The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [290]
On landing at Portsmouth, Milady was an Englishwoman driven from La Rochelle by French persecution; on landing at Boulogne, after a two-day crossing, she passed for a Frenchwoman whom the English harassed in Portsmouth, in the hatred they had conceived against France.
Milady had, besides, the most effective of passports: her beauty, her noble bearing, and the generosity with which she scattered pistoles. Exempted from the usual formalities by the affable smile and gallant manners of an old port governor, who kissed her hand, she stayed in Boulogne only long enough to post a letter worded thus:
To His Eminence Monseigneur le Cardinal de Richelieu, in his camp before La Rochelle.
Monseigneur,
Your Eminence may rest assured: His Grace the duke of Buckingham will never leave for France.
Boulogne, the evening of the 25th.
Milady de———
P.S. As Your Eminence wished, I am going to the convent of the Carmelites in Béthune, where I shall await your orders.
Indeed, that same evening Milady set out on her way. Night overtook her; she stopped and slept in an inn; then, the next day, at five o’clock in the morning, she left, and three hours later she came to Béthune.
The Carmelite convent was pointed out to her, and she went in at once.
The mother superior came to meet her. Milady showed her the cardinal’s order, and the abbess had her given a room and served breakfast.
The whole of the past was already effaced in this woman’s eyes, and, her gaze fixed on the future, she saw only the high fortune reserved for her by the cardinal, whom she had served so successfully, without having her name mixed up in any way with that bloody business. The ever new passions that consumed her gave her life the appearance of those clouds that move across the sky, reflecting now azure, now fire, now the opaque black of the storm, and that leave no other traces on earth than devastation and death.
After breakfast, the abbess came to visit her. There was little distraction in the cloister, and the good mother superior was anxious to make her new pensioner’s acquaintance.
Milady wanted to please the abbess, which was an easy thing for this truly superior woman to do. She tried to be amiable: she was charming, and seduced the good mother superior by the variety of her conversation and by the graces diffused throughout her person.
The abbess, who was a daughter of the nobility, was most fond of stories about the court, which rarely reached the far corners of the realm and had special difficulty passing through the walls of convents, on the thresholds of which the noises of the world expired.
Milady, on the other hand, was quite up-to-date on all the aristocratic intrigues, which she had been living in the midst of constantly for the past five or six years, and thus set about to converse with the good abbess on the worldly practices of the court of France, mixed with the extravagant devotions of the king; she recited the scandalous chronicle of the lords and ladies of the court, whom the abbess knew perfectly well by name, and touched lightly on the amours of the queen and Buckingham, speaking much in order to be little spoken to.
But the abbess contented herself with listening and smiling, all without any reply. However, as Milady saw that this sort of story amused her greatly, she went on; only she turned the conversation to the cardinal.
But she was rather perplexed: she did not know whether the abbess was a royalist or a cardinalist. She kept to a prudent middle line; but the abbess, for her part, kept to a still more prudent reserve, contenting herself with making a deep bow of the head each time the traveler uttered His Eminence’s name.
Milady began to think that she was going to be extremely bored in the convent. She thus resolved to risk something in order to find out at once which side to take. Wishing to see how far the good abbess’s discretion would go, she began to speak ill of the cardinal, very covertly at first, then in great detail, telling about the minister’s amours with Mme d’Aiguillon, Marion de Lorme, and several other