The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [250]
These leaflets had all the effect that could have been looked for by the man who wrote them, in that they induced a great number of the inhabitants to open separate negotiations with the royal army.
But at the moment when the cardinal saw his method already bearing fruit and was applauding himself on having made use of it, an inhabitant of La Rochelle, who had managed to pass through the royal lines—God knows how, so great was the surveillance of Bassompierre, Schomberg, and the duc d’Angoulême, who were themselves under the cardinal’s surveillance—an inhabitant of La Rochelle, we say, entered the town, coming from Portsmouth, and said he had seen a magnificent fleet ready to set sail within a week. What was more, Buckingham announced to the mayor that the great league against France was about to be declared, and that the kingdom would be invaded at the same time by the armies of England, the Empire, and Spain. This letter was read publicly on all the squares, copies of it were put up on street corners, and the very same people who had begun to open negotiations broke them off, resolved to wait for the help so majestically announced.
This unexpected occurrence brought back to Richelieu all his original anxieties, and forced him, despite himself, to turn his eyes once again across the sea.
During this time, exempt from the anxieties of its one real chief, the royal army led a merry life. There was no lack of provisions in the camp, or of money either. The corps all rivaled each other in daring and gaiety. Catching spies and hanging them, making hazardous expeditions over the dike or the sea, thinking up mad deeds and coolly bringing them off—such were the pastimes which shortened for the army those days that were so long not only for the Rochelois, gnawed by hunger and anxiety, but also for the cardinal, who blockaded them so vigorously.
Sometimes, when the cardinal, always riding about like the least soldier of the army, ran his thoughtful gaze over these works being built under his command, though much more slowly than he would have liked, by engineers he had brought from all corners of the realm of France, if he met with a musketeer of Tréville’s company, he would approach him, look at him in a singular fashion, and, recognizing that he was not one of our four companions, turn his profound gaze and his vast thought elsewhere.
One day when, gnawed by deadly vexation, with no hope of negotiations with the town, with no news from England, the cardinal went out with the sole purpose of going out, accompanied only by Cahusac and La Houdinière, riding along the shore and mingling the immensity of his dreams with the immensity of the ocean, he came, at his horse’s easy pace, to the top of a hill, from which he made out seven men reclining on the sand behind a hedge, surrounded by empty bottles, and catching in passage one of those rays of sunlight so rare at that time of year. Four of these men were our musketeers, preparing to listen to the reading of a letter that one of them had just received. This letter was so important that it had left cards and dice abandoned on a drumhead.
The three others were busy uncorking an enormous demijohn of Collioure wine. These were the gentlemen’s lackeys.
The cardinal, as we have said, was in a sullen mood, and when he was in that state of mind, nothing increased his grumpiness so much as the gaiety of others. Besides, he had a strange preoccupation, which was to believe that the very causes of his sadness aroused the gaiety of strangers. Making a sign for La Houdinière and Cahusac to stop, he got off his horse and approached