“Well! I ought to have told your majesty that M. Fouquet had arrested me; that would have been more just.

I re-establish the truth, then; I have been arrested by M. Fouquet.”

It was now the turn of Louis XIV. to be surprised. His majesty was astonished in his turn.

D’Artagnan, with his quick glance, appreciated what was passing in the heart of his master. He did not allow him time to put any questions. He related, with that poetry, that picturesqueness, which perhaps he alone possessed at that period, the escape of Fouquet, the pursuit, the furious race, and, lastly, the inimitable generosity of the surintendant, who might have fled ten times over, who might have killed the adversary in the pursuit, but who had preferred imprisonment,