“No, but-”
“But- I shall be sent to keep company with poor M. Fouquet. Mordioux! That is a gallant man, a worthy man! We shall live very sociably together, I assure you.”
“Here we are at our place of destination,” said the duke. “Captain, for Heaven’s sake be calm with the King!”
“Ah, ah! you are playing the brave man with me, Duke!” said d’Artagnan, throwing one of his defiant glances over De Gesvres. “I have been told that you are ambitious of uniting your Guards with my Musketeers. This strikes me as a capital opportunity.”
“God forbid that I should avail myself of it, Captain.”
“And why not?”
“Oh, for many reasons,- in the first place, for this: if I were to succeed you in the Musketeers after having arrested you-”
“Ah! then you admit you have arrested me?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Say met me, then. So, you were saying, if you were to succeed me after having arrested me-”
“Your Musketeers, at the first exercise with ball cartridges, would all fire towards me, by mistake.”
“Ah! as to that I won’t say,- for the fellows do love me a little.”
De Gesvres made d’Artagnan pass in first, and took him straight to the cabinet where the King was waiting for his captain of the Musketeers, and placed himself behind his colleague in the antechamber. The King could be heard distinctly, speaking aloud to Colbert, in the same cabinet where Colbert might have heard, a few days before, the King speaking aloud with M. d’Artagnan. The guards remained as a mounted picket before the principal gate; and the report was quickly spread through the city that Monsieur the Captain of the Musketeers had just been arrested by order of the King. Then these men were seen to be in motion, as in the good old times of Louis XIII and M. de Treville; groups were formed, the staircases were filled; vague murmurs, issuing from the courts below, came rolling up to the upper stories, like the hoarse moanings of the tide-waves. M. de Gesvres became very uneasy. He looked at his guards, who after being interrogated by the musketeers who had just got among their ranks, began to shun them with a manifestation of uneasiness. D’Artagnan was certainly less disturbed than M. de Gesvres, the captain of the Guards. As soon as he entered, he had seated himself on the ledge of a window, whence, with his eagle glance, he saw without the least emotion all that was going on. None of the progress of the fermentation which had manifested itself at the report of his arrest had escaped him. He foresaw the moment when the explosion would take place, and we know that his previsions were pretty correct.
“It would be very odd,” thought he, “if this evening my praetorians should make me King of France. How I should laugh!” But at the height all was stopped. Guards, musketeers, officers, soldiers, murmurs, and disturbance, all dispersed, vanished, died away; no more tempest, no more menace, no more sedition. One word had calmed the waves. The King had just said by the mouth of De Brienne, “Hush, Messieurs! you disturb the King.”
D’Artagnan sighed. “All is over!” said he; “the Musketeers of the present day are not those of his Majesty Louis XIII. All is over!”
“M. d’Artagnan to the King’s apartment!” cried an usher.
Chapter LXXXI: King Louis XIV
THE King was seated in his cabinet, with his back turned towards the door of entrance. In front of him was a mirror in which while turning over his papers he could see with a glance those who came in. He did not take any notice of the entrance of d’Artagnan, but laid over his letters and plans the large silk cloth which he made use of to conceal his secrets from the importunate. D’Artagnan understood his play, and kept in the background; so that at the end of a minute, the King, who heard nothing and could see only with the corner of his eye, was obliged to cry, “Is not M. d’Artagnan there?”
“I am here, Sire,” replied the musketeer, advancing.
“Well, Monsieur,” said the King, fixing his clear eye upon d’Artagnan, “what have you to say to me?”