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“And you are virtuous, aren’t you, Planchet?”

“Monsieur, isn’t that the barrel of a musket gleaming over there? Shall we duck our heads?”

“Truly,” murmured d’Artagnan, who was beginning to remember M. de Tréville’s advice, “truly, this creature will end by frightening me.”

And he put his horse to a trot.

Planchet followed his master’s movement, exactly as if he was his shadow, and found himself trotting beside him.

“Are we going to ride like this all night, Monsieur?” he asked.

“No, Planchet, because you happen to have arrived.”

“How do you mean, I’ve arrived? And Monsieur?”

“I’m going a few steps further.”

“And Monsieur is leaving me alone here?”

“Are you afraid, Planchet?”

“No, but I would only observe to Monsieur that the night will be very cold, that chills cause rheumatism, and that a lackey with rheumatism is a sorry servant, above all for so alert a master as Monsieur.”

“Well, then, if you’re cold, Planchet, you can go into one of the taverns you see there, and wait for me outside the door at six o’clock in the morning.”

“Monsieur, I respectfully ate and drank the écu you gave me this morning, so that I don’t have a wretched denier left in case I get cold.”

“Here’s a half pistole. Till tomorrow.”

D’Artagnan got off his horse, threw the bridle over Planchet’s arm, and walked off quickly, wrapping himself in his cloak.

“God, am I cold!” cried Planchet, once he had lost sight of his master, and hard-pressed as he was to warm up again, he hastened to knock at the door of a house decked out in all the attributes of a suburban tavern.

Meanwhile, d’Artagnan, who had plunged into a narrow crossroad, continued on his way and arrived in Saint-Cloud; but, instead of taking the main street, he circled behind the château, came to an extremely secluded sort of lane, and soon found himself facing the designated pavilion. The place was totally deserted. A high wall, at the corner of which this pavilion stood, dominated one side of the lane, and on the other a hedge protected a small garden against passersby. At the bottom of the garden stood a meagre hut.

He had come to the rendezvous, and since he had not been told to announce his presence by any signal, he waited.

There was no sound to be heard; one would have thought one was a hundred leagues from the capital. D’Artagnan leaned back against the hedge after glancing behind him. Beyond the hedge, the garden, and the hut, a dark mist enveloped in its folds that immensity in which Paris slept, empty, gaping, an immensity in which a few specks of light shone, funereal stars in that hell.

But for d’Artagnan, all sights took on a happy form, all ideas wore a smile, all shadows were diaphanous. The hour of the rendezvous was about to strike.

Indeed, after a few moments, the belfry of Saint-Cloud slowly let fall ten strokes of its wide, booming maw.

There was something lugubrious in that bronze voice lamenting so in the middle of the night.

But each of the hours that made up the awaited hour vibrated harmoniously in the young man’s heart.

His eyes were fixed on the little pavilion located at the corner of the street, all the windows of which were closed with shutters except for a single one on the second floor.

Through that window shone a gentle light which silvered the trembling foliage of two or three lindens that rose up, forming a group outside the park. Obviously, behind that little window, so graciously lit, the pretty Mme Bonacieux awaited him.

Lulled by that sweet notion, d’Artagnan, for his part, waited half an hour without any impatience, his eyes fixed on that charming little living room, of which he could make out a part of the ceiling with gilded moldings, attesting to the elegance of the rest of the apartment.

The belfry of Saint-Cloud rang half-past ten.

This time, without his understanding why, a shiver ran through d’Artagnan’s veins. Perhaps the cold was beginning to affect him, and he mistook an entirely physical sensation for a moral one.

Then it occurred to him that he had misread and that the rendezvous