The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [74]
“Come, Monsieur le Commissaire,” said Athos disdainfully, “if I am no longer needed here, pray send me somewhere else. I find your Monsieur Bonacieux a very tiresome person.”
“Take the prisoners back to their cells.” The Commissioner included Athos and Bonacieux in the same gesture of dismissal. “See that they are guarded more closely than ever.”
“I must observe,” Athos declared with his usual phlegm, “that you are interested in Monsieur d’Artagnan, I scarcely see how I can replace him.”
“Do as I said,” the Commissioner told his guards. “Watch these men carefully!”
Athos shrugged his shoulders and followed the guards silently, but Monsieur Bonacieux set up howls of lamentation. Led back to the same cell he had occupied the night before, he sat there all day, weeping like a real haberdasher. As he himself had said, he was no soldier. In the evening, at about nine, just as he was preparing to retire, he heard steps echoing ever louder and closer in the corridor. The door of his cell was flung open and the guards appeared. Then an officer, close behind the guards, commanded:
“Follow me!”
“Follow you?” cried Bonacieux. “Follow you at this hour? Where to? O Lord, where to?”
“Where we are commanded to lead you.”
“But that is no answer, Monsieur.”
“It is the only answer we can give you.”
“O God, O God,” cried the wretched haberdasher, “now indeed I am lost.”
Moving like an automaton, he followed the familiar corridor, crossed a courtyard, then another large building in front of which stood a carriage, flanked by four guards on horseback.
“Get in,” said the officer, hoisting him on the seat and settling himself on Bonacieux’s right. A guard locked the door, and the rolling prison moved off, slow as a hearse. Through the padlocked windows, the prisoner could see a house here, a pavement there, but, a true Parisian, he recognized each street by its stones, signboards and lamp-posts. As the carriage approached Saint-Paul, where prisoners from the Bastille were usually executed, he all but fainted. Twice he made the sign of the Cross, then realized he was spared. The carriage rolled on.
Further on, a new wave of terror swept over him as the carriage passed by the Cimetière Saint-Jean, the burial place of State criminals. But he found consolation in recalling that their heads were usually severed from their bodies before interment, whereas his head was still on his shoulders.
Next the carriage moved towards the Place de Grève; he identified their itinerary by the pointed roofwork of the Hôtel de Ville. Suddenly the carriage whisked under an arcade and Bonacieux knew all was over.
“Monsieur l’Officier,” he cried, “let me confess my sins.”
The officer refusing, Bonacieux screamed so shrilly that the other threatened:
“Shut up, idiot, or I’ll clap a gag on you!”
Bonacieux considered these words minatory yet reassuring. Were he destined for execution on the Place de Grève, no gagging was necessary, for the carriage was arriving . . . was crossing . . . and now had left the fatal spot far behind. . . .
One more station to his Calvary remained: the Croix-du-Trahoir. This time, no doubt remained, for all minor criminals were put to death there. What vanity for the haberdasher to flatter himself that he was worthy of Saint-Paul or the Place de Grève! Alas, no: journey’s end was surely the Place de la Croix-du-Trahoir! He could not yet distinguish that dreadful cross but he could almost feel it advancing to meet him. Twenty paces from it, he heard a tumult of voices. The carriage stopped.
This was more than poor Bonacieux could stand. Crushed by the emotions he had undergone, our haberdasher uttered so feeble a moan that you would have sworn it was the last sigh of a dying man.
This time he really fainted.
XIV
THE MAN OF MEUNG
The crowd near the Croix-du-Trahoir was not awaiting a victim; it was contemplating a man who had just been hanged. The carriage stopped for a moment, then pursued its way along the Rue Saint-Honoré, to turn down the Rue des Bons-Enfants, and finally pull up before a low square door.