The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [207]
The review over, the guards set forward alone, the musketeers standing by to escort the King. This enabled Porthos to pass down the Rue aux Ours in his magnificent equipment.
Madame Attorney, who saw him go by in his new uniform and on his fine steed, loved him far too dearly to allow him to part thus. She motioned him to dismount and to come to her. Porthos was magnificent: his spurs jangled, his breastplate gleamed, his sword clanked proudly against his massive leg. This time the law clerks felt no temptation to laugh: Porthos looked too much like an authentic clipper of ears and ripper of gullets.
The musketeer was ushered into Monsieur Coquenard’s presence; the attorney’s little gray eyes sparkled with anger as he saw his cousin so handsomely turned out. But there was one consolation: rumor had it that the campaign would be a hard one. He therefore breathed a silent prayer that Porthos might be killed on the field of honor.
Porthos paid his compliments to the attorney and bade him farewell; the attorney, in return, wished the musketeer all manner of good fortune. As for Madame Coquenard, she could not check her tears. But no one placed a dubious construction on her sorrow; she was known to be much attached to her relatives and she had always quarreled bitterly with her husband on their behalf. The real farewells, however, took place in Madame Coquenard’s room and they were heartrending.
As long as Madame Attorney could follow her lover down the street with her eyes, she stood at the window, leaning out so far that she looked for all the world as if she intended to leap out of it. Porthos received all these attentions like a man accustomed to such demonstrations; but on rounding the corner he lifted his hat jauntily and waved it to her in a gesture of farewell.
For his part, Aramis spent his last moments in Paris writing a long letter. To whom? Nobody knew. Kitty, who was to leave next day for Tours, was waiting in the next room.
As for Athos, he found time to sip his last bottle of Spanish wine to the lees.
Meanwhile D’Artagnan was marching off to the front with his company. At the Faubourg Saint-Antoine he turned round to gaze at the Bastille, half in relief, half in amusement. So absorbed was he in surveying it that he failed to notice a blonde blue-eyed lady mounted on a light chestnut horse. At her side stood two evil-looking men. As she pointed to D’Artagnan, they drew up close to the ranks in order to get a good view of him. They stared up at her questioningly; she nodded affirmatively. Then, certain that there could be no misunderstanding about the execution of her orders, Milady set spurs to her horse and disappeared amid the crowd.
The two men then followed Monsieur des Essart’s company and, as it debouched from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, they mounted two horses, fully equipped, which a lackey out of livery held in readiness.
XLI
THE SIEGE OF LA ROCHELLE
The siege of La Rochelle proved to be one of the great political events of the reign of Louis XIII and one of the Cardinal’s great military enterprises. It therefore warrants some comment, both for its own sake and because its vicissitudes were intimately connected with the history we have undertaken to relate.
The general political views of the Cardinal when he undertook this siege were far-reaching. There were also specific private views which were probably quite as important to him.
Of the large cities given up by Henry IV to the Huguenots as places of safety there remained only La Rochelle. It became necessary therefore to reduce this last bulwark of Calvinism, a dangerous leaven constantly impregnated by ferments of civil revolt or foreign war. Spaniards, Englishmen, Italians, malcontents and adventurers from every nation, and soldiers of fortune of every sect, flocked under the standard of the Protestants at the first call and were organized in a vast association