The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [19]
D’Artagnan took stock of the situation. The two musketeers were here now, the door closed behind them, and the hum of conversation in the antechamber rose again, doubtless revived by speculation about why Porthos and Aramis were on the carpet. Monsieur de Tréville was pacing up and down in silence, his brows knit; he covered the entire length of his office, back and forth, three or four times, passing directly in front of the musketeers, who stood smartly at attention, as if on parade. Suddenly he stopped squarely in front of them, wheeled round to face them, and, surveying them angrily from top to toe:
“Do you gentlemen know what the King said to me no later than yesterday evening?” he demanded. “Do you know, gentlemen?”
There was a moment’s silence. Then one of them replied:
“No . . . No, Monsieur, we do not.”
“I hope that Monsieur will do us the honor to tell us,” Aramis suggested in his most honeyed tone as he made a deep bow.
“He told me that from now on he would recruit his musketeers from among the Cardinal’s Guards.”
“The Cardinal’s Guards!” Aramis asked indignantly. “But why, Monsieur?”
“Because His Majesty realizes that his inferior wine needs improving by blending it with a better vintage.”
The two musketeers blushed to the roots of their hair. D’Artagnan, completely in the dark about what was happening and considerably embarrassed, wished himself a hundred feet underground.
“Ay,” Monsieur de Tréville went on, growing angrier apace, “His Majesty was perfectly right, for upon my word, the musketeers certainly cut a sorry figure at Court. Do you know what happened yesterday evening when His Eminence was playing chess with the King? Well, I’ll tell you. . . .
“His Eminence looked at me with a commiserating air which frankly vexed me. Then he told me that my daredevil musketeers—those daredevils, he repeated with an irony that vexed me even more—had required disciplining. Then, his tiger-cat eye cocked at me, he informed me that my swashbucklers had made a night of it in a tavern in the Rue Férou and that a patrol of his Guards (I thought he was going to laugh in my face!) had been forced to arrest the rioters.”
Monsieur de Tréville paused for breath.
“Morbleu! God’s death, you must know something about it,” he resumed. “My musketeers—arrested! And you were among them, don’t deny it; you were identified and the Cardinal named you! But it’s all my own fault, ay, it’s my own fault because it is I who choose my men. Come, Aramis, tell me why the devil you asked me for a musketeer’s uniform when a cassock would have suited you so much better? And you, Porthos? Of what use is that fine golden baldric of yours if all it holds up is a sword of straw? And Athos? . . . By the way, where is Athos?”
“Monsieur,” Aramis explained mournfully, “Athos is ill, very ill.”
“Ill, you say? What’s the matter with him?”
“We’re afraid it’s chicken-pox, Monsieur,” Porthos improvised, determined at all costs to take part in the conversation. “But we hope not, because it would certainly disfigure him.”
“The pox. There’s a cock-and-bull story, Porthos! Chicken-pox at his age! No, I know better. He was probably wounded or killed, I dare say. Oh, if only I knew what has happened to him!”
Monsieur de Tréville began pacing his office again, then turned fiercely on the culprits:
“Sangdieu, gentlemen! God’s blood, I will not have my men haunting disreputable places, I will not have them brawling in the streets, and I will not have them fighting at every street corner. Above all, I will not have them make themselves the laughingstocks of Monseigneur Cardinal’s Guards. These Guards are decent fellows, they are law-abiding and tactful, they do not put themselves in a position to be arrested. And if they did—I swear it!—they wouldn’t allow themselves to be arrested.