The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [77]
“Not for all the world,” replied Bonacieux.
“What is the gentleman’s name?” asked the commissary.
“That I cannot tell you. I don’t know him.”
“What? You don’t know him?”
“No.”
“You have never seen him?”
“No, I have, but I don’t know what he’s called.”
“Your name?” asked the commissary.
“Athos,” replied the musketeer.
“But that’s not the name of a man, it’s the name of a mountain!”60 cried the poor interrogator, who was beginning to lose his head.
“It is my name,” Athos said calmly.
“But you said your name was d’Artagnan.”
“I?”
“Yes, you.”
“That is to say, someone said to me: ‘You are M. d’Artagnan?’ I replied: ‘You think so?’ My guards shouted that they were sure of it. I did not want to vex them. Besides, I might have been mistaken.”
“Monsieur, you insult the majesty of the law.”
“Not at all,” Athos said calmly.
“You are M. d’Artagnan.”
“You see, you’re telling me so again.”
“But,” M. Bonacieux cried in turn, “I tell you, Monsieur le commissaire, that there’s not a moment’s doubt. M. d’Artagnan is my lodger, and consequently, though he doesn’t pay me the rent, and precisely because of that, I ought to know him. M. d’Artagnan is a young man of barely nineteen or twenty, and Monsieur is at least thirty. M. d’Artagnan is in M. des Essarts’s guards, and Monsieur is in the company of M. de Tréville’s musketeers: look at the uniform, Monsieur le commissaire, look at the uniform.”
“That’s true,” murmured the commissary, “that’s true, pardieu.”
At that moment the door flew open, and a messenger, ushered in by one of the gatekeepers of the Bastille, handed the commissary a letter.
“Oh, the poor woman!” cried the commissary.
“How’s that? What did you say? Who are you talking about? It’s not my wife, I hope?”
“On the contrary, it is. You’re in a fine mess now.”
“Ah!” cried the exasperated mercer, “but be so kind as to tell me, Monsieur, how my case could be made worse by what my wife does while I’m in prison!”
“Because what she does is the result of a plan arranged between you, an infernal plan!”
“I swear to you, Monsieur le commissaire, that you are in the profoundest error, that I know nothing at all of what my wife is supposedly doing, that I am a perfect stranger to what she does, and that, if she has done something stupid, I renounce her, I deny her, I curse her.”
“Ah, well,” Athos said to the commissary, “if you have no further need of me here, send me somewhere else. Your M. Bonacieux is very tiresome.”
“Take the prisoners back to their cells,” said the commissary, indicating Athos and Bonacieux with the same gesture, “and see that they’re guarded more strictly than ever.”
“However,” Athos said with his habitual calm, “if your business is with M. d’Artagnan, I don’t see very well how I can replace him.”
“Do as I said!” cried the commissary. “And the utmost secrecy! Understand?”
Athos followed his guards shrugging his shoulders, and M. Bonacieux pouring out lamentations that would have broken a tiger’s heart.
The mercer was taken back to the same cell where he had spent the night, and was left there for the whole day. For the whole day Bonacieux wept like a real mercer, being no swordsman at all, as he told us himself.
In the evening, towards nine o’clock, just as he was making up his mind to go to bed, he heard footsteps in his corridor. These footsteps approached his cell, his door opened, guards appeared.
“Follow me,” said an officer who came after the guards.
“Follow you?” cried Bonacieux. “Follow you at this hour? My God, where to?”
“Where we have orders to bring you.”
“But that…that’s not an answer.”
“It is, however, the only one we can give you.”
“Ah, my God, my God!” murmured the poor mercer, “this time I’m lost!”
And, mechanically and without resistance, he followed the guards who had come to fetch him.
He took the same corridor he had already taken, crossed a first courtyard, went through a second part of the building; finally, at the door to the front courtyard, he found a carriage surrounded by four mounted guards. They made him