Essential Novelists - Alexandre Dumas. Alexandre Dumas

And the cardinal began to examine with the greatest attention the map of La Rochelle, which, as we have said, lay open on the desk, tracing with a pencil the line in which the famous dyke was to pass which, eighteen months later, shut up the port of the besieged city. As he was in the deepest of his strategic meditations, the door opened, and Rochefort returned.

      “Well?” said the cardinal, eagerly, rising with a promptitude which proved the degree of importance he attached to the commission with which he had charged the count.

      “Well,” said the latter, “a young woman of about twenty-six or twenty-eight years of age, and a man of from thirty-five to forty, have indeed lodged at the two houses pointed out by your Eminence; but the woman left last night, and the man this morning.”

      “It was they!” cried the cardinal, looking at the clock; “and now it is too late to have them pursued. The duchess is at Tours, and the duke at Boulogne. It is in London they must be found.”

      “What are your Eminence’s orders?”

      “Not a word of what has passed. Let the queen remain in perfect security; let her be ignorant that we know her secret. Let her believe that we are in search of some conspiracy or other. Send me the keeper of the seals, Seguier.”

      “And that man, what has your Eminence done with him?”

      “What man?” asked the cardinal.

      “That Bonacieux.”

      “I have done with him all that could be done. I have made him a spy upon his wife.”

      The Comte de Rochefort bowed like a man who acknowledges the superiority of the master as great, and retired.

      Left alone, the cardinal seated himself again and wrote a letter, which he secured with his special seal. Then he rang. The officer entered for the fourth time.

      “Tell Vitray to come to me,” said he, “and tell him to get ready for a journey.”

      An instant after, the man he asked for was before him, booted and spurred.

      “Vitray,” said he, “you will go with all speed to London. You must not stop an instant on the way. You will deliver this letter to Milady. Here is an order for two hundred pistoles; call upon my treasurer and get the money. You shall have as much again if you are back within six days, and have executed your commission well.”

      The messenger, without replying a single word, bowed, took the letter, with the order for the two hundred pistoles, and retired.

      Here is what the letter contained:

      MILADY, Be at the first ball at which the Duke of Buckingham shall be present. He will wear on his doublet twelve diamond studs; get as near to him as you can, and cut off two.

      As soon as these studs shall be in your possession, inform me.

       15 MEN OF THE ROBE AND MEN OF THE SWORD

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      ON THE DAY AFTER THESE events had taken place, Athos not having reappeared, M. de Treville was informed by d’Artagnan and Porthos of the circumstance. As to Aramis, he had asked for leave of absence for five days, and was gone, it was said, to Rouen on family business.

      M de Treville was the father of his soldiers. The lowest or the least known of them, as soon as he assumed the uniform of the company, was as sure of his aid and support as if he had been his own brother.

      He repaired, then, instantly to the office of the LIEUTENANT-CRIMINEL. The officer who commanded the post of the Red Cross was sent for, and by successive inquiries they learned that Athos was then lodged in Fort l’Eveque.

      Athos had passed through all the examinations we have seen Bonacieux undergo.

      We were present at the scene in which the two captives were confronted with each other. Athos, who had till that time said nothing for fear that d’Artagnan, interrupted in his turn, should not have the time necessary, from this moment declared that his name was Athos, and not d’Artagnan. He added that he did not know either M. or Mme. Bonacieux; that he had never spoken to the one or the other; that he had come, at about ten o’clock in the evening, to pay a visit to his friend M. d’Artagnan, but that till that hour he had been at M. de Treville’s, where he had dined. “Twenty witnesses,” added he, “could attest the fact”; and he named several distinguished gentlemen, and among them was M. le Duc de la Tremouille.

      The second commissary was as much bewildered as the first had been by the simple and firm declaration of the Musketeer, upon whom he was anxious to take the revenge which men of the robe like at all times to gain over men of the sword; but the name of M. de Treville, and that of M. de la Tremouille, commanded a little reflection.

      Athos was then sent to the cardinal; but unfortunately the cardinal was at the Louvre with the king.

      It was precisely at this moment that M. de Treville, on leaving the residence of the LIEUTENANT-CRIMINEL and the governor of Fort l’Eveque without being able to find Athos, arrived at the palace.

      As captain of the Musketeers, M. de Treville had the right of entry at all times.

      It is well known how violent the king’s prejudices were against the queen, and how carefully these prejudices were kept up by the cardinal, who in affairs of intrigue mistrusted women infinitely more than men. One of the grand causes of this prejudice was the friendship of Anne of Austria for Mme. de Chevreuse. These two women gave him more uneasiness than the war with Spain, the quarrel with England, or the embarrassment of the finances. In his eyes and to his conviction, Mme. de Chevreuse not only served the queen in her political intrigues, but, what tormented him still more, in her amorous intrigues.

      At the first word the cardinal spoke of Mme. de Chevreuse—who, though exiled to Tours and believed to be in that city, had come to Paris, remained there five days, and outwitted the police—the king flew into a furious passion. Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.

      But when the cardinal added that not only Mme. de Chevreuse had been in Paris, but still further, that the queen had renewed with her one of those mysterious correspondences which at that time was named a CABAL; when he affirmed that he, the cardinal, was about to unravel the most closely twisted thread of this intrigue; that at the moment of arresting in the very act, with all the proofs about her, the queen’s emissary to the exiled duchess, a Musketeer had dared to interrupt the course of justice violently, by falling sword in hand upon the honest men of the law, charged with investigating impartially the whole affair in order to place it before the eyes of the king—Louis XIII could not contain himself, and he made a step toward the queen’s apartment with that pale and mute indignation which, when it broke out, led this prince to the commission of the most pitiless cruelty. And yet, in all this, the cardinal had not yet said a word about the Duke of Buckingham.

      At this instant M. de Treville entered, cool, polite, and in irreproachable costume.

      Informed of what had passed by the presence of the cardinal and the alteration in the king’s countenance, M. de Treville felt himself something like Samson before the Philistines.

      Louis XIII had already placed his hand on the knob of the door; at the noise of M. de Treville’s entrance he turned round. “You arrive in good time, monsieur,” said the king, who, when his passions were raised to a certain point, could not dissemble; “I have learned some fine things concerning your Musketeers.”

      “And I,” said Treville, coldly, “I have some pretty things to tell your Majesty concerning these gownsmen.”

      “What?”