“No; still there, but I only speak of him in order that I
may introduce the name of another man. Do you know Monsieur
d’Artagnan?” he added, looking steadfastly at the queen.
Anne of Austria received the blow with a beating heart.
“Has the Gascon been indiscreet?” she murmured to herself,
then said aloud:
“D’Artagnan! stop an instant, the name seems certainly
familiar. D’Artagnan! there was a musketeer who was in love
with one of my women. Poor young creature! she was poisoned
on my account.”
“That’s all you know of him?” asked Mazarin.
The queen looked at him, surprised.
“You seem, sir,” she remarked, “to be making me undergo a
course of cross-examination.”
“Which you answer according to your fancy,” replied Mazarin.
“Tell me your wishes and I will comply with them.”
The queen spoke with some impatience.
“Well, madame,” said Mazarin, bowing, “I desire that you
give me a share in your friends, as I have shared with you
the little industry and talent that Heaven has given me. The
circumstances are grave and it will be necessary to act
promptly.”
“Still!” said the queen. “I thought that we were finally
quit of Monsieur de Beaufort.”
“Yes, you saw only the torrent that threatened to overturn
everything and you gave no attention to the still water.
There is, however, a proverb current in France relating to
water which is quiet.”
“Continue,” said the queen.
“Well, then, madame, not a day passes in which I do not
suffer affronts from your princes and your lordly servants,
all of them automata who do not perceive that I wind up the
spring that makes them move, nor do they see that beneath my
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Dumas, Alexandre – Twenty Years After
quiet demeanor lies the still scorn of an injured, irritated
man, who has sworn to himself to master them one of these
days. We have arrested Monsieur de Beaufort, but he is the
least dangerous among them. There is the Prince de Conde
—- ”
“The hero of Rocroy. Do you think of him?”
“Yes, madame, often and often, but pazienza, as we say in
Italy; next, after Monsieur de Conde, comes the Duke of
Orleans.”
“What are you saying? The first prince of the blood, the
king’s uncle!”
“No! not the first prince of the blood, not the king’s
uncle, but the base conspirator, the soul of every cabal,
who pretends to lead the brave people who are weak enough to
believe in the honor of a prince of the blood — not the
prince nearest to the throne, not the king’s uncle, I
repeat, but the murderer of Chalais, of Montmorency and of
Cinq-Mars, who is playing now the same game he played long
ago and who thinks that he will win the game because he has
a new adversary — instead of a man who threatened, a man
who smiles. But he is mistaken; I shall not leave so near
the queen that source of discord with which the deceased
cardinal so often caused the anger of the king to rage above
the boiling point.”
Anne blushed and buried her face in her hands.
“What am I to do?” she said, bowed down beneath the voice of
her tyrant.
“Endeavor to remember the names of those faithful servants
who crossed the Channel, in spite of Monsieur de Richelieu,
tracking the roads along which they passed by their blood,
to bring back to your majesty certain jewels given by you to
Buckingham.”
Anne arose, full of majesty, and as if touched by a spring,
and looking at the cardinal with the haughty dignity which
in the days of her youth had made her so powerful: “You are
insulting me!” she said.
“I wish,” continued Mazarin, finishing, as it were, the
speech this sudden movement of the queen had cut; “I wish,
in fact, that you should now do for your husband what you
formerly did for your lover.”
“Again that accusation!” cried the queen. “I thought that
calumny was stifled or extinct; you have spared me till now,
but since you speak of it, once for all, I tell you —- ”
“Madame, I do not ask you to tell me,” said Mazarin,