The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [19]
So it was through this crush and disorder that our young man advanced, his heart pounding, holding his long rapier to his lean leg, and keeping one hand on his hat brim, with the half smile of a provincial who wants to put on a bold front. Having gotten past one group, he breathed more freely; but he realized that they were turning to look at him, and for the first time in his life, d’Artagnan, who till that day had had a rather good opinion of himself, felt ridiculous.
When he reached the stairway, things became still worse: there were four musketeers on the first steps, amusing themselves with the following exercise, while ten or twelve of their comrades waited on the landing for their turn to take part in the game.
One of them, standing on a higher step, a drawn sword in his hand, was preventing, or attempting to prevent, the other three from coming up.
These other three were fencing with him, wielding extremely agile blades. D’Artagnan at first took their weapons for fencing foils and thought the tips were blunted, but he soon recognized from certain scratches that each blade was, on the contrary, perfectly pointed and sharpened, and at each of those scratches not only the spectators but the participants themselves laughed like fools.
The one who occupied the upper step at this moment kept his adversaries at bay quite marvelously. A circle formed around them: the condition was that at each hit, the one touched would leave the game, losing his turn for an audience to the one who touched him. In five minutes, three were grazed, one on the wrist, another on the chin, another on the ear, by the defender of the step, who was himself unscathed: which skill, according to the agreed conventions, earned him three turns of preference.
Difficult not as it was but as he wished it to be to astonish him, this pastime astonished our young traveler. In his province, that land where all the same heads become so swiftly heated, he had seen a bit more in the way of preliminaries to a duel, and the gasconade of these four players seemed to him the best of all he had heard of up to then, even in Gascony. He thought he had been transported to that famous country of giants where Gulliver went later and got so frightened;15 and yet he had not reached the end: there remained the landing and the antechamber.
On the landing they no longer fought, they told stories about women, and in the antechamber stories about the court. On the landing, d’Artagnan blushed; in the antechamber, he shuddered. His lively and roving imagination, which in Gascony had made him devastating to young chambermaids and sometimes even to their young mistresses, had never dreamed, even in the wildest moments, of half of these amorous wonders and a quarter of these gallant feats, spiced with the most well-known names and the least shrouded details. But if his love of good morals was shocked on the landing, his respect for the cardinal was scandalized in the antechamber. There, to his great astonishment, d’Artagnan heard criticized aloud the policy that made Europe tremble and the private life of the cardinal, which so many high and mighty lords had been punished for trying to penetrate: this great man, revered by M. d’Artagnan Sr., was a laughingstock for M. de Tréville’s musketeers, who jeered at this bandy legs and hunched back. Some sang ditties on Mme d’Aiguillon, his mistress, and Mme de Combalet, his niece,16 while others got up parties against the cardinal-duke’s pages and guards—all things that seemed monstrous impossibilities to d’Artagnan.
However, when the king’s name sometimes suddenly came up unexpectedly in the midst of all these cardinalesque gibes, a sort of gag stopped all these mocking mouths; the