Chapter 40 - Page 2

the squirrel.” D’Artagnan picked up one of these morsels of paper as he descended. “Gourville’s pretty little hand,” cried he, while examining one of the fragments of the note; “I was not mistaken.” And he read the word “horse.” “Stop!” said he; and he examined another upon which there was not a letter traced. Upon a third he read the word “white,”- “white horse,” repeated he, like a child that is spelling. “Ah, mordioux!” cried the suspicious spirit, “a white horse!” And like that grain of powder which burning dilates into a centupled volume, d’Artagnan, enlarged by ideas and suspicions, rapidly reascended the stairs towards the terrace. The white horse was still galloping in the direction of the Loire, at the extremity of which, merging with the vapors of the water, a little sail appeared, balancing like an atom. “Oh, oh!” cried the musketeer, “no one but a man escaping danger would go at that pace across ploughed lands; there is only Fouquet, a financier, to ride thus in open day upon a white horse; there is no one but the lord of Belle-Isle who would make his escape towards the sea, while there are such thick forests on the land; and there is but one d’Artagnan in the world to catch M. Fouquet, who has half an hour’s start, and who will have gained his boat within an hour.”

This being said, the musketeer gave orders that the carriage with the iron trellis should be taken immediately to a thicket situated just outside the city. He selected his best horse, jumped upon his back, galloped along the Rue aux Herbes, taking, not the road Fouquet had taken, but the very bank of the Loire, certain that he should gain ten minutes upon the total of the distance, and at the intersection of the two lines come up with the fugitive, who could have no suspicion of being pursued in that direction. In the rapidity of the pursuit, and with the impatience of a persecutor animating himself in the chase as in war, d’Artagnan, so mild, so kind towards Fouquet, was surprised to find himself become ferocious and almost sanguinary. For a long time he galloped without catching sight of the white horse. His fury assumed the tints of rage; he doubted himself; he suspected that Fouquet had buried himself in some subterranean road, or that he had changed the white horse for one of those famous black ones, as swift as the wind, which d’Artagnan at St. Mandé had so frequently admired, envying their vigorous lightness.

At these moments, when the wind cut his eyes so as to make the water spring from them; when the saddle had become burning hot; when the galled and spurred horse reared with pain and threw behind him a shower of dust and stones,- d’Artagnan, raising himself in his stirrups, and seeing nothing on the waters, nothing beneath the trees,