Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas (desktop ebook reader txt) 📗
- Author: Alexandre Dumas
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“And have you never revisited that village?” eagerly asked Madame de Chevreuse.
“A year after, madame.”
“Well?”
“I wanted to see the good cure again. I found him much preoccupied with an event that he could not at all comprehend. A week before he had received, in a cradle, a beautiful little boy three months old, with a purse filled with gold and a note containing these simple words: ‘11 October, 1633.’”
“It was the date of that strange adventure,” interrupted Madame de Chevreuse.
“Yes, but he couldn’t understand what it meant, for he had spent that night with a dying person and Marie Michon had left his house before his return.”
“You must know, monsieur, that Marie Michon, when she returned to France in 1643, immediately sought for information about that child; as a fugitive she could not take care of it, but on her return she wished to have it near her.”
“And what said the abbe?” asked Athos.
“That a nobleman whom he did not know had wished to take charge of it, had answered for its future, and had taken it away.”
“That was true.”
“Ah! I see! That nobleman was you; it was his father!”
“Hush! do not speak so loud, madame; he is there.”
“He is there! my son! the son of Marie Michon! But I must see him instantly.”
“Take care, madame,” said Athos, “for he knows neither his father nor his mother.”
“You have kept the secret! you have brought him to see me, thinking to make me happy. Oh, thanks! sir, thanks!” cried Madame de Chevreuse, seizing his hand and trying to put it to her lips; “you have a noble heart.”
“I bring him to you, madame,” said Athos, withdrawing his hand, “hoping that in your turn you will do something for him; till now I have watched over his education and I have made him, I hope, an accomplished gentleman; but I am now obliged to return to the dangerous and wandering life of party faction. To-morrow I plunge into an adventurous affair in which I may be killed. Then it will devolve on you to push him on in that world where he is called on to occupy a place.”
“Rest assured,” cried the duchess, “I shall do what I can. I have but little influence now, but all that I have shall most assuredly be his. As to his title and fortune----”
“As to that, madame, I have made over to him the estate of Bragelonne, my inheritance, which will give him ten thousand francs a year and the title of vicomte.”
“Upon my soul, monsieur,” said the duchess, “you are a true nobleman! But I am eager to see our young vicomte. Where is he?”
“There, in the salon. I will have him come in, if you really wish it.”
Athos moved toward the door; the duchess held him back.
“Is he handsome?” she asked.
Athos smiled.
“He resembles his mother.”
So he opened the door and beckoned the young man in.
The duchess could not restrain a cry of joy on seeing so handsome a young cavalier, so far surpassing all that her maternal pride had been able to conceive.
“Vicomte, come here,” said Athos; “the duchess permits you to kiss her hand.”
The youth approached with his charming smile and his head bare, and kneeling down, kissed the hand of the Duchess de Chevreuse.
“Sir,” he said, turning to Athos, “was it not in compassion to my timidity that you told me that this lady was the Duchess de Chevreuse, and is she not the queen?”
“No, vicomte,” said Madame de Chevreuse, taking his hand and making him sit near her, while she looked at him with eyes sparkling with pleasure; “no, unhappily, I am not the queen. If I were I should do for you at once the most that you deserve. But let us see; whatever I may be,” she added, hardly restraining herself from kissing that pure brow, “let us see what profession you wish to follow.”
Athos, standing, looked at them both with indescribable pleasure.
“Madame,” answered the youth in his sweet voice, “it seems to me that there is only one career for a gentleman--that of the army. I have been brought up by monsieur le comte with the intention, I believe, of making me a soldier; and he gave me reason to hope that at Paris he would present me to some one who would recommend me to the favor of the prince.”
“Yes, I understand it well. Personally, I am on bad terms with him, on account of the quarrels between Madame de Montbazon, my mother-in-law, and Madame de Longueville. But the Prince de Marsillac! Yes, indeed, that’s the right thing. The Prince de Marsillac--my old friend--will recommend our young friend to Madame de Longueville, who will give him a letter to her brother, the prince, who loves her too tenderly not to do what she wishes immediately.”
“Well, that will do charmingly,” said the count; “but may I beg that the greatest haste may be made, for I have reasons for wishing the vicomte not to sleep longer than to-morrow night in Paris!”
“Do you wish it known that you are interested about him, monsieur le comte?”
“Better for him in future that he should be supposed never to have seen me.”
“Oh, sir!” cried Raoul.
“You know, Bragelonne,” said Athos, “I never speak without reflection.”
“Well, comte, I am going instantly,” interrupted the duchess, “to send for the Prince de Marsillac, who is happily, in Paris just now. What are you going to do this evening?”
“We intend to visit the Abbe Scarron, for whom I have a letter of introduction and at whose house I expect to meet some of my friends.”
“‘Tis well; I will go there also, for a few minutes,” said the duchess; “do not quit his salon until you have seen me.”
