The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [22]
“Porthos, you’re as conceited as Narcissus, let me tell you,” responded Aramis. “You know I hate moralizing, except when Athos does it. As for you, my dear, you have too magnificent a baldric to be strong on that subject. I’ll become an abbé if it suits me; meanwhile I’m a musketeer: in that quality, I say what I please, and at this moment it pleases me to tell you that you annoy me.”
“Aramis!”
“Porthos!”
“Ah! Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” cries came from all around them.
“M. de Tréville awaits M. d’Artagnan,” the lackey interrupted, opening the office door.
At that announcement, during which the office door remained open, everyone fell silent, and in the midst of the general silence, the young Gascon crossed the antechamber for a good part of its length and entered the office of the captain of the musketeers, congratulating himself wholeheartedly on escaping the end of this bizarre quarrel just in time.
III
THE AUDIENCE
M. de Tréville was for the moment in a very bad humor. Nevertheless, he politely greeted the young man, who bowed all the way to the ground, and smiled on receiving his compliments in that Béarnais accent which reminded him at the same time of his youth and of his birthplace, a double memory that makes a man smile at any age. But, going towards the antechamber almost at once, and making a sign to d’Artagnan with his hand, as if asking his permission to finish with the others before beginning with him, he called out three times, raising his voice more each time, so that he ran through all the intermediary tones between the imperative and the irritated:
“Athos! Porthos! Aramis!”
The two musketeers whose acquaintance we have already made, and who answered to the last two of these three names, immediately left the groups they were part of and advanced towards the office, the door of which closed behind them the moment they crossed the threshold. Their bearing, though not entirely calm, still aroused d’Artagnan’s admiration by its casualness, which was at once full of dignity and of submission. He saw these men as demigods and their chief as an Olympian Jupiter armed with all his thunderbolts.
When the two musketeers came in; when the door was closed behind them; when the buzzing murmur of the antechamber, to which the summons that had just been made had given fresh nourishment, started up again; when, finally, M. de Tréville, silent and frowning, had paced the whole length of his office three or four times, passing each time before Porthos and Aramis, rigid and mute as if on parade, he suddenly stopped in front of them and, looking them up and down with an irritated glance, shouted:
“Do you know what the king said to me, and that no later than yesterday evening? Do you know, gentlemen?”
“No,” replied the two musketeers after a moment of silence. “No, Monsieur, we don’t know.”
“But I hope you will do us the honor of telling us,” Aramis added in his most polite tone and with a most graceful bow.
“He told me he would henceforth recruit his musketeers from M. le cardinal’s guards!”
“From M. le cardinal’s guards! And why would that be?” Porthos asked sharply.
“Because he saw very well that his local vintage needed fortifying with a dose of good wine.”
The two musketeers blushed to the roots of their hair. D’Artagnan did not know what it had to do with him and wished he was a hundred feet underground.
“Yes, yes,” M. de Tréville continued, growing animated, “yes, and His Majesty is right, for, on my honor, it’s true that the musketeers cut a sad figure at court. Yesterday, playing chess with the king, M. le cardinal told us, with an air of condolence which greatly displeased me, that the day before yesterday those damned musketeers, those daredevils—he stressed these words with an ironic accent that displeased me still more—those true destroyers, he added, looking at me with his tigercat’s eyes, had stayed late at a tavern on the