“You see, Monsieur, that you say it again.”
“But I tell you, Monsieur commissary,” cried Bonacieux, in his turn, “there is not the least doubt about the matter. M. d’Artagnan is my tenant, although he does not pay me my rent—and even better on that account ought I to know him. M. d’Artagnan is a young man, scarcely nineteen or twenty, and this gentleman must be thirty at least. M. d’Artagnan is in M. des Essart’s Guards, and this gentleman is in the company of M. de Tréville’s Musketeers. Look at his uniform, Monsieur commissary, look at his uniform!”
“That’s true,” murmured the commissary; “ pardieu , that’s true.”
At this moment the door was opened quickly, and a messenger, introduced by one of the gatekeepers of the Bastille, gave a letter to the commissary.
“Oh, unhappy woman!” cried the commissary.
“How? What do you say? Of whom do you speak? It is not of my wife, I hope!”
“On the contrary, it is of her. Yours is a pretty business.”
“But,” said the agitated mercer, “do me the pleasure, Monsieur, to tell me how my own proper affair can become worse by anything my wife does while I am in prison?”
“Because that which she does is part of a plan concerted between you—of an infernal plan.”
“I swear to you, Monsieur commissary, that you are in the profoundest error, that I know nothing in the world about what my wife had to do, that I am entirely a stranger to what she has done; and that if she has committed any follies, I renounce her, I abjure her, I curse her!”