The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [60]
Affluence provides a host of little amenities and frills which prove most becoming to a beauty. Shapely slippers on her feet, white stockings of sheer material, a silk dress, a lace guimpe and a dainty ribbon in her hair do not make an ugly woman pretty, but they do make a pretty woman beautiful. And a woman’s hands especially! What wonders money can do for women by sparing them from working! Truly, to be beautiful, a woman’s hands must be idle.
As we have not concealed the state of D’Artagnan’s fortune, the reader well knows that he was no millionaire. To be sure he hoped to become one some day but the date set in his own mind for this happy change was still far distant. Meanwhile, how painful to see the woman one loves longing for those myriad trifles that constitute feminine happiness and to be unable to satisfy her wants. When a woman is rich and her lover is not, she can at least buy what her lover cannot afford to give her; she usually gratifies these indulgences with her husband’s money and without thanks to him.
D’Artagnan, eager to become the most passionate of lovers, was already her devoted friend. Amid his amorous designs upon the haberdasher’s wife, he did not forget his comrades. The comely Madame Bonacieux was just the woman to stroll on his arm in the Plaine Saint-Denis or through the fair of Saint-Germain with Athos, Porthos and Aramis for company. How proud D’Artagnan would be to display such a conquest!
Now when people have walked any length of time, they get quite hungry, as D’Artagnan had himself noticed. So D’Artagnan, his inamorata and his comrades, their stroll done, would enjoy charming little dinners at which he visualized himself pressing the hand of a loyal friend on one side, and, on the other, the foot of an adoring mistress. And, were his friends out of funds, he saw himself as their financial savior.
What about Monsieur Bonacieux whom D’Artagnan had delivered into the hands of the officers, betraying him publicly after his private promises to save him? It must be confessed that D’Artagnan did not vouchsafe him a thought or, if he did, he decided that the haberdasher was in the proper place, wherever it was. Is not love the most selfish of all passions?
(Let our readers reassure themselves. If D’Artagnan forgot or feigned to forget his landlord, pretending not to know whither the wretched man had been carried away, we have not forgotten him and we know where he is. But for the moment let us do as the amorous Gascon did. Presently our worthy haberdasher will reappear.)
Dreaming of his future amours, apostrophizing the night and gazing at the stars, D’Artagnan was returning up the Rue du Cherche-Midi, or rather Chasse-Midi as it was then called. As Aramis lived in this quarter, he suddenly thought he would pay Aramis a visit to explain why he had dispatched Planchet to him with immediate orders to rush to the mousetrap.
“If Aramis was at home when Planchet arrived,” D’Artagnan said, “he must have gone straight to the Rue des Fossoyeurs. There he would have found no one or at best Athos and Porthos. So all three are in complete ignorance of what has happened. I owe them at least an explanation for having disturbed them.”
Thus he spoke aloud. But silently, to himself, he thought that a visit to Aramis offered him a chance of talking about pretty little Madame Bonacieux, who at this point filled his head if not his heart. To look for discretion in a first love is irrelevant. First loves are accompanied by a joy so excessive that it must be allowed to overflow or it will stifle a man.
For the past two hours Paris had been swathed in darkness and the streets were practically