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The Three Musketeers
Twenty Years Later
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The Three Musketeers 46 at Prostate Health
he sought for. Then he came back to the point
where, perhaps, he ought to have begun, and that was to knock at
the door against which the stranger had leaned; but this proved
useless--for though he knocked ten or twelve times in succession,
no one answered, and some of the neighbors, who put their noses
out of their windows or were brought to their doors by the noise,
had assured him that that house, all the openings of which were
tightly closed, had not been inhabited for six months.
While dArtagnan was running through the streets and knocking at
doors, Aramis had joined his companions; so that on returning home
dArtagnan found the reunion complete.
"Well!" cried the three Musketeers all together, on seeing
dArtagnan enter with his brow covered with perspiration and his
countenance upset with anger.
"Well!" cried he, throwing his sword upon the bed, "this man must
be the devil in person; he has disappeared like a phantom,
like a shade, like a specter."
"Do you believe in apparitions?" asked Athos of Porthos.
"I never believe in anything I have not seen, and as I never have
seen apparitions, I dont believe in them."
"The Bible," said Aramis, "make our belief in them a law; the
ghost of Samuel appeared to Saul, and it is an article of faith
that I should be very sorry to see any doubt thrown upon,
Porthos."
"At all events, man or devil, body or shadow, illusion or
reality, this man is born for my damnation; for his flight has
caused us to miss a glorious affair, gentlemen--an affair by
which there were a hundred pistoles, and perhaps more, to be
gained."
"How is that?" cried Porthos and Aramis in a breath.
As to Athos, faithful to his system of reticence, he contented
himself with interrogating dArtagnan by a look.
"Planchet," said dArtagnan to his domestic, who just then
insinuated his head through the half-open door in order to catch
some fragments of the conversation, "go down to my landlord,
Monsieur Bonacieux, and ask him to send me half a dozen bottles
of Beaugency wine; I prefer that."
"Ah, ah! You have credit with your landlord, then?" asked
Porthos.
"Yes," replied dArtagnan, "from this very day; and mind, if the
wine is bad, we will send him to find better."
"We must use, and not abuse," said Aramis, sententiously.
"I always said that dArtagnan had the longest head of the four,"
said Athos, who, having uttered his opinion, to which dArtagnan
replied with a bow, immediately resumed his accustomed silence.
"But come, what is this about?" asked Porthos.
"Yes," said Aramis, "impart it to us, my dear friend, unless the
honor of any lady be hazarded by this confidence; in that case
you would do better to keep it to yourself."
"Be satisfied," replied dArtagnan; "the honor of no one will
have cause to complain of what I have to tell."
He then related to his friends, word for word, all that had
passed between him and his host, and how the man who had abducted
the wife of his worthy landlord was the same with whom he had had
the difference at the hostelry of the Jolly Miller.
"Your affair is not bad," said Athos, after having tasted like a
connoisseur and indicated by a nod of his head that he thought
the wine good; "and one may draw fifty or sixty pistoles from
this good man. Then there only remains to ascertain whether
these fifty or sixty pistoles are worth the risk of four heads."
"But observe," cried dArtagnan, "that there is a woman in the
affair--a woman carried off, a woman who is doubtless threatened,
tortured perhaps, and all because she is faithful to her
mistress."
"Beware, dArtagnan, beware," said Aramis. "You grow a little
too warm, in my opinion, about the fate of Madame Bonacieux.
Woman was created for our destruction, and it is from her we
inherit all our miseries."
At this speech of Aramis, the brow of Athos became clouded and he
bit his lips.
"It is not Madame Bonacieux about whom I am anxious," cried
dArtagnan, "but the queen, whom the king abandons, whom the
cardinal persecutes, and who sees the heads of all her friends
fall, one after the other."
"Why does she love what we hate most in the world, the Spaniards
and the English?"
"Spain is her country," replied dArtagnan; "and it is very
natural that she should love the Spanish, who are the children of
the same soil as herself. As to the second reproach, I have
heard it said that she does not
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