The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [78]
The carriage started off, slow as a funeral hearse. Through the locked grill, the prisoner made out houses and the pavement, that was all; but, true Parisian that he was, Bonacieux recognized each street by its hitching posts, signs, and street lamps. When they reached Saint-Paul,61 where the condemned prisoners of the Bastille were executed, he nearly fainted and crossed himself twice. He thought the carriage was going to stop there. The carriage went on, however.
Further on, he was seized by great terror again, as they passed beside the Saint-Jean cemetery, where state criminals were buried. One thing reassured him slightly, that before burying them they generally cut off their heads, and his head was still on his shoulders. But when he saw the carriage go towards the place de Grève,62 when he made out the pointed roofs of the Hôtel de Ville, when the carriage turned under the arcade, he thought it was all over for him, wanted to confess to the officer, and, at his refusal, uttered cries so pitiable that the officer declared to him that if he went on deafening him like that he would gag him.
This threat reassured Bonacieux slightly: if he was to be executed on the Grève, it was not worth gagging him, because they had almost reached the place of execution. Indeed, the carriage crossed the fatal square without stopping. The only thing left to fear was the Croix-du-Trahoir.63 The carriage was going precisely that way.
This time there was no more doubt; it was at the Croix-du-Trahoir that they executed inferior criminals. Bonacieux had flattered himself in thinking he was worthy of Saint-Paul or the place de Grève: it was at the Croix-du-Trahoir that he was going to end his journey and his destiny! He could not yet see that ill-fated cross, but he somehow felt it coming towards him. When he was only twenty paces from it, he heard a hubbub, and the carriage stopped. This was more than poor Bonacieux could bear, crushed as he already was by the successive emotions he had suffered. He let out a feeble moan, which might have been taken for a dying man’s last sigh, and fainted.
XIV
THE MAN FROM MEUNG
This gathering had been produced not by the expectation of a man to be hung, but by the contemplation of a hanged man.
The carriage, having stopped for a moment, started off again, passed through the crowd, continued on its way, went down the rue Saint-Honoré, turned into the rue des Bons-Enfants, and stopped in front of a low doorway.
The door opened, two guards received Bonacieux, supported by the officer, into their arms; he was pushed into an alley, made to climb a stairway, and deposited in an antechamber.
All these movements were performed for him in mechanical fashion.
He had walked as one walks in a dream; he had glimpsed things through a mist; his ears had perceived sounds without understanding them; he could have been executed at that moment without his making a gesture in his own defense or crying out to beg for mercy.
So he remained on the bench, his back leaning against the wall and his arms hanging down, just where his guards had deposited him.
However, as he looked around and saw no threatening objects, as nothing suggested that he was in any real danger, as the bench was comfortably upholstered, as the wall was covered in fine Cordovan leather, as great curtains of red damask hung before the window, held back by golden curtain loops, he gradually understood that his fright was exaggerated, and he began moving his head to the left, to the right, and up and down.
With this movement, which no one opposed, he plucked up a little courage and risked flexing one leg, then the other; finally, aiding himself with both hands, he got up from the bench and found himself on his feet.
At that moment, a benevolent-looking officer opened a portière, went on exchanging a few words with someone in the neighboring room, and, turning to the prisoner, said: “It’s you who call yourself Bonacieux?