The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [124]
He went up to the window, stood in a ray of light, took the letter from his pocket, and reread it. He had not been mistaken: the rendezvous was for ten o’clock.
He went back to his post, beginning to be troubled by the silence and the solitude.
It struck eleven.
D’Artagnan really began to fear that something had happened to Mme Bonacieux.
He clapped his hands three times, the usual signal of lovers, but no one answered him, not even an echo.
Then he thought with a certain vexation that the young woman might have fallen asleep while waiting for him.
He went up to the wall and tried to climb it, but the wall had been newly roughcast, and d’Artagnan uselessly broke his fingernails.
At that moment he noticed the trees, their leaves still silvered by the light, and as one of them hung over the road, he thought that from the midst of its branches he would be able to see into the pavilion.
The tree was an easy climb. Besides, d’Artagnan was barely twenty years old and still remembered his schoolboy skill. In an instant he was in the midst of the branches, and through the transparent windowpanes his eyes delved into the interior of the pavilion.
Strange thing, and it made d’Artagnan shiver from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair: that gentle light, that calm lamp, lit up a scene of frightful disorder. One of the windowpanes was smashed, the door to the room had been broken down and hung in pieces from its hinges; a table that must have been covered with an elegant supper lay overturned on the floor; fragments of carafes and crushed fruit strewed the parquet; everything in the room bore witness to a violent and desperate struggle. D’Artagnan even thought he could make out in the midst of this strange pell-mell some shreds of clothing and a few bloodstains on the tablecloth and curtains.
He hurriedly climbed back down to the street, his heart pounding terribly. He wanted to see if he could find other traces of violence.
The mellow little light still shone through the calm of the night. D’Artagnan then saw—something he had not noticed at first, for nothing had prompted him to such an examination—that the ground, trampled down here, dug up there, showed mingled traces of men’s feet and horses’ hooves. Moreover, the wheels of a carriage, which seemed to have come from Paris, had left deep ruts in the soft soil, which went no further than the pavilion and then returned to Paris.
Pursuing his search, d’Artagnan finally found a torn woman’s glove near the wall. The glove, however, wherever it had not touched the muddy ground, was of an irreproachable freshness. It was one of those perfumed gloves such as lovers love to tear from a pretty hand.
As d’Artagnan pursued his investigations, an ever more abundant and icy sweat beaded his brow, his heart was gripped by a terrible anguish, his breath came in gasps; and yet he told himself, for reassurance, that this pavilion perhaps had nothing to do with Mme Bonacieux; that the young woman had given him a rendezvous in front of this pavilion, and not inside it; that she might have been kept in Paris by her service, or perhaps by her husband’s jealousy.
But all these arguments were beaten down, destroyed, overturned by that sense of intimate grief which, on certain occasions, comes over our whole being and cries out to us, through every means we have of hearing, that a great misfortune is hovering over us.
Then d’Artagnan almost lost his senses. He ran down the main street, took the same path he had already taken, went as far as the ferry, and questioned the ferryman.
Towards seven o’clock in the evening, the ferryman had taken a woman across the river. She was wrapped in a black cloak and seemed to have the greatest interest in not being recognized. But, precisely because of the precautions she took, the ferryman had paid greater attention to her and had seen that the woman was young and pretty.
Then as now, there was a crowd of young and pretty women who went to Saint-Cloud and were interested in not being seen, and yet d’Artagnan never doubted