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"Let us go to the king's tailor," he said; "and since he measures the king, I think, by my faith, I may do worse than allow him to measure me!" The king's tailor, Messire Jean Percerin, occupied a rather large house in the Rue St. Honore, near the Rue de l'Arbre Sec. He was a man of great taste in elegant stuffs, embroideries, and velvets, being hereditary tailor to the king.
"Let us see," said the attentive musketeer; perceiving with his wonderful instinct that they had only been skirmishing till now, and that the hour of battle was approaching. "Let us see," said Percerin, incredulously. "Why, now," continued Aramis, "does M. Fouquet give the king a fete? Is it not to please him?" "Assuredly," said Percerin. D'Artagnan nodded assent.
But he reckoned without his captain of the musketeers, and without M. Colbert. Like Calypso, who could not be consoled at the departure of Ulysses, our Gascon could not console himself for not having guessed why Aramis had asked Percerin to show him the king's new costumes.
"I'faith, I too, am quite in the dark," quoth Percerin. Aramis took an "opportunity," as is said in theatrical matters. "My dear M. de Percerin," Aramis continued, "you are making five dresses for the king, are you not? One in brocade; one in hunting-cloth; one in velvet; one in satin; and one in Florentine stuffs." "Yes; but how do you know all that, monseigneur?" said Percerin, astounded.
"Oh, then," cried Lebrun, "I would answer for the effect." "Good!" said D'Artagnan, "this ought to be the knotty point of the whole thing; they want a pattern of each of the materials. Mordioux! Will this Percerin give in now?" Percerin, beaten from his last retreat, and duped, moreover, by the feigned good-nature of Aramis, cut out five patterns and handed them to the bishop of Vannes.
Under Henry III., gay king as he was, this position was a grand as the height of one of the loftiest peaks of the Cordilleras. Now Percerin had been a clever man all his life, and by way of keeping up his reputation beyond the grave, took very good care not to make a bad death of it, and so contrived to die very skillfully; and that at the very moment he felt his powers of invention declining.
Perceiving D'Artagnan, he put the silk aside, and came to meet him, by no means radiant with joy, and by no means courteous, but, take it altogether, in a tolerably civil manner. "The captain of the king's musketeers will excuse me, I am sure, for I am engaged." "Eh! yes, on the king's costumes; I know that, my dear Monsieur Percerin. You are making three, they tell me."
And so it was a doublet issuing from M. Percerin's workshop, which the Parisians rejoiced in hacking into so many pieces with the living human body it contained. Notwithstanding the favor Concino Concini had shown Percerin, the king, Louis XIII., had the generosity to bear no malice to his tailor, and to retain him in his service.
"By delicate attentions? by some happy device? by a succession of surprises, like that of which we were talking? the enrolment of our Epicureans." "Admirable." "Well, then; this is the surprise we intend. M. Lebrun here is a man who draws most excellently." "Yes," said Percerin; "I have seen his pictures, and observed that his dresses were highly elaborated.
M. Concino Concini, and his wife Galligai, who subsequently shone at the French court, sought to Italianize the fashion, and introduced some Florentine tailors; but Percerin, touched to the quick in his patriotism and his self-esteem, entirely defeated these foreigners, and that so well that Concino was the first to give up his compatriots, and held the French tailor in such esteem that he would never employ any other, and thus wore a doublet of his on the very day that Vitry blew out his brains with a pistol at the Pont du Louvre.
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