The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [91]
“What are you saying, Sire? God forbid that for my sake the queen should experience the least vexation! She has always believed me her enemy, Sire, though Your Majesty can attest that I have always warmly taken her part, even against you. Oh! if she betrayed Your Majesty with regard to his honor, that would be another thing, and I would be the first to say: ‘No pardon, Sire, no pardon for the guilty one!’ Fortunately that is not at all the case, and Your Majesty has just received new proof of it.”
“That’s true, Monsieur le cardinal,” said the king, “and you’re right as always; but the queen nonetheless deserves my full wrath.”
“It is you, Sire, who have incurred hers. And indeed, were she to pout seriously at Your Majesty, I would understand it. Your Majesty has treated her with a severity…”
“That is how I will always treat my enemies and yours, Duke, however highly placed they are and whatever risk I run in acting severely with them.”
“The queen is my enemy, but not yours, Sire. On the contrary, she is a devoted spouse, submissive and irreproachable. Allow me, Sire, to intercede for her with Your Majesty.”
“Let her humble herself, then, and come to me first!”
“On the contrary, Sire, set the example. Yours was the first wrong, since it was you who suspected the queen.”
“I be the first to make it up?” said the king. “Never!”
“Sire, I beg you.”
“Besides, how can I make it up first?”
“By doing something you know will please her.”
“Such as?”
“Give a ball. You know how much the queen loves to dance. I guarantee you that her rancor will never withstand such thoughtfulness.”
“Monsieur le cardinal, you know I have no love of worldly pleasures.”
“The queen will only be the more grateful to you, since she knows your antipathy for this pleasure. Besides, it will be an occasion for her to put on those beautiful diamond pendants you gave her the other day for her birthday, and with which she has not yet had time to adorn herself.”
“We’ll see, Monsieur le cardinal, we’ll see,” said the king, who, in his joy at finding the queen guilty of a crime he was little concerned with and innocent of a fault he greatly feared, was quite ready to make peace with her. “We’ll see, but, on my honor, you are too lenient.”
“Sire,” said the cardinal, “leave severity to ministers. Leniency is the royal virtue. Use it, and you will see that you won’t regret it.”
Upon which the cardinal, hearing the clock strike eleven, bowed deeply, asked the king’s leave to retire, and begged him to make peace with the queen.
Anne d’Autriche, who, following the seizure of her letter, was expecting some reproach, was greatly astonished to see the king make attempts at reconciliation with her the next day. Her first impulse was to repel them. Her pride as a woman and her dignity as a queen had both been so cruelly injured that she could not make things up like that at the first stroke. But, conquered by the advice of her women, she finally seemed as though she was beginning to forget. The king profited from that first moment of reversal to tell her that he was intending to give a fête in the near future.
A fête was such a rare thing for poor Anne d’Autriche that, at his announcement, as the cardinal had thought, the last trace of her resentment disappeared, if not from her heart, at least from her face. She asked what day the fête would take place, but the king replied that he had to discuss that point with the cardinal.
Indeed, every day the king asked the cardinal when the fête would take place, and every day the cardinal, under some pretext or other, put off fixing the date.
Ten days passed that way.
On the eighth day after the scene we have just recounted, the cardinal received a letter, with a London stamp, which contained only these few lines:
I have them; but I cannot leave London for lack of money. Send me five hundred pistoles, and four or five days after I receive them, I will be in Paris.
On the same day that the cardinal received this letter, the king asked him his usual question.
Richelieu