D'Artagnan (Chapters 1–6)

On the first Monday of April 1625, the market town of Meung, where the author of the Romance of the Rose was born, seemed to be in as perfect a state of uproar as if the Huguenots had come to make a second La Rochelle of it. The cause was a young man. Picture to yourself a Don Quixote of eighteen; a Don Quixote without his corselet, without his coat of mail; a Don Quixote clothed in a woollen doublet whose blue colour had faded to a nameless shade between lees of wine and a heavenly azure; a long brown face, high cheek-bones, the jaw muscles enormously developed — an infallible sign by which a Gascon may always be recognised; the eye open and intelligent; the nose hooked, but finely chiselled. He rode a yellow Béarn pony of about twelve or fourteen years old, without a hair in its tail, which made everyone in Meung laugh.

His name was d'Artagnan. His father, a poor gentleman of Gascony, had given him three gifts when he left home: fifteen crowns, the horse, and a letter of recommendation to Monsieur de Tréville, the captain of the King's Musketeers, an old friend from Gascony who had made his fortune by his sword. And with them, three pieces of advice: never to put up with an insult from anyone except the Cardinal and the King; to fight on every occasion, since duels were forbidden and so there was twice as much courage needed to fight; and to be loyal. His mother gave him a recipe for a miraculous balm for wounds.

At the inn of the Jolly Miller in Meung a gentleman with a scar on his temple laughed at his horse. D'Artagnan drew his sword. The gentleman's servants knocked him senseless with sticks. When he came to, the gentleman was talking with a beautiful pale woman with blonde curls in a carriage — he called her "Milady" — and giving her orders from the Cardinal; and d'Artagnan's letter to Monsieur de Tréville had been stolen. The man rode away. D'Artagnan swore to find him.

In Paris he sold his horse for three crowns and went to the house of Monsieur de Tréville, which was crowded with musketeers — swaggering, quarrelling, fencing on the stairs. Tréville received him kindly, but without the letter could do nothing more than offer him a place in a riding academy, and the advice to wait. Then, through the window, d'Artagnan saw the man from Meung passing in the street. He rushed out after him — and in his haste collided, one after another, with three musketeers.

D'Artagnan, waiting in the antechamber, heard Monsieur de Tréville, in his study, scolding three of his musketeers at the top of his voice: the King had told him, laughing, that the Cardinal's Guards had beaten and arrested some musketeers in a tavern brawl the day before. "Athos! Porthos! Aramis!" They came in: two of them, ashamed, and the third, Athos, pale, with a wound he had hidden. Tréville roared at them that the musketeers were becoming a laughing-stock — and then, when he learned that they had been taken by surprise, and that Athos had been wounded and would not surrender, he forgave them everything; and Athos fainted. D'Artagnan saw, at once, that these were the men he wanted to be like.

First, on the stairs, he ran into Athos, who had a wound in his shoulder and cried out in pain; Athos told him coldly that he would meet him at noon, behind the Carmelite convent, to give him a lesson in manners. Then, rushing out of the door, he ran into Porthos, a huge, handsome, boastful musketeer, whose magnificent gold-embroidered baldric, d'Artagnan discovered as he got tangled in his cloak, was gold only in front: behind it was plain leather, and Porthos wore a cloak to hide it. Porthos was furious; one o'clock, behind the Luxembourg. Then he saw Aramis, a gentle, elegant musketeer who wanted to become a priest, with a lady's embroidered handkerchief under his foot; d'Artagnan picked it up and gave it back to him, in front of his friends, and so compromised a lady: two o'clock, in the garden of Monsieur de Tréville's house.

At noon d'Artagnan arrived at the convent of the Carmelites. Athos was there; then Porthos arrived to be his second; then Aramis. "What!" said they. "You are fighting all three of us?" D'Artagnan apologised to them all — not for the quarrels, but in case he should not be able to pay his debt to all three — and drew his sword. And at that moment five of the Cardinal's Guards came round the corner, led by Monsieur de Jussac, and ordered the musketeers to surrender, since duelling was forbidden by the Cardinal's edict. The musketeers were only three, and Athos was wounded. "We are three," said Athos, "but there are four of us," said d'Artagnan — and joined them. They fought, four against five, and won; d'Artagnan wounded Jussac himself; and the four walked arm in arm back to Monsieur de Tréville's house, the best friends in the world.

The King, Louis XIII, who loved his Musketeers as the Cardinal loved his Guards, and the two were rivals in everything, was delighted, though he pretended to be angry; he sent for the young Gascon, gave him forty pistoles, and Tréville placed him as a cadet in the Guards of Monsieur des Essarts, until he could become a musketeer.