The Musketeer's Apprentice

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MONSIEUR Pierre du Vallon-a huge man with broad shoulders and a wealth of red hair and beard-knew that his besetting sin was vanity.

Oh, he wouldn’t put it that way, though his friend Aramis often put it just that way. If pressed, Monsieur du Vallon, whom the world had known for years as the Musketeer Porthos, would say that he knew himself to be a well set man, twice as broad, twice as strong, twice as valiant as all others. Pushed further, he might admit he had a fine taste in clothes and that his swordplay was the best ever seen. This he did not consider vanity, as such, but a mere statement of facts. It only seemed to him odd that most people refused to acknowledge these truths.

That this made him particularly vulnerable to the admiration of those who did know Porthos’s true worth, Porthos would be the first to admit. It had been Aramis’s admission that Porthos was the best fencing master in Paris which had caused Porthos to try to teach the effete young man-then known as Chevalier D’Herblay-how to fence in time for an impending duel. It had, however, been Porthos’s real worth as a teacher that had allowed Aramis to kill his opponent in that duel-in direct violation of the king’s edict against dueling. And this in turn had forced both D’Herblay and du Vallon-his second in the duel-to go into hiding, as Aramis and Porthos in the King’s Musketeers.

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