The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [249]
On their side, the besiegers from time to time caught messengers that the Rochelois sent to Buckingham, or spies that Buckingham sent to the Rochelois. In both cases the trial was a quick affair. M. le cardinal spoke two simple words: “Hang him!” The king was invited to come and see the hanging. The king came languidly, sat in a good place for watching the operation in all its details: this always distracted him a little and made him less impatient with the siege, but it did not keep him from being terribly bored and from talking all the time about returning to Paris; so that if there had been a lack of messengers and spies, His Eminence, for all his imagination, would have found himself quite at a loss.
Nevertheless, time was passing, and the Rochelois did not surrender. The latest spy to be captured was carrying a letter. This letter indeed told Buckingham that the town was at the last extremity; but, instead of adding: “If help does not come from you within two weeks, we will surrender,” it added quite simply: “If help does not come from you within two weeks, we will all have starved to death before it comes.”
The Rochelois thus had no hope except in Buckingham. Buckingham was their messiah. It was evident that if one day they learned for certain that they could no longer count on Buckingham, their courage would collapse along with their hopes.
The cardinal was thus waiting with great impatience for news from England announcing that Buckingham would not come.
The question of taking the town by force, often debated in the king’s council, had always been set aside. First of all, La Rochelle seemed impregnable. Then, the cardinal, whatever he might say, knew very well that the horror of the blood spilt in this encounter, where Frenchman would have to fight against Frenchman, would be a retrogression of sixty years stamped upon his policy, and the cardinal was, for his time, what is today known as a man of progress. Indeed, the sack of La Rochelle, the slaughter of three or four thousand Huguenots who would get themselves killed, bore too close a resemblance, in 1628, to the Saint Bartholomew massacre of 1572.178 And then, beyond all that, this extreme method, which the king, as a good Catholic, found in no way repugnant, always ran aground on this argument of the besieging generals: La Rochelle is impregnable, except by starvation.
The cardinal could not rid his mind of the fear it was thrown into by his terrible emissary, for he, too, had understood the strange dimensions of this woman—now serpent, now lion. Had she betrayed him? Was she dead? He knew her well enough, in any case, to know that, acting for him or against him, enemy or friend, she would not sit still without great impediments. What they were he could not know.
All the same, he was counting on Milady, and with good reason. He had guessed that there were terrible things in this woman’s past, which only her red cloak could conceal; and he felt that, for one reason or another, this woman was his, as it was only in him that she could find a support greater than the danger that threatened her.
He decided therefore to make war on his own, and to wait for any foreign success only as one waits for a lucky chance. He went on building the famous dike that was to starve La Rochelle. Meanwhile, he cast his eyes over the unfortunate town, which housed so much deep misery and so many heroic virtues, and, recalling the phrase of Louis XI, his political predecessor, as he himself was the predecessor of Robespierre, he murmured this maxim of Tristan’s confederate: “Divide and rule.”179
Henri IV, besieging Paris, had bread and provisions thrown over the walls. The cardinal had leaflets thrown over in which he pointed out to the Rochelois how unjust, egotistical, and barbaric the conduct of their leaders was. Those leaders had wheat in abundance and did not share it. They adopted the maxim—for they, too, had maxims—that it mattered little if women, children, and old men died, provided the men who had to defend their walls remained strong and fit. Up to then, either