cried they, in their turn. And the crowd opened before them
as though before the prow of a vessel. At that moment
D’Artagnan and Menneville found themselves face to face.
“Passage, passage!” cried Menneville, seeing that he was
within an arm’s length of the door.
“No one passes here,” said D’Artagnan.
“Take that, then!” said Menneville, firing his pistol,
almost within arm’s length. But before the cock fell,
D’Artagnan had struck up Menneville’s arm with the hilt of
his sword and passed the blade through his body.
“I told you plainly to keep yourself quiet,” said D’Artagnan
to Menneville, who rolled at his feet.
“Passage! passage!” cried the companions of Menneville, at
first terrified, but soon recovering, when they found they
had only to do with two men. But those two men were
hundred-armed giants, the swords flew about in their hands
like the burning glaive of the archangel. They pierce with
its point, strike with the flat, cut with the edge, every
stroke brings down a man. “For the king!” cried D’Artagnan,
to every man he struck at, that is to say, to every man that
fell. This cry became the charging word for the musketeers,
who guided by it, joined D’Artagnan. During this time the
archers, recovering from the panic they had undergone,
charge the aggressors in the rear, and regular as mill
strokes, overturn or knock down all that oppose them. The
crowd, which sees swords gleaming, and drops of blood flying
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Dumas, Alexandre – Ten Years Later
in the air — the crowd falls back and crushes itself. At
length cries for mercy and of despair resound; that is, the
farewell of the vanquished. The two condemned are again in
the hands of the archers. D’Artagnan approaches them, seeing
them pale and sinking: “Console yourselves, poor men,” said
he, “you will not undergo the frightful torture with which
these wretches threatened you. The king has condemned you to
be hung: you shall only be hung. Go on, hang them, and it
will be over.”
There is no longer anything going on at the
Image-de-Notre-Dame. The fire has been extinguished with two
tuns of wine in default of water. The conspirators have fled
by the garden. The archers were dragging the culprits to the
gibbets. From this moment the affair did not occupy much
time. The executioner, heedless about operating according to
the rules of art, made such haste that he dispatched the
condemned in a couple of minutes. In the meantime the people
gathered around D’Artagnan, — they felicitated, they
cheered him. He wiped his brow, streaming with sweat, and
his sword, streaming with blood. He shrugged his shoulders
at seeing Menneville writhing at his feet in the last
convulsions. And, while Raoul turned away his eyes in
compassion, he pointed to the musketeers the gibbets laden
with their melancholy fruit. “Poor devils!” said he, “I hope
they died blessing me, for I saved them with great
difficulty.” These words caught the ear of Menneville at the
moment when he himself was breathing his last sigh. A dark,
ironical smile flitted across his lips, he wished to reply,
but the effort hastened the snapping of the chord of life —
he expired.
“Oh! all this is very frightful!” murmured Raoul: “let us
begone, monsieur le chevalier.”
“You are not wounded?” asked D’Artagnan.
“Not at all, thank you.”
“That’s well! Thou art a brave fellow, mordioux! The head of
the father, and the arm of Porthos. Ah! if he had been here,
good Porthos, you would have seen something worth looking
at.” Then as if by way of remembrance —
“But where the devil can that brave Porthos be?” murmured
D’Artagnan.
“Come, chevalier, pray come away,” urged Raoul.
“One minute, my friend, let me take my thirty-seven and a
half pistoles and I am at your service. The house is a good
property,” added D’Artagnan, as he entered the
Image-de-Notre-Dame, “but decidedly, even if it were less
profitable, I should prefer its being in another quarter.”
CHAPTER 63
How M. d’Eymeris’s Diamond passed
into the Hands of M. D’Artagnan.
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Dumas, Alexandre – Ten Years Later
Whilst this violent, noisy, and bloody scene was passing on