Gondy remained firm, and the abuse of the day seemed to glide over his head as the sarcasms of the evening before had done; but hatred and revenge were accumulating in his heart silently and drop by drop. He looked coldly at the queen, who nudged Mazarin to make him say something in his turn.
Mazarin, according to his custom, was thinking much and saying little.
“Ho! ho!” said he, “good advice, advice of a friend. I, too, would give up that good Monsieur Broussel, dead or alive, and all would be at an end.”
“If you yield him dead, all will indeed be at an end, my lord, but quite otherwise than you mean.”
“Did I say ‘dead or alive?’” replied Mazarin. “It was only a way of speaking. You know I am not familiar with the French language, which you, monsieur le coadjuteur, both speak and write so well.”
(“This is a council of state,” D’Artagnan remarked to Porthos; “but we held better ones at La Rochelle, with Athos and Aramis.”
“At the Saint Gervais bastion,” said Porthos.
“There and elsewhere.”)
The coadjutor let the storm pass over his head and resumed, still with the same tranquillity:
“Madame, if the opinion I have submitted to you does not please you it is doubtless because you have better counsels to follow. I know too well the wisdom of the queen and that of her advisers to suppose that they will leave the capital long in trouble that may lead to a revolution.”