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Rh loud explosion resounded from the ramparts, and called his attention toward the city.

"It is strange" said D'Artagnan, "that I don't yet see the king's flag upon the walls, or hear the drums beat the chamade." He launched three hundred fresh men, under a high- spirited officer, and ordered another breach to be beaten. Then, being more tranquil, he turned toward the coffret, which Colbert's envoy held out to him. It was his treasure—he had won it.

D'Artagnan was holding out his hand to open the coffret, when a ball from the city crushed the coffret in the arms of the officer, struck D'Artagnan full in the chest, and knocked him down upon a sloping heap of earth, while the fleur-de- lised baton, escaping from the broken sides of the box, came rolling under the powerless hand of the marechal. D'Artagnan endeavored to raise himself up. It was thought he had been knocked down without being wounded. A terrible cry broke from the group of his terrified officers; the marechal was covered with blood; the paleness of death ascended slowly to his noble countenance. Leaning upon the arms which were held out on all sides to receive him, he was able once more to turn his eyes toward the place, and to distinguish the white flag at the crest of the principal bastion; his ears, already deaf to the sounds of life, caught feebly the rolling of the drum which announced the victory. Then, clasping in his nerveless hand the baton, ornamented with its fleur-de-lis, he cast down upon it his eyes, which had no longer the power of looking upward toward heaven, and fell back, murmuring those strange words, which appeared to the soldiers cabalistic words — words which had formerly represented so many things upon earth, and which none but the dying man longer comprehended:

"Athos — Porthos, farewell till we meet again! Aramis, adieu forever!" Of the four valiant men whose history we have related, there now no longer remained but one single body; God had resumed the souls.