The four philosophers looked blankly at each other, stunned. Monsieur de Tréville never joked about affairs pertaining to discipline.
“And how much will this ‘necessary equipment’ cost?” asked d’Artagnan.
“It’s hard to say, exactly,” replied Aramis. “Even if we adopt the stinginess of Spartans, we’ll each need at least fifteen hundred livres.”
“Four times fifteen makes sixty, or rather, six thousand livres,” said Athos.
D’Artagnan said, “It seems to me that for a thousand livres each— speaking not as a Spartan, but as a procureur, meaning an outfitter rather than a prosecutor—”
The word “prosecutor” roused Porthos. “Wait,” he said, “I have an idea!”
“That’s fine for you. For myself, I haven’t the shadow of one,” said Athos coolly. “As to d’Artagnan, Messieurs, the joy of henceforth being one of us has driven him quite mad. A thousand livres, indeed! For myself alone, I’ll need at least two thousand.”
“And four times two makes eight,” said Aramis. “We’ll need eight thousand livres to equip us. At least we already have some splendid saddles.”
“Moreover,” said Athos, once d’Artagnan had left to go thank Monsieur de Tréville, “there’s that glorious diamond that gleams on our friend’s finger. What the devil! D’Artagnan is too good a comrade to leave his brothers in financial embarrassment while wearing a king’s ransom on his hand.”
XXIX
The Hunt for Equipment
The most preoccupied of the four friends was certainly d’Artagnan, though as a member of the guards he would be easier to outfit than Messieurs les Mousquetaires, who were all noblemen. But as has been shown, the Gascon cadet’s character was thrifty, almost to the point of parsimony, though at the same time nearly as vainglorious as Porthos—explain the contradiction if you can. Also just then, to add to d’Artagnan’s preoccupations with vanity, was a far less selfish concern: despite all his inquiries after Madame Bonacieux, he’d come across no news of her. Monsieur de Tréville had even spoken to the queen. Her Majesty didn’t know where the mercer’s young wife was, but she’d promised to order a search for her. However, this promise was too vague to reassure d’Artagnan.
Athos refused to leave his lodgings; he’d resolved not to take a single step to equip himself. “We still have a whole fortnight,” he told his friends. “Very well: if at the end of a fortnight I’ve found nothing—or rather if nothing’s found me—then as I’m too good a Catholic to blow my head off with my pistol, I’ll pick a fight with four of His Eminence’s Guards, or maybe eight Englishmen. I’ll fight until one of them kills me, which is bound to happen, considering the odds. Everyone will say I died for the king, so I’ll have done my duty without having to equip myself.”
Porthos continued to pace back and forth, hands behind his back, nodding and saying, “I’ll follow up on my idea.”
Aramis said nothing. He seemed anxious, and his grooming, for once, was haphazard.
As these distressing details show, desolation reigned over the community.
The lackeys, for their part, reflected their masters’ gloom, like the coursers of Hippolytus. Mousqueton hoarded crusts; Bazin, ever devout, haunted the churches; Planchet watched the flies buzz in circles; and Grimaud, whom even in the general distress refused to break the silence imposed by his master, heaved sighs that would soften hearts of stone.
The three friends—for, as already mentioned, Athos had sworn not to take a single step to equip himself—the three friends went out quite early every morning and returned quite late every evening. They wandered the streets, eyes on the pavement to see if some passerby had dropped his purse. They were so intent one might have supposed they were following tracks. When they met they exchanged despairing looks, as if to say, “Have you found anything?”
Since Porthos was the first to have an idea, and as he’d pondered it long enough to decide how to follow it up, he was the first to act. The worthy Porthos was a man of action. D’Artagnan spotted him one day making his way toward the Church of Saint-Leu,81 and instinctively followed him. Porthos went in, after twisting his mustachios into points, and currying his royale—a habit, with Porthos, that always announced a campaign of conquest. D’Artagnan entered behind him, careful not to be seen. Porthos, believing himself unobserved, went and leaned against a pillar. D’Artagnan, unnoticed, leaned against the opposite side.
