Man in the Iron Mask by Dumas, Alexandre part two

The manner in which the musketeer had been near killing his two best friends, the destiny which had so strangely brought Athos to participate in the great state secret, the farewell of Raoul, the obscurity of that future which threatened to end in a melancholy death,- all this threw d’Artagnan incessantly back to lamentable predictions and forebodings which the rapidity of his pace did not dissipate, as it used formerly to do. D’Artagnan passed from these considerations to the remembrance of the proscribed Porthos and Aramis. He saw them both, fugitives, tracked, ruined,- laborious architects of a fortune they must lose; and as the King called for his man of execution in the hours of vengeance and malice, d’Artagnan trembled at the idea of receiving some commission that would make his very heart bleed.

Sometimes when ascending hills, when the winded horse breathed hard from his nostrils, and heaved his flanks, the captain, left to more freedom of thought, reflected upon the prodigious genius of Aramis,- a genius of craft and intrigue, of which the Fronde and the civil war had produced but two similar examples. Soldier, priest, and diplomatist, gallant, avaricious, and cunning, Aramis had taken the good things of this life only as steppingstones to rise to bad ones. Generous in spirit, if not high in heart, he never did ill but for the sake of shining a little more brilliantly. Towards the end of his career, at the moment of reaching the goal, like the patrician Fiesco, he had made a false step upon a plank, and had fallen into the sea.

But Porthos, the good, simple Porthos! To see Porthos hungry; to see Mousqueton without gold lace, imprisoned, perhaps; to see Pierrefonds, Bracieux, razed to the very stones, dishonored even to the timber,- these were so many poignant griefs for d’Artagnan, and every time that one of these griefs struck him he bounded like a horse at the sting of the gadfly beneath the vaults of foliage where he has sought shade and shelter from the burning sun.

Never was the man of spirit subjected to ennui if his body was exposed to fatigue; never did the man healthy of body fail to find life light if he had something to engage his mind. D’Artagnan, riding fast, always thinking, alighted from his horse in Paris, fresh and tender in his muscles as the athlete preparing for the gymnasium. The King did not expect him so soon, and had just departed for the chase towards Meudon. D’Artagnan, instead of riding after the King, as he would formerly have done, took off his boots, had a bath, and waited till his Majesty should return dusty and tired. He occupied the interval of five hours in taking, as people say, the air of the house, and in arming himself against all ill-chances. He learned that the King during the last fortnight had been gloomy; that the Queen-Mother was ill and much depressed; that Monsieur the King’s brother was exhibiting a devotional turn; that Madame had the vapors; and that M. de Guiche had gone to one of his estates. He learned that M. Colbert was radiant; that M. Fouquet consulted a fresh physician every day who still did not cure him, and that his principal complaint was one which physicians do not usually cure unless they are political physicians. The King, d’Artagnan was told, behaved in the kindest manner to M. Fouquet, and did not allow him to be ever out of his sight; but the superintendent, touched to the heart, like one of those fine trees which a worm has punctured, was declining daily, in spite of the royal smile- that sun of court trees.

D’Artagnan learned that Mademoiselle de la Valliere had become indispensable to the King; that the King, during his sporting excursions, if he did not take her with him, wrote to her frequently, no longer verses, but, what was still much worse, prose,- and that whole pages at a time. Thus, as the poetical Pleiad of the day said, the first King in the world was seen descending from his horse with an ardor beyond compare, and on the crown of his hat scrawling bombastic phrases, which M. de Saint-Aignan, aide-de-camp in perpetuity, carried to La Valliere at the risk of foundering his horses. During this time deer and pheasants were left to the free enjoyments of their nature,- hunted so lazily that, it was said, the art of venery ran great risk of degenerating at the court of France.

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