The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [47]
Meanwhile Monsieur de Tréville was working on D’Artagnan’s behalf as keenly as he had promised. One fine morning the King ordered Monsieur le Chevalier des Essarts to admit D’Artagnan as a cadet in his company of guards. As he donned the guardsman’s uniform, D’Artagnan sighed, for he would have given ten years of his life to exchange it for that of a musketeer. But Monsieur de Tréville assured him he could do so only after his trial period of two years in another regiment, unless, in the meantime, he found an opportunity to render His Majesty some signal service or to distinguish himself by some brilliant action.
D’Artagnan a guardsman, what could Athos, Porthos and Aramis do but reciprocally mount guard with him when he was on duty? Thus Monsieur le Chevalier des Essart’s company, by admitting one D’Artagnan, found itself four men the stronger.
VIII
CONCERNING A COURT INTRIGUE
Like all good things in this world, the forty pistoles of Louis XIII, having had a beginning, came to their appointed end, which placed the four comrades in an awkward situation. At first, Athos supported the group for a while out of his own pocket . . . next Porthos succeeded him, and, thanks to one of his customary disappearances, kept them going a fortnight . . . next Aramis came to the rescue with good grace and a few pistoles he had obtained, so he said, by selling some theological books . . . next as they had done so often, they appealed to Monsieur de Tréville who advanced them some money on their pay, but these advances did not go very far with three musketeers who were heavily in arrears and a guardsman who as yet had had no pay at all. . . .
Finally, realizing they were about to fall into dire want, they managed by a last desperate effort to raise eight or ten pistoles with which Porthos was despatched to the gaming-table. Unfortunately he was not in luck; he lost every sou plus twenty-five pistoles for which he pledged his word. Then their want became actual distress as the four hungry friends, followed by their four hungry lackeys, haunted the quays and guardrooms of the city to prove that Aramis was right in saying:
“It is wise to sow meals right and left in prosperity in order to reap a few in time of need.”
Athos was invited four times and each time brought his friends and their lackeys along; Porthos was invited six times which provided them all with six more meals; Aramis was invited eight times (as we have seen he was a very quiet man but much sought after) and eight times his friends shared his good fortune. D’Artagnan, who as yet knew no one in the capital, unearthed a priest from his own province who supplied a light breakfast with chocolate, and a cornet of the guards who furnished a dinner at his home. The Gascon took his troop to the priest’s, where they devoured a stock of food that would have lasted the cleric two months, and to the home of the cornet, who did wonders. But as Planchet remarked:
“People do not eat once for all time even when they eat a great deal.”
D’Artagnan felt humiliated at having procured only one meal and a half for his companions—breakfast at the priest’s could only be counted as a half-meal—in return for the banquets Athos, Porthos and Aramis had procured him. He fancied himself a burden to the group, forgetting in his wholly youthful good faith that he had entertained them for a whole month. His plight gave him considerable food—for thought! He came to the conclusion that this coalition of four young, brave, enterprising and active men ought to have some other object than swaggering about the city, taking fencing lessons and playing practical jokes that were more or less witty.
In fact, four men devoted to one another whether their purses or lives were involved . . . four men always supporting one another, never yielding, and executing singly or together the resolutions they had made in common . . . four arms threatening the four cardinal points or concentrated upon a single point . . . in brief, four such men as they, must