A sermon was under way, so the church was crowded. For Porthos, this was an opportunity to ogle the women. Thanks to the careful labors of Mousqueton, his exterior belied the distress of his interior. His hat was a bit worn, his plume a bit faded, his gold piping a bit tarnished, his lace a bit frayed—but in the half-light of the church these defects disappeared, and Porthos was still the magnificent Porthos.
In the pew closest to the pillar Porthos leaned on, d’Artagnan noticed a faded beauty, somewhat past her prime, somewhat withered and gaunt, but erect and haughty beneath her black taffeta hood. Porthos’s glance furtively touched on this lady, then flitted at large across the nave.
As to the lady, she blushed repeatedly, then threw a fleeting look at the fickle Porthos, who immediately sent his eyes roving back across the throng. This seemed to strike the lady in the hood to the quick; she worried her lips until they bled, rubbed her nose nervously, and squirmed in her seat.
Seeing this, Porthos again twisted his mustache and stroked his royale, then began to make signals to a beautiful woman who sat near the choir—a woman not only beautiful, but also doubtless a great lady, for behind her sat a young black boy, who had borne the cushion on which she knelt, and a serving-woman, who held the velvet bag with embroidered coat-of-arms that had contained the book from which the lady was reading mass.
The lady in the black hood followed Porthos’s roving gaze and saw that it stopped at the lady with the velvet cushion, black boy, and serving-woman.
Meanwhile, Porthos was hard at work, sending the great lady significant little winks, touching his finger to his lips, and producing an assassinating smile that really did assassinate the scorned elder beauty. It forced from her, as a sort of mea culpa, a sob so distinct that everyone, even the lady with the red cushion, turned her way. Only Porthos ignored it; he understood it completely, but played deaf.
If the lady with the red cushion made a great impression upon both the dame with the black hood, and on Porthos—for she was a stunner, and Porthos thought her much prettier than the hooded lady—she made an even greater impression on d’Artagnan, who recognized her as his lady of Meung, of Calais, and of Dover, the woman his nemesis, the man with the scar, had called “Milady.”
Without losing sight of the lady with the red cushion, d’Artagnan continued to follow Porthos’s little game, which he found highly amusing. He supposed that the lady in the black taffeta hood was the prosecutor’s wife of the Rue aux Ours, especially since that street wasn’t far from the Church of Saint-Leu. He imagined Porthos sought to take his revenge for the betrayal at Chantilly, when the prosecutor’s wife had been so reluctant to open her purse.
D’Artagnan likewise noted that no one actually responded to Porthos’s gallantries. They were nothing but chimeras, illusions; but with love, as with jealousy, is there any other reality but illusions and chimeras?
The sermon ended. The prosecutor’s wife advanced toward the font of holy water, but Porthos was ahead of her. Instead of a finger, he dipped his entire hand in the basin. The prosecutor’s wife smiled, assuming it was for her that Porthos made this gesture, but she was promptly and cruelly undeceived. When she was no more than three steps away from him, Porthos turned his head and fixed his gaze on the lady with the red cushion, who was approaching, trailed by her black boy and fille de chambre.
As the lady of the red cushion approached, Porthos drew his hand streaming from the font. The devout beauty briefly brushed her slender hand against Porthos’s great mitt, smiled, made the sign of the cross, and went out of the church.
This was too much for the prosecutor’s wife. She had no doubt but that this lady and Porthos were romantically involved. If she’d been a grande dame, she’d have fainted dead away—but as she was only a prosecutor’s wife, she contented herself with saying to the musketeer, with intense fury, “So, Monsieur Porthos, you have no holy water to offer me?”
At the sound of her voice, Porthos started like a man awakened from a hundred-year sleep. “Madame!” he cried. “Is that you? How is your husband, that dear Monsieur Coquenard? Still as stingy as ever? What can I have been looking at that I never noticed you during a two-hour sermon?”
“I was two steps away from you, Monsieur,” replied the prosecutor’s wife, “but you didn’t notice me because you had eyes only for that belle dame you gave the holy water to.”
Porthos feigned embarrassment. “Ah! You saw that, did you?”
“I would have to have been blind to miss it.”
