my father knew by heart in French and which he occasionally recited for no apparent reason, almost like a pet phrase he trotted out to fill a silence, he probably liked the rhythm, the sound and the concision, or perhaps it had impressed him as a boy, the first time he read it (like Díaz-Varela he had studied at a French lycée, San Luis de los Franceses, if I remember rightly). Athos is talking about himself in the third person, that is, he’s telling d’Artagnan his story as if it were that of an old aristocratic friend, who had got married at twenty-five to an innocent, intoxicatingly beautiful young girl of sixteen, ‘belle comme les amours’, so says Athos, who, at the time, was not a musketeer, but the Count de la Fère. While they are out hunting, his very young, angelic wife – whom he had married despite knowing almost nothing about her and without bothering to find out where she came from, never imagining that she had a past to conceal – has an accident, falls from her horse and faints. Rushing to her aid, Athos notices that her dress is constricting her breathing and, to help her breathe more easily, he takes out his dagger and cuts open her dress, thus leaving her shoulder bare. And it is then that he sees the fleur-de-lys with which executioners branded prostitutes or female thieves or perhaps criminals in general, I’m not sure. ‘The angel was a devil,’ declares Athos, adding the somewhat contradictory statement: ‘The poor girl had been a thief.’ D’Artagnan asks him what the Count did, to which his friend replies with succinct coldness (and this was the quotation that my father used to repeat and which I remembered): ‘Le Comte était un grand seigneur, il avait sur les terres droit de justice basse et haute: il acheva de déchirer les habits de la Comtesse, il lui lia les mains derrière le dos et la pendit à un arbre.’ ‘The Count was a great lord, he had the right on his estates to mete out justice both high and low; he tore the rest of the Countess’s dress to shreds, tied her hands behind her back and hanged her from a tree.’ And that, without a moment’s hesitation, without listening to reason or seeking extenuating circumstances, without batting an eyelid, without pity or regret for her youth, that is what the young Athos did to the girl with whom he had fallen so deeply in love that, in his desire to treat her honestly, he had made her his wife, when, as he acknowledges, he could easily have seduced her or taken her by force if he liked; he was, after all, the great lord, and, besides, who would have come to the aid of a stranger, a girl about whom nothing was known except that her true or false name was Anne de Breuil? But no: ‘the fool, the simpleton, the imbecile’ had to marry her, Athos says reproachfully of his former self, the Count de le Fère, as upright as he was fierce, who, as soon as he discovered the deception, the infamy, the indelible stain, abandoned all questions and conflicting feelings, all hesitations and postponements and compassion – he did not stop loving her, though, because he still continued to love her, or at least never fully recovered – and without giving the Countess an opportunity to explain or defend herself, to deny or to persuade, to beg for mercy or to bewitch him again, not even ‘to die hereafter’, as perhaps even the most wretched creature on earth deserves, ‘he tied her hands behind her back and hanged her from a tree’, without wavering for a moment. D’Artagnan is horrified and cries out: ‘Good heavens, Athos, a murder!’ To which Athos replies mysteriously, or, rather, enigmatically: ‘Yes, a murder, nothing more,’ and then calls for more wine and ham, considering the story at an end. What remains mysterious or even enigmatic are those two words ‘nothing more’, ‘pas davantage’ in French. Athos doesn’t refute d’Artagnan’s cry of outrage, he doesn’t justify himself or contradict him, saying: ‘No, it was simply an execution’ or ‘It was an act of justice’; he doesn’t even attempt to make the precipitate, ruthless and presumably solitary hanging of the wife he loved more comprehensible, for doubtless only he and she were there in the middle of a wood, a spur-of-the-moment decision with no witnesses, with no one to