• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“And now,” said Athos, “unless M. le cardinal has the ingenious idea of having Grimaud’s stomach opened, I believe we can be nearly at peace.”

During this time, His Eminence continued on his melancholy promenade, muttering between his mustaches:

“Decidedly, those four men must be mine.”

LII

FIRST DAY OF CAPTIVITY

Let us go back to Milady, whom a glance at the shores of France has made us lose sight of for a moment.

We shall find her in the same desperate position in which we left her, opening up an abyss of gloomy reflections, a gloomy hell at the gateway to which she has almost abandoned hope:181 because for the first time she doubts, for the first time she fears.

On two occasions her luck had failed her, on two occasions she had been discovered and betrayed, and, on those two occasions, it was against the fatal genius no doubt sent by the Lord to combat her that she had run aground: d’Artagnan had vanquished her—her, the invincible force of evil.

He had deceived her in her love, humiliated her in her pride, foiled her in her ambition, and now here he was ruining her fortunes, striking at her freedom, even threatening her life. Much more than that, he had lifted a corner of her mask, that aegis with which she shielded herself and which made her so strong.

D’Artagnan had diverted from Buckingham, whom she hated, as she hated all that she had once loved, the storm with which Richelieu threatened him in the person of the queen. D’Artagnan had passed himself off as de Wardes, for whom she had conceived one of those uncontrollable tigress fancies that women of her character have. D’Artagnan knew the terrible secret that she had sworn no one would know and live. Finally, at the very moment when she had obtained a blank permit with the help of which she was going to take revenge on her enemy, the blank permit was snatched away from her, and it is d’Artagnan who holds her prisoner and is going to send her to some foul Botany Bay, to some filthy Tyburn of the Indian Ocean.182

For all this undoubtedly comes to her from d’Artagnan. From whom could all these disgraces heaped on her head come, if not from him? He alone could have handed on all those frightful secrets to Lord de Winter, who had revealed them one after another with a sort of fatality. He knew her brother-inlaw; he must have written to him.

What hatred she exudes! There, immobile in her empty apartment, her eyes burning and fixed, how well the dull roars that sometimes escape from the depths of her breast as she breathes accompany the noise of the swell rising, rumbling, groaning, and coming to break, like some eternal and impotent despair, on the rocks over which this proud and gloomy castle is built! How well, by the glimmer of the lightning that her stormy wrath sends flashing through her mind, she conceives magnificent plans of revenge against Mme Bonacieux, against Buckingham, and above all against d’Artagnan, lost in the depths of the future!

Yes, but to be revenged, one must be free, and to be free, when one is a prisoner, one must break through a wall, loosen bars, make a hole in the floor—all undertakings that a patient and strong man might carry through, but before which the feverish irritations of a woman must fail. Besides, to do all that one must have time, months, years, while she…she had ten or twelve days, according to Lord de Winter, her brotherly and terrible jailer.

And yet, had she been a man, she would have attempted all that, and would perhaps have succeeded. Why, then, had heaven made the mistake of placing this virile soul in this frail and delicate body!

And so, the first moments of captivity were terrible: several convulsions of rage, which she had been unable to master, had paid her debt of feminine weakness to nature. But she gradually overcame the outbursts of her wild anger, the nervous tremblings that shook her body disappeared, and now she was coiled up on herself like a weary serpent resting.

“Come, come, I was mad to get carried away like that,” she said, plunging into