“Your affair has become more complicated since yesterday evening, my good man,” said the commissioner, “and I advise you to tell the whole truth, for only a full confession can stave off the cardinal’s anger.”
“But I’m ready to tell everything!” cried Bonacieux. “At least, everything I know. Interrogate me, I beg you.”
“Where is your wife, first of all?”
“I told you—she’s been abducted from me.”
“Yes, but since five o’clock yesterday afternoon, she’s escaped— thanks to you.”
“My wife has escaped!” cried Bonacieux. “Oh! The wretch! Monsieur, if she has escaped, it’s not my fault, I swear to you.”
“Why then did you go to the rooms of your neighbor, Monsieur d’Artagnan, with whom you had a long conference?”
“Ah! Yes, Monsieur le Commissaire, yes, that’s true, and I confess my mistake. I have been to Monsieur d’Artagnan’s.”
“What was the object of this visit?”
“To beg his aid in recovering my wife. I thought I had a right to reclaim her, but apparently I was mistaken, and I ask your pardon.”
“And what did Monsieur d’Artagnan say to this?”
“Monsieur d’Artagnan promised me his aid, but at the first chance, he betrayed me.”
“Do you think you can laugh in the face of justice? I tell you, Monsieur d’Artagnan made a deal with you. By virtue of this deal he chased off the policemen who had come to arrest your wife, and now he’s hidden her where no one can find her.”
“Monsieur d’Artagnan has abducted my wife? Wait, what are you telling me?”
“Happily, Monsieur d’Artagnan is in our hands, and you shall confront him.”
“Ah! My faith, I ask nothing more,” cried Bonacieux. “I won’t be sorry to see anybody I know.”
“Bring in Monsieur d’Artagnan,” said the commissioner to the guards.
The two guards brought in Athos.
“Monsieur d’Artagnan,” said the commissioner, addressing Athos, “declare everything that passed between you and monsieur, here.”
“But this isn’t Monsieur d’Artagnan!” cried Bonacieux.
“What?” said the commissioner. “This isn’t Monsieur d’Artagnan?”
“Not the least in the world,” replied Bonacieux.
“What’s his name, then?” demanded the commissioner.
“I can’t tell you, because I don’t know him.”
“What? You don’t know him?”
“No.”
“Have you ever seen him before?”
“I have; but I don’t know what he’s called.”
“Your name?” demanded the commissioner.
“Athos,” replied the musketeer.
“But that’s not the name of a man, that’s the name of a mountain!” cried the poor interrogator, who was beginning to lose his head.
“That’s my name,” said Athos tranquilly.
“But you said your name was d’Artagnan.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“To be precise, when they met me, my guards said, ‘You are Monsieur d’Artagnan?’ I replied, ‘You think so?’ They said they were sure I was. I didn’t want to contradict officers in the pursuit of their duty. Besides, I could be wrong myself.”
“Monsieur, you insult the majesty of justice!”
“By no means,” said Athos calmly.
“You are Monsieur d’Artagnan.”
“There, you see? You keep telling me that.”
“But I tell you, Monsieur le Commissaire, there isn’t the slightest doubt here,” cried Bonacieux in his turn. “Monsieur d’Artagnan is my tenant, and I ought to know him when I see him, all the more so as he doesn’t pay me my rent. Monsieur d’Artagnan is a young man, barely nineteen or twenty, and monsieur here is at least thirty. Monsieur d’Artagnan is in Monsieur des Essarts’s guards, and monsieur here is in the company of Monsieur de Tréville’s musketeers. Just look at his uniform, Monsieur le Commissaire, look at his uniform!”
“That’s true,” murmured the commissioner, “by God, that’s true.”
At this moment the door was opened from outside and one of the Bastille gatekeepers admitted a messenger, who hurriedly gave a letter to the commissioner.
“Oh! Wretched woman!” cried the commissioner, reading it.
“What’s that? Of whom do you speak? Not my wife, I hope!” said Bonacieux.