Athos bowed and prepared to leave.
“Well, monsieur le comte,” said the duchess, smiling, “does one leave so solemnly his old friends?”
“Ah,” murmured Athos, kissing her hand, “had I only sooner known that Marie Michon was so charming a creature!” And he withdrew, sighing.
There was once in the Rue des Tournelles a house known by all the sedan chairmen and footmen of Paris, and yet, nevertheless, this house was neither that of a great lord nor of a rich man. There was neither dining, nor playing at cards, nor dancing in that house. Nevertheless, it was the rendezvous of the great world and all Paris went there. It was the abode of the little Abbe Scarron.
In the home of the witty abbe dwelt incessant laughter; there all the items of the day had their source and were so quickly transformed, misrepresented, metamorphosed, some into epigrams, some into falsehoods, that every one was anxious to pass an hour with little Scarron, listening to what he said, reporting it to others.
The diminutive Abbe Scarron, who, however, was an abbe only because he owned an abbey, and not because he was in orders, had formerly been one of the gayest prebendaries in the town of Mans, which he inhabited. On a day of the carnival he had taken a notion to provide an unusual entertainment for that good town, of which he was the life and soul. He had made his valet cover him with honey; then, opening a feather bed, he had rolled in it and had thus become the most grotesque fowl it is possible to imagine. He then began to visit his friends of both sexes, in that strange costume. At first he had been followed through astonishment, then with derisive shouts, then the porters had insulted him, then children had thrown stones at him, and finally he was obliged to run, to escape the missiles. As soon as he took to flight every one pursued him, until, pressed on all sides, Scarron found no way of escaping his escort, except by throwing himself into the river; but the water was icy cold. Scarron was heated, the cold seized on him, and when he reached the farther bank he found himself crippled.
Every means had been employed in vain to restore the use of his limbs. He had been subjected to a severe disciplinary course of medicine, at length he sent away all his doctors, declaring that he preferred the disease to the treatment, and came to Paris, where the fame of his wit had preceded him. There he had a chair made on his own plan, and one day, visiting Anne of Austria in this chair, she asked him, charmed as she was with his wit, if he did not wish for a title.
“Yes, your majesty, there is a title which I covet much,” replied Scarron.
“And what is that?”
“That of being your invalid,” answered Scarron.
So he was called the queen’s invalid, with a pension of fifteen hundred francs.
From that lucky moment Scarron led a happy life, spending both income and principal. One day, however, an emissary of the cardinal’s gave him to understand that he was wrong in receiving the coadjutor so often.
“And why?” asked Scarron; “is he not a man of good birth?”
“Certainly.”
“Agreeable?”
“Undeniably.”
“Witty?”
“He has, unfortunately, too much wit.”
“Well, then, why do you wish me to give up seeing such a man?”
“Because he is an enemy.”
“Of whom?”
“Of the cardinal.”
“What?” answered Scarron, “I continue to receive Monsieur Gilles Despreaux, who thinks ill of me, and you wish me to give up seeing the coadjutor, because he thinks ill of another man. Impossible!”
The conversation had rested there and Scarron, through sheer obstinacy, had seen Monsieur de Gondy only the more frequently.
Now, the very morning of which we speak was that of his quarter-day payment, and Scarron, as usual, had sent his servant to get his money at the pension-office, but the man had returned and said that the government had no more money to give Monsieur Scarron.
It was on Thursday, the abbe’s reception day; people went there in crowds. The cardinal’s refusal to pay the pension was known about the town in half an hour and he was abused with wit and vehemence.
In the Rue Saint Honore Athos fell in with two gentlemen whom he did not know, on horseback like himself, followed by a lackey like himself, and going in the same direction that he was. One of them, hat in hand, said to him:
“Would you believe it, monsieur? that contemptible Mazarin has stopped poor Scarron’s pension.”
“That is unreasonable,” said Athos, saluting in his turn the two cavaliers. And they separated with courteous gestures.
“It happens well that we are going there this evening,” said Athos to the vicomte; “we will pay our compliments to that poor man.”
“What, then, is this Monsieur Scarron, who thus puts all Paris in commotion? Is he some minister out of office?”
“Oh, no, not at all, vicomte,” Athos replied; “he is simply a gentleman of great genius who has fallen into disgrace with the cardinal through having written certain verses against him.”
“Do gentlemen, then, make verses?” asked Raoul, naively, “I thought it was derogatory.”
“So it is, my dear vicomte,” said Athos, laughing, “to make bad ones; but to make good ones increases fame--witness Monsieur de Rotrou. Nevertheless,” he continued, in the tone of one who gives wholesome advice, “I think it is better not to make them.”
“Then,” said Raoul, “this Monsieur Scarron is a poet?”
“Yes; you are warned, vicomte. Consider well what you do in that house. Talk only by gestures, or rather always listen.”
“Yes, monsieur,” replied Raoul.
“You will see
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