The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [15]
“He is quite cowardly, in fact,” murmured the host, going up to d’Artagnan, and trying by this flattery to make things up with the poor boy, like the heron of the fable with his last night’s snail.8
“Yes, quite cowardly,” murmured d’Artagnan. “But she, she is quite beautiful!”
“She who?” asked the host.
“Milady,” babbled d’Artagnan.
And he passed out a second time.
“It’s all the same,” said the host. “I’ve lost two, but I still have this one, whom I’m sure to keep for several days at least. That’s already eleven écus to the good.”
We know that eleven écus was exactly the sum that was left in d’Artagnan’s purse.
The host had reckoned on eleven days of convalescence, at one écu a day, but he had reckoned without his traveler. The next day, at five o’clock in the morning, d’Artagnan got up, went down to the kitchen by himself, asked for wine, oil, and rosemary, among other ingredients, the list of which has not come down to us, and, with his mother’s recipe in his hand, made up a balm with which he anointed his numerous wounds, refreshing the compresses himself and not allowing the addition of any medicine. Thanks, no doubt, to the effectiveness of the Bohemian balm, and perhaps also to the absence of any doctor, d’Artagnan was on his feet that same evening and very nearly cured the next morning.
But when he went to pay for that rosemary, that oil, and that wine, the master’s only extra expenses, because he had kept to a strict fast, while the yellow horse, on the contrary, at least according to the innkeeper, had eaten three times more than one would reasonably have supposed from its size, d’Artagnan found in his pocket only the threadbare velvet purse along with the eleven écus it contained, but as for the letter to M. de Tréville, it had disappeared.
The young man began searching for the letter with great impatience, turning his pockets inside out twenty times, rummaging in his sack again and again; but when he arrived at the conviction that the letter was not to be found, he went into a third fit of rage, which nearly cost him a new consumption of wine and aromatic oil: for, seeing this headstrong young man becoming heated and threatening to smash everything in the establishment if they did not find his letter, the host had already seized a pike, his wife a broom handle, and his waiters the same sticks that had served them two days before.
“My letter of introduction!” cried d’Artagnan, “my letter of introduction, sangdieu! or I’ll skewer you all like buntings!”
Unfortunately, one circumstance kept the young man from carrying out his threat: this was, as we have said, that his sword had been broken in two during his first fight, a fact he had completely forgotten. The result was that, when d’Artagnan actually went to draw, he found himself armed, purely and simply, with a piece of sword some eight or ten inches long, which the host had carefully stuffed back into the scabbard. As for the rest of the blade, the chef had skillfully appropriated it for use as a larding needle.
However, this deception would probably not have stopped our hotheaded young man, if the host had not reflected that the complaint his traveler had addressed to him was perfectly just.
“But,” he said, lowering his pike, “where indeed is that letter?”
“Yes, where is that letter?” cried d’Artagnan. “First of all, I warn you, that letter is for M. de Tréville, and it must be found; or if it’s not found, he’ll know how to find it himself!”
This threat thoroughly intimidated the host. After the king and M. le cardinal, M. de Tréville was the man whose name was perhaps most often repeated by the military, and even by townsmen. True, there was of course Father Joseph;9 but his name was always uttered only in hushed tones, so great was the terror inspired by the Gray Eminence, as the cardinal’s familiar was known.
And so, flinging his pike