“On the contrary, it is about her. Your little affair is becoming very pretty.”
“That can’t be!” cried the harried mercer. “Oblige me by telling me, Monsieur, how my affairs can get worse by what my wife does while I’m in prison!”
“Because she acts following a plan arranged between you—an infernal plan!”
“I swear to you, Monsieur le Commissaire, that you are in the most profound error, and that I know nothing in the world about what my wife is doing. I’m entirely ignorant of what she’s done, and if she’s committed any follies, I disown her, I deny her, I curse her!”
“Bah!” said Athos to the commissioner. “If you have no more need of me here, send me elsewhere. Your Monsieur Bonacieux is very tiresome.”
“Take the prisoners back to the dungeons,” said the commissioner, indicating with the same gesture Athos and Bonacieux, “and see to it they are guarded more closely than ever!”
“I must say,” Athos said, with his habitual calm, “if you have business with Monsieur d’Artagnan, I don’t very well see how I can take his place.”
“Do as I said!” cried the commissioner. “And maintain absolute secrecy! Do you hear?”
Athos shrugged his shoulders and followed his guards, while Monsieur Bonacieux uttered lamentations so pitiful they would have softened the heart of a tiger.
They led the mercer back to the same dungeon where he’d passed the night and left him to himself for the rest of the day. All day Bonacieux wept like the tradesman he was, not being at all a man of the sword, as he himself admitted.
In the evening, around nine o’clock, just when he’d decided to put himself to bed, he heard footsteps in the corridor. The footsteps approached his dungeon, his door opened, and the guards appeared.
“Follow me,” said an exempt, a military policeman who came behind the guards.
“Follow you!” cried Bonacieux. “Follow you, at this hour! My God, to where?”
“To where we have an order to conduct you.”
“But that’s no answer!”
“It is, however, the only one I can give you.”
“Dear God, dear God,” murmured the poor mercer, “this time I’m lost!” And he followed his guards mechanically and without resistance.
They took the same corridor they’d taken before, crossed a courtyard, and then passed through another wing of the fortress. Finally, at the gate of the forecourt, Bonacieux was brought to a carriage surrounded by four mounted guards. They marched him into this carriage, the exempt got in beside him, they locked the door, and the two found themselves in a rolling prison.
The carriage moved slowly, like a funeral hearse. Through the padlocked grille at the rear, the prisoner could see only houses and pavement. However, true Parisian as he was, Bonacieux recognized each street by familiar milestones, by signs, and by streetlights. When they arrived at Saint-Paul, where the Bastille’s condemned were executed, he nearly fainted, and crossed himself twice. He thought the carriage was going to stop there . . . but the carriage passed on.
Farther on, a still greater terror took him as they skirted the Saint-Jean Cemetery, where state criminals were interred. The only thing that reassured him was that before these criminals were buried they generally cut off their heads, and his head so far was still on his shoulders. But when he saw the carriage take the route to the Place de Grève, when he saw the gabled roofs of the Hôtel de Ville, and the carriage began to pass beneath the hôtel arcade, he thought that everything was over for him. He tried to confess to the exempt, who refused to
listen to him. At this, he made such pitiable cries that the exempt swore they were deafening him. He threatened Bonacieux that if he continued, he would have him gagged.
This threat reassured Bonacieux somewhat: if they meant to execute him at the Place de Grève they wouldn’t take the trouble to gag him, this close to the place of execution. In fact, the carriage crossed the fatal square without stopping. There was nothing further to fear but the Croix-du-Trahoir: the carriage was taking the road that led right to it.
This time, there could be no doubt—for it was at the gallows of the Croix-du-Trahoir that they executed minor criminals. Bonacieux had been flattering himself to think he was worthy of attention at Saint-Paul or the Place de Grève; clearly, it was at the Croix-du-Trahoir that he would finish his journey and find his fate! He couldn’t yet see this woeful cross, but he felt somehow that it was coming to him.
