“Then you have nothing to say against them.”
“Well, I return, then, to the army and parliament.”
“I say that I borrow twenty thousand livres of M. Planchet, and that I put twenty thousand livres of my own to it, and with these forty thousand livres I raise an army.”
Planchet clasped his hands; he saw that D’Artagnan was in earnest, and, in good truth, he believed his master had lost his senses.
“An army!—ah, monsieur,” said he, with his most agreeable smile, for fear of irritating the madman, and rendering him furious,—“an army!—how many?”
“Of forty men,” said D’Artagnan.
“Forty against forty thousand! that is not enough. I know very well that you, M. d’Artagnan, alone, are equal to a thousand men, but where are we to find thirty-nine men equal to you? Or, if we could find them, who would furnish you with money to pay them?”
“Not bad, Planchet. Ah, the devil! you play the courtier.”
“No, monsieur, I speak what I think, and that is exactly why I say that, in the first pitched battle you fight with your forty men, I am very much afraid——”
“Therefore I shall fight no pitched battles, my dear Planchet,” said the Gascon, laughing. “We have very fine examples in antiquity of skillful retreats and marches, which consisted in avoiding the enemy instead of attacking them. You should know that, Planchet, you who commanded the Parisians the day on which they ought to have fought against the musketeers, and who so well calculated marches and countermarches, that you never left the Palais Royal.”