• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The discovery of a completely unknown manuscript, in a period when historical science has been raised to such a high level, seemed almost miraculous to us. Thus we hastened to request permission to have it printed, with the aim of presenting ourselves to the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres with other men’s baggage, if we should not succeed, as is highly likely, in entering the French Academy8 with our own. This permission, we must say, was graciously granted; which fact we record here in order to give a public refutation to those malicious persons who claim that we are living under a government which is not especially well disposed towards men of letters.

Today we offer our readers the first part of this precious manuscript, giving it a more suitable title, with the commitment that if, as we have no doubt, this first part obtains the success it merits, we will shortly publish the second.

In the meantime, as a godfather is a second father, we invite the reader to lay the blame on us, and not on the comte de La Fère, for his pleasure or his boredom.

That said, let us go on to our story.

THE THREE MUSKETEERS

I

THE THREE PRESENTS OF M. D’ARTAGNAN SR.

On the first Monday of the month of April 1625, the village of Meung, where the author of the Romance of the Rose was born,1 seemed to be in as total an upheaval as if the Huguenots had come to make a second La Rochelle.2 Many of the townsmen, seeing women fleeing along the main street, hearing children crying on the doorsills, hastened to put on their breastplates and, backing up their somewhat uncertain countenances with a musket or a partisan, headed for the Jolly Miller Inn, before which jostled a compact group, noisy, full of curiosity, and growing every minute.

At that time panics were frequent, and few days passed without one town or another recording some such event in its archives. There were lords who fought among themselves; there was the king who made war on the cardinal; there was the Spaniard who made war on the king.3 Then, besides these hidden or public, secret or open wars, there were also the robbers, the beggars, the Huguenots, the wolves, and the lackeys, who made war on everybody. The townsfolk always took up arms against the robbers, against the wolves, against the lackeys—often against the lords and the Huguenots—and sometimes against the king—but never against the cardinal or the Spaniard. The result of this acquired habit thus was that, on the first Monday of the month of April 1625, the townsmen, hearing noise, and seeing neither the yellow-and-red standard, nor the livery of the duc de Richelieu, rushed for the Jolly Miller Inn.

Arrived there, each of them could see and identify the cause of the stir.

A young man…—let us draw his portrait with a single stroke of the pen: picture to yourself Don Quixote at eighteen, Don Quixote husked, without hauberk and greaves, Don Quixote dressed in a woolen doublet whose blue color has been transformed into an elusive nuance of wine lees and celestial azure. A long, brown face; prominent cheekbones, a token of shrewdness; enormously developed jaw muscles, an infallible sign by which to recognize a Gascon, even without a beret, and our young man was wearing a beret, decorated with a sort of feather; eyes open and intelligent; nose hooked but finely drawn; too tall for an adolescent, too small for a grown man, and whom an inexperienced eye would have taken for a farmer’s son on a journey, were it not for his long sword, hung from a leather baldric, which slapped against its owner’s calves when he was on foot, and against the bristling hide of his mount when he was on horseback.

For our young man had a mount, and this mount was even so remarkable that it was remarked: it was a Béarnais nag, twelve or fourteen years old, yellow of coat, without a hair in its tail, but not without galls on its legs, and which, though it walked with its head lower than its knees, rendering the application of a martingale unnecessary, still made its eight leagues