When they were within twenty paces of it, he heard the sound of a crowd, and the carriage halted. After everything he’d gone through, this was more than poor Bonacieux could bear; he uttered a feeble groan, like the last gasp of the dying, and fainted.
XIV
The Man of Meung
The crowd at the Croix-du-Trahoir hadn’t gathered expecting a hanging, but to gawk at a man already hanged. Monsieur Bonacieux’s carriage-prison stopped for an instant, then resumed its progress, forcing a passage through the throng. It continued threading its way along the broad, teeming Rue Saint-Honoré, turned onto the narrower Rue des Bons-Enfants, and stopped before a low gate.
The gate opened, and the exempt handed the stunned Bonacieux out of the carriage and into the arms of two guards. The guards frogmarched him through an alley, up a flight of stairs, and finally deposited him in an antechamber.
Bonacieux responded to all this motion in a purely mechanical fashion, marching like one in a dream. He glimpsed his surroundings as if through a fog, heard sounds without comprehending them. At that moment he could have been executed without raising a hand to defend himself, or saying a word to beg for mercy.
He slumped in the antechamber on a bench, leaning back against a wall, arms hanging down beside him, staying in the same place and position where his guards had deposited him. He gradually became aware that nothing threatened him, nothing indicated any immediate danger—and as the bench was comfortably upholstered, the wall he leaned against was covered in handsome Cordovan leather, and red damask curtains with golden tiebacks fluttered before the window, he slowly came to the conclusion that his fright was exaggerated.
Tentatively, he moved his head right and left, then up and down. No one opposed this action. Encouraged, he ventured to draw up one leg, then the other, and finally, aided by his hands, raised himself from the bench and found his feet.
At this moment, a door opened and an impressive-looking officer appeared in the doorway. He finished exchanging a few words with somebody in the next room and then approached the prisoner. “Are you named Bonacieux?”
“Yes, Monsieur l’Officier, at your service,” stammered the mercer, more dead than alive.
“Enter,” said the officer, stepping aside so the mercer could pass. The latter obeyed without a word, entering the chamber where it seemed he was awaited.
It was a large study, the walls adorned with arms offensive and defensive. The atmosphere was close and stifling, and there was a fire in the hearth, though it was not yet the end of September. A square table occupied the center of the room, covered with books and papers upon which was unrolled an immense map of the city of La Rochelle.
Standing before the chimney was a man of medium height, of a haughty and proud demeanor, with piercing eyes, a high forehead, and a slender face elongated further by the pointed goatee called a “royale,” surmounted by a thin, sharp moustache. Although this man was barely thirty-six or thirty-seven years of age, his hair, mustache, and royale were graying. He lacked a sword, but had the aura of a man of war, and his buff boots were still lightly covered with the dust that showed he’d ridden a horse that day.
This man was Armand-Jean Duplessis, Cardinal de Richelieu—not as he is often represented, a broken old man, suffering like a martyr: body crippled, voice fading, buried in a large armchair like one anticipating the tomb, living only by the force of his genius, while the strings with which he made the states of Europe dance like puppets gradually fall from his fingers. This was Richelieu as he really was at that time, a dynamic and gallant cavalier, his physical strength already beginning to fail, but sustained by that moral force that made him one of the most extraordinary men of history. This was Richelieu, after having taken Nîmes, Castres, and Uzès, making his plans to drive the English from the coast of France and lay siege to La Rochelle, then support the Duc de Nevers in his claim to the Duchy of Mantua.53
At first glance, nothing about him denoted the cardinal, and it was impossible for one who didn’t know his face to recognize who he was. The poor mercer remained standing in the doorway, while the eyes of the man before the chimney fixed upon him, eyes that seemed able to peer into the depths of the past. “Is this that Bonacieux?” he asked, after a moment of silence.
“Yes, Monseigneur,” replied the officer.
“Very well, give me those papers and leave us.”
The officer picked up the designated papers from the table, handed them to the cardinal, bowed to the ground, and left.
