new that Louis XIV. must experience an imperious want of a
private conversation with one whom the possession of such a secret
placed on a level with the highest powers of the kingdom. But as to
saying exactly what the king's wish was, D'Artagnan found himself
completely at a loss. The musketeer had no other doubts, either, upon
the reason which had urged the unfortunate Philippe to reveal his
character and his birth. Philippe, hidden forever beneath a mask of
iron, exiled to a country where the men seemed little more than slaves
of the elements; Philippe, deprived even of the society of D'Artagnan,
who had loaded him with honors and delicate attentions, had nothing more
to see than specters and griefs in this world, and despair beginning to
devour him, he poured himself forth in complaints, in the belief that
his revelations would raise an avenger for him.

The manner in which the musketeer had been near killing his two best
friends, the destiny which had so strangely brought Athos to participate
in the great state secret, the farewell of Raoul, the obscurity of that
future which threatened to end in a melancholy death; all this threw
D'Artagnan incessantly back to the lamentable predictions and
forebodings, which the rapidity of his pace did not dissipate, as it
used formerly to do. D'Artagnan passed from these considerations to the
remembrance of the proscribed Porthos and Aramis. He saw them both,
fugitives, tracked, ruined--laborious architects of a fortune they must
lose; and, as the king called for his man of execution in the hours of
vengeance and malice, D'Artagnan trembled at the idea of receiving some
commission that would make his very heart bleed. Sometimes, when
ascending hills, when the winded horse breathed hard from his nostrils,
and heaved his flanks, the captain, left to more freedom of thought,
reflected upon the prodigious genius of Aramis, a genius of astucity and
intrigue, such as the Fronde and the civil war had produced but two.
Soldier, priest, and diplomatist; gallant, avaricious, and cunning;
Aramis had never taken the good things of this life but as
stepping-stones to rise to bad ones. Generous in spirit, if not high in
heart, he never did ill but for the sake of shining a little more
brilliantly. Toward the end of his career, at the moment of reaching
the goal like the patrician Fuscus, he had made a false step upon a
plank, and had fallen into the sea. But Porthos, the good harmless
Porthos