The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [204]
As long as the procureuse could follow her lover with her eyes, she waved her handkerchief, leaning so far out her window that it looked as if she wanted to throw herself from it. Porthos took all these marks of affection like a man who was used to such demonstrations. But as he turned the corner of the street, he took off his hat and waved it in a sign of farewell.
For his part, Aramis wrote a long letter. To whom? No one knew. In the neighboring room, Kitty, who was to leave that same evening for Tours, waited for this mysterious letter.
Athos drank the last bottle of his Spanish wine in little sips.
In the meantime, d’Artagnan was marching with his company.
On reaching the faubourg Saint-Antoine, he turned and looked gaily at the Bastille; but, as he was only looking at the Bastille, he did not see Milady, mounted on a dun-colored horse, who pointed him out to two evil-looking men, who approached the ranks at once in order to identify him. To their questioning look, Milady replied by a sign that he was the man. Then, certain that there could no longer be any mistake in the carrying out of her orders, she spurred her horse and disappeared.
The two men then followed the company and, on leaving the faubourg Saint-Antoine, mounted two horses that an un-liveried servant was holding by the reins in readiness for them.
XLI
THE SIEGE OF LA ROCHELLE
The siege of La Rochelle was one of the great political events of the reign of Louis XIII, and one of the great military undertakings of the cardinal. It is thus worthwhile, and even necessary, for us to say a few words about it. Besides, many details of this siege are bound up in too important a way with the story we have undertaken to tell for us to pass over them in silence.
The cardinal’s political objectives, when he undertook this siege, were extensive. Let us present them first, and then go on to some particular objectives, which were perhaps of no less influence on His Eminence than the former.
Of the important towns given to the Huguenots by Henri IV as safe havens, the only one left was La Rochelle. It was thus a question of destroying this last bulwark of Calvinism, a dangerous leavening, into which ferments of civil rebellion and foreign war were constantly being mixed.
Spanish, English, and Italian malcontents, adventurers from all nations, soldiers of fortune of every sect, ran at the first call to put themselves under the banners of the Protestants, and made up a sort of vast association that branched out at leisure over every part of Europe.
La Rochelle, which had acquired a new importance from the ruin of the other Calvinist towns, was thus a hotbed of dissension and ambition. What was more, its port was the last port open to the English in the realm of France. In closing it to England, our eternal enemy, the cardinal completed the work of Joan of Arc and the duc de Guise.146
And so Bassompierre, who was at once Protestant and Catholic, Protestant by conviction and Catholic as commander of the Order of the Holy Spirit;147 Bassompierre, who was German by birth and French at heart; Bassompierre, finally, who commanded his own army at the siege of La Rochelle, said, in charging at the head of several other Protestant noblemen like himself:
“You’ll see, gentlemen, that we shall be fools enough to take La Rochelle!”
And Bassompierre was right: the cannonade of the Île de Ré foreshadowed the dragonnades of the Cévennes; the taking of La Rochelle was the preface to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.148
But, as we have said, alongside these objectives of the leveling and simplifying minister, which belong to history, the chronicler is forced to acknowledge the petty aims of the lover and jealous rival.
Richelieu, as everyone knows, had been in love with the queen. Whether that love had a simple political goal for him, or was quite naturally one of those deep passions that Anne d’Autriche inspired in those around her, we are unable to say; but in any case we have seen, from previous developments in this story, that