“If I have changed Zephyr into Furet,” said D’Artagnan, “I must make some diminutive or other of my own name.  So, instead of D’Artagnan, I will be Agnan, short; that is a concession which I naturally owe to my gray coat, my round hat, and my rusty calotte.”

Monsieur d’Artagnan traveled, then, pretty easily upon Furet, who ambled like a true butter-woman’s pad, and who, with his amble, managed cheerfully about twelve leagues a day, upon four spindle-shanks, of which the practiced eye of D’Artagnan had appreciated the strength and safety beneath the thick mass of hair which covered them.  Jogging along, the traveler took notes, studied the country, which he traversed reserved and silent, ever seeking the most plausible pretext for reaching Belle-Ile-en-Mer, and for seeing everything without arousing suspicion.  In this manner, he was enabled to convince himself of the importance the event assumed in proportion as he drew near to it.  In this remote country, in this ancient duchy of Bretagne, which was not France at that period, and is not so even now, the people knew nothing of the king of France.  They not only did not know him, but were unwilling to know him.  One face — a single one — floated visibly for them upon the political current.  Their ancient dukes no longer ruled them; government was a void — nothing more.  In place of the sovereign duke, the seigneurs of parishes reigned without control; and, above these seigneurs, God, who has never been forgotten in Bretagne.  Among these suzerains of chateaux and belfries, the most powerful, the richest, the most popular, was M. Fouquet, seigneur of Belle-Isle.  Even in the country, even within sight of that mysterious isle, legends and traditions consecrate its wonders.  Every one might not penetrate it:  the isle, of an extent of six leagues in length, and six in breadth, was a seignorial property, which the people had for a long time respected, covered as it was with the name of Retz, so redoubtable in the country.  Shortly after the erection of this seignory into a marquistate, Belle-Isle passed to M. Fouquet.  The celebrity of the isle did not date from yesterday; its name, or rather its qualification, is traced back to the remotest antiquity.  The ancients called it Kalonese, from two Greek words, signifying beautiful isle.  Thus, at a distance of eighteen hundred years, it had borne, in another idiom, the same name it still bears.  There was, then, something in itself in this property of M. Fouquet’s, besides its position of six leagues off the coast of France; a position which makes it a sovereign in its maritime solitude, like a majestic ship which disdains roads, and proudly casts anchor in mid-ocean.