“Yes, that’s a duchess I happen to know,” Porthos said offhandedly. “It’s a pain trying to see her, her husband’s so jealous. She sent round a note to say that she’d come today, here to this obscure church in a nowhere neighborhood, just to see me.”
“Monsieur Porthos,” said the prosecutor’s wife, “will you do me the honor to offer me your arm for five minutes? I have something to tell you.”
“As you wish, Madame,” said Porthos, winking to himself, like a gambler about to fleece his mark.
D’Artagnan passed just then in pursuit of Milady; he glanced at Porthos and saw his look of triumph. “Oh ho! I see at least one of us is going to have his equipment before the deadline,” he said to himself, in accord with the strangely easy morals of that gallant period.
Porthos, yielding to the pressure of Madame’s arm as a ship yields to a rudder, arrived at the Cloister of Saint-Magloire, a little-used passage between main streets with a turnstile at either end. During the daytime no one was ever seen there but children playing and beggars looking for handouts.
“Ah, Monsieur Porthos!” cried the prosecutor’s wife, once she was assured that no strangers could see or hear her. “Ah, Monsieur Porthos! You’re a mighty conqueror, it seems!”
“Me, Madame?” said Porthos, throwing out his chest. “Why do you say that?”
“All those signals! And that holy water! She must be a princess, at least, that lady with the black boy and serving-woman!”
“Good God! Not at all!” replied Porthos. “She’s merely a duchess.”
“And that footman who held the door to her carriage, with a liveried coachman waiting on the seat?”
Porthos had seen neither the footman nor the carriage, but with the eye of a jealous woman Madame Coquenard had seen everything.
Porthos was sorry he hadn’t made the lady with the red cushion a princess in the first place.
“You’re quite the darling of the ladies, Monsieur Porthos!” sighed the prosecutor’s wife.
“What would you have?” replied Porthos. “Endowed by Nature with a physique such as mine, you must realize that I don’t lack for luck with the ladies.”
“My God! How quickly men forget!” cried the prosecutor’s wife, rolling her eyes toward heaven.
“Less quickly than women, it seems to me,” replied Porthos, “and in that regard, I must say I’ve been your victim. When I was wounded, dying, and even the doctors had given up on me—I, the scion of an illustrious family, who’d relied on your friendship—I was nearly dead, first from wounds, then from hunger, in a miserable inn at Chantilly. And you never deigned once to reply to the urgent, earnest letters I wrote to you.”
“But, Monsieur Porthos,” murmured Madame, beginning to feel that, judging by the conduct of the great ladies of the times, she was in the wrong.
“To me, who’d sacrificed the Comtesse de Penaflor for your sake . . .”
“I know it!”
“The Baroness de . . .”
“Monsieur Porthos, this is unbearable!”
“The Duchesse de . . .”
“Monsieur Porthos, be generous!”
“You’re right, Madame—I’ll spare you.”
“But it was my husband who wouldn’t even speak of a loan.”
“Madame Coquenard,” said Porthos, “please recall the first letter you ever wrote to me, a missive of passion that is graven forever in my memory.”
The prosecutor’s wife uttered a low moan. “But, you see,” she said, “the sum you asked to borrow was so very large.”
“Madame Coquenard, of all those to whom I could have written, I gave you the preference. I had only to write to the Duchesse de . . . but no, I won’t speak her name, for it’s not in me to compromise a woman. But this I know, that I had only to write to her, and she would have sent me fifteen hundred.”
The prosecutor’s wife shed a tear. “Monsieur Porthos,” she said, “I swear you’ve severely punished me, and if in the future you find yourself in a similar state, you have only to address yourself to me.”
“Enough!” said Porthos, in mock revulsion. “No more talk about money, if you please. It’s humiliating.”
“Then . . . you no longer love me,” the prosecutor’s wife said, slowly and sadly.
Porthos maintained a majestic silence.
“That’s your only reply? Alas! I understand.”
“Just think about the offense you gave me, Madame! It lives on . . . in here.” Porthos thumped his great chest over the location of his heart.
“But I’ll make up for it! You’ll see, my dear Porthos!”
