Chapter 56 - Page 2

his domicil by choice. For several days the count did not speak a word; he refused to receive the visits that were paid him, and during the night he was seen to relight his lamp and pass long hours in writing letters or examining parchments.

Athos wrote one of these letters to Vannes, another to Fontainebleau; they remained without answers. We know why Aramis had quitted France, and d’Artagnan was travelling from Nantes to Paris, from Paris to Pierrefonds. Athos’s valet de chambre observed that he shortened his walk every day by several turns. The great alley of limes soon became too long for feet that used to traverse it a hundred times in a day. The count walked feebly as far as the middle trees, seated himself upon a mossy bank which sloped towards a side path, and there waited the return of his strength, or rather the return of night. Very shortly a hundred steps exhausted him. At length Athos refused to rise at all; he declined all nourishment, and his terrified people,- although he did not complain, although he had a smile on his lips, although he continued to speak with his sweet voice,- his people went to Blois in search of the old physician of the late Monsieur, and brought him to the Comte de la Fere in such a fashion that he could see the count without being himself seen. For this purpose they placed him in a closet adjoining the chamber of the patient, and implored him not to show himself, in the fear of displeasing their master, who had not asked for a physician. The doctor obeyed: Athos was a sort of model for the gentlemen of the country; the Blaisois boasted of possessing this sacred relic of the old French glories. Athos was a great seigneur, compared with such nobles as the King improvised by touching with his yellow and prolific sceptre the dry trunks of the heraldic trees of the province.

People respected Athos, we say, and they loved him. The physician could not bear to see his people weep, and to see flock round him the poor of the canton, to whom Athos gave life and consolation by his kind words and his charities. He examined, therefore, from the depths of his hiding-place, the nature of that mysterious malady which bent down and devoured more mortally every day a man but lately so full of life and of a desire to live. He remarked upon the cheeks of Athos the purple of fever, which fires itself and feeds itself,- slow fever, pitiless, born in a fold of the heart, sheltering itself behind that rampart, growing from the suffering it engenders, at once cause and effect of a perilous situation. The count spoke to nobody, we say; he did not even talk to himself. His thought feared noise; it approached to that degree of over-excitement which borders upon ecstasy. Man thus absorbed, though he does not yet belong to God, already belongs no longer to earth. The doctor remained for several hours studying this painful struggle of the will against a superior power; he was terrified at seeing those