Bonacieux recognized the papers as a transcription of his interrogation in the Bastille. From time to time, the man by the chimney raised his eyes from the vellum and plunged them like daggers into the poor mercer’s heart.
At the end of ten minutes’ reading of the papers, and ten seconds’ scrutiny of Bonacieux, the cardinal’s mind was made up. “That head has never conspired,” he murmured, “but no matter, let us test him.”
“You are accused of high treason,” said the cardinal slowly.
“That’s what they told me, Monseigneur,” cried Bonacieux, giving his interrogator the honorific he’d heard the officer use, “but I swear I know nothing about it.”
The cardinal repressed a smile. “You have conspired with your wife, with Madame de Chevreuse, and with Milord the Duke of Buckhingham,” he said sternly.
“In fact, Monseigneur,” replied the mercer, “I have heard her mention those names.”
“On what occasion?”
“She said that Cardinal Richelieu had drawn the Duke of Buckingham to Paris to destroy him, and the queen with him.”
“She said that?” the cardinal barked.
“Y-yes, Monseigneur! But I told her that she was wrong to bother about such matters, and that His Eminence was incapable . . .”
“Be silent. You are an imbecile,” said the cardinal.
“That’s just what my wife said, Monseigneur.”
“Do you know who abducted your wife?”
“No, Monseigneur.”
“You have suspicions, however?”
“Yes, Monseigneur; but these suspicions appeared to disturb Monsieur le Commissaire, so I no longer have them.”
“Your wife has escaped, did you know that?”
“No, Monseigneur! I heard about it only since I’ve been in prison, through Monsieur le Commissaire, a nice, amiable man!”
The cardinal repressed a second smile.
“Then you are ignorant of what has become of your wife since her escape?”
“Absolutely, Monseigneur; but I’m sure she’ll return to the Louvre.”
“As of one o’clock this morning, she had not yet returned.”
“Good God! What has become of her, then?”
“We shall know, rest assured. Nothing can be hidden from the cardinal; the cardinal knows all.”
“In that case, Monseigneur, do you think the cardinal would consent to my asking him what has become of my wife?”
“Perhaps. But first of all, you must confess everything you know about the relations of your wife with Madame de Chevreuse.”
“But, Monseigneur, I know nothing a
bout Madame de Chevreuse. I’ve never even seen her!”
“When you went to fetch your wife from the Louvre, did you always return directly home?”
“Almost never. She had business with linen merchants, and I escorted her to their houses.”
“And how many of these linen merchants were there?”
“Two, Monseigneur.”
“Where did they dwell?”
“One, just around the corner in the Rue de Vaugirard, and the other, halfway down the Rue de La Harpe.”
“Did you enter these houses with her?”
“Never, Monseigneur. I always waited at the door.”
“And what pretext did she give you for entering alone?”
“She didn’t give me any. She told me to wait, so I waited.”
“You are a complaisant husband, my dear Monsieur Bonacieux,” said the cardinal.
“He calls me his dear monsieur!” the mercer said to himself. “Peste! Affairs go well!”
“Would you recognize those doors?”
“Yes.”
“You know the addresses?”
“Yes.”
“What are they?”
“Number 25 in the Rue de Vaugirard, and number 75 in the Rue de la Harpe.”
“That’s good,” said the cardinal. He picked up a small silver bell and rang it, and the officer reentered. “Go, and find me Rochefort,” the cardinal said in an undertone. “He’s to come immediately, if he’s returned.”
“The count is already here,” said the officer, “and requests to speak with Your Eminence right away.”
“With Your Eminence!” murmured Bonacieux, who knew this was the title ordinarily given to the cardinal. “To Your Eminence!”
“Let him come in, then, let him come in!” said Richelieu.
The officer hastened from the room, with the speed the servants of the cardinal usually displayed in obedience to his orders. “To Your Eminence!” murmured Bonacieux again.
Five seconds scarcely elapsed between the officer’s exit and the appearance in the doorway of a new face. Bonacieux took one look and cried, “That’s him!”