“And did this Menneville also cry, ‘Vive Colbert’?”
“Louder than all the rest; like a madman.”
Colbert’s brow grew dark and wrinkled. A kind of ambitious glory which had lighted his face was extinguished, like the light of glow-worms we crush beneath the grass. “Then you say,” resumed the deceived intendant, “that the initiative came from the people? Menneville was my enemy; I would have had him hung, and he knew it well. Menneville belonged to the Abbe Fouquet — the affair originated with Fouquet; does not everybody know that the condemned were his friends from childhood?”
“That is true,” thought D’Artagnan, “and thus are all my doubts cleared up.