The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [23]
“Monsieur,” Aramis responded sadly, “he is ill, very ill.”
“Ill, very ill, you say? And with what illness?”
“They’re afraid it may be smallpox, Monsieur,” answered Porthos, who wanted to add a word of his own to the conversation, “which would be regrettable in that it would quite certainly spoil his looks.”
“Smallpox! That’s another glorious story you’re telling me, Porthos!…Sick with smallpox, at his age?…Not so!…but wounded, no doubt, maybe killed…Ah, if I’d only known!…Sangdieu! you gentlemen musketeers, I don’t mean to have you haunting low places like that, picking quarrels in the street and playing with swords at the crossroads. I don’t want you, finally, to give the laugh to M. le cardinal’s guards, who are brave men, calm, clever, who never put themselves in danger of being arrested, and besides would not let themselves be arrested, not them!…I’m sure of it…They’d much rather die on the spot than retreat a single step…To run away, to bolt, to flee—that’s fit for the king’s musketeers!”
Porthos and Aramis were trembling with rage. They would gladly have strangled M. de Tréville, if at the bottom of it all they had not felt that it was the great love he bore them which made him speak to them that way. They stamped the carpet with their feet, bit their lips until they bled, and gripped the hilts of their swords with all their might. Outside, as we have said, the others had heard Athos, Porthos, and Aramis summoned, and had guessed, by the accent of M. de Tréville’s voice, that he was in perfect wrath. Ten curious heads were pressed against the tapestry and turned pale with fury, for their ears, glued to the door, did not miss a single syllable of what was said, while their lips repeated the captain’s insulting words bit by bit to the whole population of the antechamber. In an instant, from office door to street door, the entire hôtel was in turmoil.
“So the king’s musketeers get arrested by M. le cardinal’s guards!” M. de Tréville went on, inwardly as furious as his soldiers, but halting at each word and plunging them one by one, so to speak, like so many thrusts of a stiletto, into the breasts of his listeners. “So six of His Eminence’s guards arrest six of His Majesty’s musketeers! Morbleu! I’ve made my choice! I’m going straight to the Louvre! I shall turn in my resignation as captain of the king’s musketeers and ask for a lieutenancy in the cardinal’s guards, and if he refuses me, morbleu, I’ll become an abbé!”
At these words, the murmur outside became an explosion: everywhere one heard nothing but oaths and blasphemies. The “morbleus,” the “sangdieus,” the “forty pockmarked devils” crisscrossed in the air. D’Artagnan looked for a tapestry to hide behind, and felt an immense desire to crawl under the table.
“Well, then, Captain,” said Porthos, beside himself, “the truth is that we were six against six, but we were set upon treacherously, and before we had time to draw our swords, two of us had fallen dead, and Athos, grievously wounded, was hardly worth more. For you know Athos. Well, Captain, he tried to get up twice, and he fell back twice. But all the same we didn’t surrender. No! We were dragged off by force. On the way, we escaped. As for Athos, they thought he was dead, and they left him quite calmly on the battlefield, thinking he wasn’t worth carrying off. That’s the story. Devil take it, Captain, you can’t win every battle! The great Pompey lost at Pharsalia, and King François I, I’ve heard tell, was as good a man as any, yet he lost at Pavia.”22