The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [83]
As for Aramis, he had asked for a five-day leave, and was said to be in Rouen on family business.
M. de Tréville was a father to his soldiers. The humblest and least known of them, once he put on the uniform of the company, was as certain of his help and support as his own brother would have been.
He thus went instantly to the criminal lieutenant.69 The officer who commanded the post at the Croix-Rouge was summoned, and from successive information it was learned that Athos was temporarily lodged in the Fort-l’Évêque.
Athos had passed through all the trials we have seen Bonacieux undergo.
We were present at the scene of the two captives’ confrontation. Athos, who had said nothing up to then for fear that d’Artagnan, bothered in his turn, would not have time to do what he had to do, declared from that moment on that his name was Athos and not d’Artagnan.
He added that he knew neither M. nor Mme Bonacieux, that he had never spoken to the one or the other, that he had come at around ten o’clock in the evening to visit his friend, M. d’Artagnan, but that until that hour he had remained with M. de Tréville, with whom he had dined; twenty witnesses, he added, could attest to that fact, and he named several distinguished gentlemen, among them M. le duc de La Trémouille.
The second commissary was as stunned as the first by the simple and firm declaration of the musketeer, on whom he would have liked very much to take the revenge that men of the robe love to win from men of the sword; but the names of M. de Tréville and of M. de La Trémouille deserved consideration.
Athos was then sent to the cardinal, but unfortunately the cardinal was at the Louvre with the king.
This was precisely the moment when M. de Tréville, coming out from seeing the criminal lieutenant and the governor of the Fort-l’Évêque without having been able to find Athos, went to His Majesty.
We know what prejudices the king had against the queen, prejudices skillfully maintained by the cardinal, who, with regard to intrigues, was infinitely more wary of women than of men. One of the great causes of this particular prejudice was Anne d’Autriche’s friendship with Mme de Chevreuse. These two women worried him more than the wars with Spain, the quarrels with England, and his financial difficulties. It was his view and his conviction that Mme de Chevreuse served the queen not only in her political intrigues, but, which tormented him much more, in her amorous intrigues.
At the first word of what the cardinal had said—that Mme de Chevreuse, exiled to Tours and thought to be in that town, had come to Paris, and had eluded the police for the five days she had stayed there—the king had flown into a furious temper. Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will have difficulty understanding this character, which history explains only by deeds and never by reasoning.
But when the cardinal added that not only had Mme de Chevreuse come to Paris, but also that the queen had renewed her friendship with her through the help of that mysterious sort of connection which was then known as a cabal; when he affirmed that, just as he, the cardinal, was about to unravel the most obscure threads of this intrigue, at the moment of catching the queen’s emissary to the exiled lady red-handed, in flagrante delicto, provided with all necessary proofs, a musketeer had dared to violently disrupt the course of justice by falling, sword in hand, upon the honest men of law charged with the impartial examination of the affair in order to place it under the eyes of the king—Louis XIII could no longer contain himself. He made a step towards the queen’s apartments with that pale and mute indignation which, when it burst out, brought this prince to the coldest cruelty.
And yet, in all this, the cardinal had still not said a word about the duke of Buckingham.
It was then that M. de Tréville came in, cold, polite, and impeccably dressed.
Alerted to what had just happened by the cardinal’s presence and the