Monsieur Bonacieux — The Three Musketeers

Guards take the mercer Jacques Bonacieux straight to the Bastille and treat him like a peasant. In a bare room a commissary with a fox's face lectures him on the danger of an obscure citizen meddling in public matters, then paints the cardinal as a man no one thwarts. Bonacieux, already selfish and frightened, praises Richelieu and swears he never meant to offend him. Then he hears the charge: high treason. When the commissary asks about his wife, he admits she was abducted and describes a tall dark lord he could pick from a thousand people. The commissary's face darkens. He sends Bonacieux to the first safe dungeon and writes a letter in haste.

At dawn the same official returns and says the case is worse. The wife escaped the day before from d'Artagnan's rooms, after Bonacieux asked the young Guard for help. They bring in a prisoner they call d'Artagnan. It is Athos, who let the guards keep the wrong name rather than argue. Bonacieux names the mismatch: his tenant is about twenty and wears Dessessart's colours; this man is about thirty and wears Tréville's. A messenger then hands the commissary a letter. The official cries out against that unhappy woman, treats her latest move as a shared plot, and Bonacieux, in terror, curses and renounces her. Athos asks to be sent somewhere quieter. Both men are locked down more closely.

That night officers put Bonacieux in a closed carriage and roll him through Paris. He reads every street and nearly faints at St. Paul, at the cemetery of St. Jean, and under the arcade at La Grêve. The officer threatens to gag him. The carriage turns toward the Traitor's Cross, where lesser criminals are executed. Twenty paces short it stops in a crowd. Bonacieux utters a groan like a last sigh and faints.