“After all, what was I asking for?” continued Porthos, with a good-natured shrug of his massive shoulders. “A loan, nothing more. It’s not as if I were an unreasonable man. I know you’re not rich, Madame Coquenard, and your husband has to bleed his poor clients to squeeze a few paltry crowns out of them. Now, if you were a countess, a marquise, or a duchess, things would be different— then your offense would be unpardonable.”
The prosecutor’s wife was piqued. “I’ll have you know, Monsieur Porthos, that my strongbox, though it may be the strongbox of a mere prosecutor’s wife, is better furnished than the coffers of your spendthrift high-class hussies.”
“That just doubles the offense,” said Porthos, removing his arm from hers. “If you’re rich, Madame Coquenard, then there’s no excuse for your refusal.”
“When I said rich,” replied Madame, who saw that she’d gone too far, “I didn’t mean literally. I’m not exactly rich, just rather well off.”
“Enough, Madame,” said Porthos. “Let’s say no more about it, I beg of you. You’ve misunderstood me: it’s over between us.”
“What an ingrate you are!”
“As if you had a right to complain!” said Porthos.
“Then go off with your baby-faced duchess! I’ll detain you no longer.”
“At least she’s not scrawny!”
“See here, Monsieur Porthos, for the last time: do you still love me?”
“Alas, Madame,” said Porthos, in the most melancholy tone he could muster, “now, when we’re about to enter onto a campaign, a campaign in which I’ve had premonitions that I’ll be killed . . .”
“Oh! Don’t say such things!” cried the prosecutor’s wife, bursting into tears.
“Something tells me it’s so,” continued Porthos, more and more morose.
“I’d rather you said you had a new love.”
“Not at all; I’m being completely frank with you. No new object of desire attracts me—and I even feel, here, in the depths of my heart, something that still speaks for you. But whether you know it or not, in a fortnight this fatal campaign begins. I’ll be frightfully preoccupied with this matter of my equipment, and now it seems I must travel to my family estate, in lower Brittany, to find the sum needed to outfit for my departure.”
Porthos thought he could see a final contest under way between love and avarice. He continued, “. . . And as the duchess you saw at the church has estates near my own, we plan to travel together. Long
journeys, you know, seem so much shorter when shared by two.”
“Haven’t you any friends in Paris, Monsieur Porthos?” said Madame.
“I thought I had,” Porthos said, resuming his air of melancholy, “but I see now that I was wrong.”
“You have them, Monsieur Porthos, you have them!” cried the prosecutor’s wife, carried away in spite of herself. “Come to our house tomorrow. Say you’re my aunt’s son, which makes you my cousin; you hail from Noyon, in Picardy; you have lawsuits pending in Paris, and need a solicitor. Can you remember all that?”
“Perfectly, Madame.”
“Come at the dinner hour.”
“Very well.”
“And watch out for my husband, who’s pretty sharp, despite being seventy-six years old.”
“Seventy-six! Peste! That’s a hell of an age!” replied Porthos.
“A heavenly age, you mean to say, Monsieur Porthos. I’m afraid the poor man may leave me a widow at any moment,” she continued, with a significant glance at the musketeer. “Happily, thanks to our marriage contract, everything goes to the last survivor.” “Everything?” said Porthos.
“Everything.”
“I see you’re a prudent woman, my dear Madame Coquenard,” said Porthos, squeezing her hand tenderly.
“So, then—we’re reconciled, Monsieur Porthos?” She simpered.
“For life!” Porthos effused.
“Au revoir, then, my traitor!”
“Au revoir, my negligent love!”
“Tomorrow, my angel!”
“Tomorrow, flame of my life!”
XXX
Milady
D’Artagnan had followed Milady unseen; he watched her step into her carriage and heard her order the coachman to take her to Saint-Germain.82
It’s pointless to try to run after a carriage drawn at a trot by two vigorous horses, so d’Artagnan turned his feet toward the Rue Férou.
In the Rue de Seine he encountered Planchet, standing outside a bakery ecstatically worshipping a supremely appetizing brioche. D’Artagnan ordered him to go to Monsieur de Tréville’s stables and saddle up two horses, one for d’Artagnan and the other for himself, and then join him at Athos’s house. (Monsieur de Tréville had been kind enough to place his stables at d’Artagnan’s service.)