The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [218]
“Yes, Monseigneur. Now let’s get back to the mission you wish to entrust me with. And, as I am anxious to go on deserving Your Eminence’s confidence, kindly present it to me in clear and precise terms, so that I make no mistake.”
There was a moment of deep silence between the two interlocutors. It was evident that the cardinal was weighing in advance the terms in which he was going to speak, and that Milady was gathering all her intellectual faculties to understand the things she was going to hear and engrave them in her memory once they were spoken.
Athos profited from this moment to tell his comrades to lock the door from inside and made them a sign to come and listen with him.
The two musketeers, who liked their comfort, brought chairs for themselves and a chair for Athos. All three then sat down, their heads together and their ears pricked up.
“You are going to leave for London,” the cardinal went on. “Once in London, you will go to find Buckingham.”
“I would observe to His Eminence,” said Milady, “that since the affair of the diamond pendants, for which the duke has always suspected me, His Grace distrusts me.”
“But this time,” said the cardinal, “it is no longer a question of gaining his confidence, but of presenting yourself to him frankly and loyally as a negotiator.”
“Frankly and loyally,” repeated Milady, with an inexpressible accent of duplicity.
“Yes, frankly and loyally,” the cardinal picked up in the same tone. “This whole negotiation must be done in the open.”
“I will follow His Eminence’s instructions to the letter, and am only waiting for him to give them to me.”
“You will go to find Buckingham on my behalf, and you will tell him that I know all the preparations he has made, but that I am hardly troubled by them, seeing that at the first move he ventures, I will ruin the queen.”
“Will he believe that Your Eminence is in a position to carry out such a threat?”
“Yes, for I have proofs.”
“I must be able to present those proofs for his evaluation.”
“Of course. You will tell him that I am going to publish the report of Bois-Robert and the marquis de Beautru162 on the interview the duke had with the queen in the home of Mme le connétable, on the evening when Mme le connétable gave a masked fête. You will tell him, so that he has no doubts at all, that he came in the costume of the Grand Mogul, which was to be worn by the chevalier de Guise,163 and which he bought from the latter for the sum of three thousand pistoles.”
“Very well, Monseigneur.”
“All the details of his entry into the Louvre and his leaving during the night, when he was introduced at the palace in the costume of an Italian fortune-teller, are known to me. You will tell him, so that he does not still doubt the authenticity of my information, that under his cloak he had on a long white robe sprinkled with black teardrops and skulls and crossbones: for, in case of surprise, he was to pass himself off as the ghost of the White Lady, who, as everyone knows, returns to the Louvre each time some great event is about to take place.”164
“Is that all, Monseigneur?”
“Tell him that I also know all the details of the adventure in Amiens, and that I shall make a little novel of it, wittily written, with a plan of the garden, and portraits of the principal actors in that nocturnal scene.”
“I shall tell him that.”
“Tell him also that I have Montaigu, that Montaigu is in the Bastille, that no letter was found on him, true, but that torture may make him tell what he knows, and even…what he does not know.”
“Excellent.”
“Add, finally, that His Grace, in the precipitation with which he set about quitting the Île de Ré, forgot in his quarters a certain letter from Mme de Chevreuse, which is singularly compromising to the queen, in so far as it proves not only that Her Majesty can love the enemies of the king, but also that she is conspiring with the enemies of France. You have remembered