hat the
vainglorious Musketeer had told him, convinced that no friendship will
hold out against a surprised secret. Besides, we feel always a sort
of mental superiority over those whose lives we know better than they
suppose. In his projects of intrigue for the future, and determined
as he was to make his three friends the instruments of his fortune,
d'Artagnan was not sorry at getting into his grasp beforehand the
invisible strings by which he reckoned upon moving them.

And yet, as he journeyed along, a profound sadness weighed upon his
heart. He thought of that young and pretty Mme. Bonacieux who was to
have paid him the price of his devotedness; but let us hasten to say
that this sadness possessed the young man less from the regret of the
happiness he had missed, than from the fear he entertained that some
serious misfortune had befallen the poor woman. For himself, he had no
doubt she was a victim of the cardinal's vengeance; and, and as was
well known, the vengeance of his Eminence was terrible. How he had found
grace in the eyes of the minister, he did not know; but without doubt M.
de Cavois would have revealed this to him if the captain of the Guards
had found him at home.

Nothing makes time pass more quickly or more shortens a journey than a
thought which absorbs in itself all the faculties of the organization of
him who thinks. External existence then resembles a sleep of which this
thought is the dream. By its influence, time has no longer measure,
space has no longer distance. We depart from one place, and arrive at
another, that is all. Of the interval passed, nothing remains in the
memory but a vague mist in which a thousand confused images of
trees, mountains, and landscapes are lost. It was as a prey to this
hallucination that d'Artagnan traveled, at whatever pace his horse
pleased, the six or eight leagues that separated Chantilly from
Crevecoeur, without his being able to remember on his arrival in the
village any of the things he had passed or met with on the road.

There only his memory returned to him. He shook his head, perceived the
cabaret at which he had left Aramis, and putting his horse to the trot,
he shortly pulled up at the door.

This time it was not a host but a hostess who received him. d'Artagnan
was a physiognomist. His eye took in at a glance the plump, cheerful
countenance of the mistress of the place, and he at once perceived there
was no occasion for dissembling with her, or