The Siege of La Rochelle — The Three Musketeers

Richelieu sits before La Rochelle to close the last Huguenot port left from Henry IV and to humble Buckingham in the queen's eyes. Buckingham has already landed on the Isle of Ré with ninety ships. The king falls ill after his Bed of Justice, so the Musketeers halt with him at Villeroy. D'Artagnan, still a Guardsman under Monsieur Dessessart, reaches camp on 10 September 1627 without Athos, Porthos, or Aramis. He walks the road toward Angoutin and counts what he has gained. Constance has vanished. The cardinal has the power to crush him and has not used it. Milady is a second enemy he cannot yet measure.

At dusk a musket barrel glitters behind a hedge. Another shows behind a rock. He drops. The first ball passes over his head. The second tears the gravel where he lay. A third shot, after the first shooter reloads, carries his hat ten paces. He picks it up as he runs, reaches quarters pale, and studies the hole. The ball is an arquebus ball, not army calibre. That is not a Rochellais sortie. The cardinal, he thinks, does not need such crude work for a man he could simply seize. The most likely hand is Milady's.

The next morning drums beat and Monsieur asks for volunteers to scout a bastion the Rochellais retook in the night. Monsieur Dessessart points to D'Artagnan. He leads four men along the trench. Two soldiers vanish behind him. The bastion fires a dozen balls. One Guardsman falls with a ball through the breast. Two more shots come from behind the angle, not from the fort. D'Artagnan drops on the body as if dead. The missing soldiers come to finish him and have not reloaded. One flees toward the Rochellais and is shot in the shoulder. D'Artagnan wounds the other in the thigh and puts his sword at the man's throat.

The wounded man names a woman called Milady and a hundred louis. He begs by the young woman D'Artagnan loves, who is not dead. D'Artagnan makes him fetch a letter from the corpse, then goes himself under fire and uses the dead man as a shield. Three balls hit the body. The unsigned note orders them not to miss the man, since they already lost the woman to a convent. The assassin confesses they missed Constance's carriage at the Barrière de La Villette after stopping to drink. D'Artagnan sees that the queen has freed her, and that Milady's information comes from the cardinal. He spares the man a second time and walks back to a day's praise. He thinks one enemy is dead and the other devoted to him. That calm only proves he does not yet know Milady.