The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [269]
It was not difficult to conquer, as she had done up to then, men ready to let themselves be seduced, and whom the gallant education of the court led quickly into the trap. Milady was beautiful enough to meet no resistance on the part of the flesh, and she was deft enough to overcome all mental obstacles.
But this time she had to fight against a wild nature, concentrated, insensible by dint of austerity. Religion and penitence had made of Felton a man inaccessible to ordinary seductions. Such vast plans, such tumultuous projects turned over in that exalted head, that there was no room left for any love, capricious or substantial—that emotion which is nursed on leisure and grows in corruption. Milady had thus made a breach, with her false virtue, in the judgment of a man horribly warned against her, and, by her beauty, in the heart and senses of a man who was chaste and pure. Finally, she had taken the measure of her means, unknown to herself till then, by this experiment made upon the most refractory subject that nature and religion could submit to her investigation.
Nevertheless, many times during that evening she had despaired of fate and of herself; she did not invoke God, as we know, but she had faith in the genius of evil, that immense sovereignty that reigns over all the details of human life, and for which, as in the Arabian fable,188 a pomegranate seed is enough to reconstruct a destroyed world.
Milady, who was well prepared to receive Felton, could set up her artillery for the next day. She knew she had only two days left, that once the order was signed by Buckingham (and Buckingham would sign it the more readily in that this order bore a false name, and he could not recognize the woman it concerned), once this order was signed, we say, the baron would put her aboard ship straight away, and she also knew that women condemned to deportation use much less powerful weapons in their seductions than would-be virtuous women, whose beauty is shone upon by the sun of society, whose wit is vaunted by the voice of fashion, and whom a reflection of aristocracy gilds with its enchanted gleams. To be a woman condemned to a wretched and degrading punishment is no hindrance to being beautiful, but is an obstacle to ever becoming powerful again. Like all people of real merit, Milady knew the milieu that suited her nature and her means. Poverty was repugnant to her; abjection diminished her greatness by two-thirds. Milady was a queen only among queens; the pleasure of satisfied pride was necessary to her domination. To command inferior beings was rather a humiliation than a pleasure for her.
To be sure, she would return from her exile, she did not doubt it for a single moment; but how long would that exile last? For an active and ambitious nature like Milady’s, the days when one is not busy rising are ill-starred days; find a word, then, to name the days that one spends falling! To lose a year, two years, three years, meaning an eternity; to come back when d’Artagnan, happy and triumphant, he and his friends, had received from the queen the reward they had well earned for the services they had rendered her—those were devouring thoughts, which a woman like Milady could not endure. Moreover, the storm that was howling in her doubled her strength, and she would have burst the walls of her prison if her body had been able for a single moment to take on the proportions of her mind.
Then, what still goaded her in the midst of all this was the memory of the cardinal. What must the distrustful, worried, suspicious cardinal be thinking, what must he be saying of her silence—the cardinal, not only her sole prop, her sole support, her sole protector for the present, but also the main instrument of her fortune and her revenge to come? She knew him, she knew that on her return after a useless journey, she could argue all she liked about prison, she could make as much as she liked of sufferings endured, the cardinal would respond with that mocking calm of the skeptic who is powerful in both strength and genius: “You should not have let yourself