"Alexandre Dumas. The Three Musketeers." - читать интересную книгу автора

lanky leg, and keeping one hand on the edge of his cap, with that
half-smile of the embarrassed a provincial who wishes to put on a good
face. When he had passed one group he began to breathe more freely; but he
could not help observing that they turned round to look at him, and for the
first time in his life D'Artagnan, who had till that day entertained a very
good opinion of himself, felt ridiculous.
Arrived at the staircase, it was still worse. There were four
Musketeers on the bottom steps, amusing themselves with the following
exercise, while ten or twelve of their com-rades waited upon the landing
place to take their turn in the sport.
One of them, stationed upon the top stair, naked sword in hand,
prevented, or at least endeavored to prevent, the three others from
ascending.
These three others fenced against him with their agile swords.
D'Artagnan at first took these weapons for foils, and believed them to
be buttoned; but he soon perceived by certain scratches that every weapon
was pointed and sharpened, and that at each of these scratches not only the
spectators, but even the actors themselves, laughed like so many madmen.
He who at the moment occupied the upper step kept his adversaries
marvelously in check. A circle was formed around them. The conditions
required that at every hit the man touched should quit the game, yielding
his turn for the benefit of the adversary who had hit him. In five minutes
three were slightly wounded, one on the hand, another on the ear, by the
defender of the stair, who himself remained intact--a piece of skill which
was worth to him, according to the rules agreed upon, three turns of favor,
However difficult it might be, or rather as he pretended it was, to
astonish our young traveler, this pastime really astonished him. He had
seen in his province--that land in which heads become so easily heated--a
few of the preliminaries of duels; but the daring of these four fencers
appeared to him the strongest he had ever heard of even in Gascony. He
be-lieved himself transported into that famous country of giants into which
Gulliver afterward went and was so frightened; and yet he had not gained
the goal, for there were still the landing place and the antechamber.
On the landing they were no longer fighting, but amused themselves
with stories about women, and in the antechamber, with stories about the
court. On the landing D'Artagnan blushed; in the antechamber he trembled.
His warm and fickle imagination, which in Gas-cony had rendered formidable
to young chambermaids, and even sometimes their mis-tresses, had never
dreamed, even in moments of delirium, of half the amorous wonders or a
quarter of the feats of gallantry which were here set forth in connection
with names the best known and with details the least concealed. But if his
morals were shocked on the landing, his respect for the cardinal was
scandalized in the antechamber. There, to his great astonishment,
D'Artagnan heard the policy which made all Europe tremble criticized aloud
and openly, as well as the private life of the cardinal, which so many
great nobles had been punished for trying to pry into. That great man who
was so revered by D'Artag-nan the elder served as an object of ridicule to
the Musketeers of Treville, who cracked their jokes upon his bandy legs and
his crooked back. Some sang ballads about Mme. d'Aguillon, his mistress,
and Mme. Cambalet, his niece; while others formed parties and plans to