ed them amid the
ruins. Aramis, animated, active, and young as at twenty, sprang toward
the triple mass, and with his hands, delicate as those of a woman,
raised by a miracle of vigor a corner of the immense sepulcher of
granite. Then he caught a glimpse, in the darkness of that grave, of the
still brilliant eye of his friend, to whom the momentary lifting of the
mass restored that moment of respiration. The two men came rushing up,
grasped their iron levers, united their triple strength, not merely to
raise it, but to sustain it. All was useless. The three men slowly gave
way with cries of grief, and the rough voice of Porthos, seeing them
exhaust themselves in a useless struggle, murmured in a jeering tone
those supreme words which came to his lips with the last respiration,
"Too heavy!"

After which the eye darkened and closed, the face became pale, the hand
whitened, and the Titan sank quite down, breathing his last sigh. With
him sank the rock, which, even in his agony, he had still held up. The
three men dropped the levers, which rolled upon the tumulary stone.
Then, breathless, pale, his brow covered with sweat, Aramis listened,
his breast oppressed, his heart ready to break.

Nothing more! The giant slept the eternal sleep, in the sepulcher which
God had made to his measure.

CHAPTER CXXV.

THE EPITAPH OF PORTHOS.

Aramis, silent, icy, trembling like a timid child, arose
shivering from the stone. A Christian does not walk upon tombs. But
though capable of standing, he was not capable of walking. It might be
said that something of dead Porthos had just died within him. His
Bretons surrounded him: Aramis yielded to their kind exertions, and the
three sailors, lifting him up, carried him into the canoe. Then, having
laid him down upon the bench near the rudder, they took to their oars,
preferring to get off by rowing to hoisting a sail, which might betray
them.

Of all that leveled surface of the ancient grotto of Locmaria, of all
that flattened shore, one single little hillock attracted their eyes.
Aramis never removed his from it; and, at a distance out in the sea, in
proportion as the shore receded, the menacing and proud mass of rock
seemed to draw itself up, as formerly Porthos used to draw himself up,
and raise a smiling and invincible head toward heaven, like that of the
honest and valiant friend, the strongest of the four, and yet the first
dead. Strange destiny of these men of brass! The mo