The Three Musketeers (Translated by Richard Pevear) - Alexandre Dumas [97]
“Come, have you decided?” she said.
“But, my dear friend, think a little about what you’re asking of me. London is far from Paris, very far, and maybe the commission you’re entrusting to me is not without its dangers.”
“What matter, if you avoid them!”
“Ah, no, Mme Bonacieux,” said the mercer, “no, I decidedly refuse: intrigues scare me. I’ve seen the Bastille, I have. Brr! It’s frightful, the Bastille! I get gooseflesh just thinking about it. They threatened to torture me. Do you know what torture is? Wooden wedges driven between your legs till the bones crack! No, I decidedly won’t go. And, morbleu! why don’t you go yourself? Because the truth is I think I’ve been mistaken about you up to now: I think you’re a man, and among the maddest of them at that!”
“And you, you’re a woman, a pathetic woman, stupid and besotted. Ah, you’re afraid! Well, then, if you don’t leave this very instant, I’ll have you arrested by order of the queen, and I’ll have them put you in that Bastille you’re so afraid of.”
Bonacieux lapsed into deep reflection. He maturely weighed these two angers in his head, the cardinal’s and the queen’s: the cardinal’s came out enormously weightier.
“Have me arrested in the queen’s name,” he said, “and I will appeal to the cardinal.”
This time Mme Bonacieux saw that she had gone too far, and she was appalled at having made such an advance. For a moment she contemplated in fear this stupid figure, with his invincible resoluteness, like that of fools when they are frightened.
“Well, then, so be it!” she said. “Perhaps you’re right after all: men know far more about politics than women, and you above all, M. Bonacieux, who have talked with the cardinal. And yet it’s a hard thing,” she added, “that my husband, that a man whose affection I thought I could count on, treats me so disgracefully and won’t satisfy my whim at all.”
“It’s that your whims may go too far,” Bonacieux replied triumphantly, “and I distrust them.”
“I’ll give it up, then,” the young woman said with a sigh. “Very well, let’s not talk about it any more.”
“If you’d at least tell me what I am to do in London,” Bonacieux picked up, recalling a bit too late that Rochefort had strongly advised trying to worm the secrets out of his wife.
“There’s no use your knowing,” said the young woman, whom an instinctive mistrust now held back. “It was a matter of a trinket such as women like, a purchase on which there was a lot to be made.”
But the more the young woman defended herself, the more Bonacieux thought, on the contrary, that the secret she refused to confide to him was important. He thus resolved to run that same instant to the comte de Rochefort and tell him that the queen was looking for a messenger to send to London.
“Excuse me if I leave you, my dear Mme Bonacieux,” he said, “but, not knowing that you would come to see me, I had made an appointment with one of my friends. I’ll be back in an instant, and if you will wait half a minute for me, as soon as I’m finished with that friend, I’ll come to fetch you, and, as it’s beginning to get late, I’ll bring you back to the Louvre.”
“Thank you, Monsieur,” replied Mme Bonacieux. “You’re not brave enough to be of any use to me, and I can very well return to the Louvre by myself.”
“As you please, Mme Bonacieux,” replied the ex-mercer. “Will I see you again soon?”
“No doubt. Next week, I hope, my service will leave me some free time, and I will profit from it to come and put our things in order, for they must be in a bit of a mess.”
“Very well, I shall expect you. You’re not vexed with me?”
“I? Not in the least.”
“See you soon, then?”
“See you soon.”
Bonacieux kissed his wife’s hand and left quickly.
“Well, now,” said Mme Bonacieux, once her husband had closed the street door and she was left alone, “all the imbecile needed was to be a cardinalist! And I, who had guaranteed the queen, I, who had promised my poor mistress…Ah, my God! My God! She’ll take me for one of those scoundrels the palace is swarming with, who