Rue des Fossoyeurs

Rue des Fossoyeurs, a narrow street near the Luxembourg Palace in seventeenth-century Paris, serves as d'Artagnan's first permanent address in the capital and the primary domestic setting for the early intrigues of The Three Musketeers. It is here that the young Gascon establishes his household, forms his bond with his landlord's wife, Constance Bonacieux, and finds himself at the center of a web of political and personal danger that repeatedly draws his friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis to its door.

Location and First Lodging

After selling his yellow Bearn pony for three crowns at the gate of St. Antoine, d'Artagnan enters Paris on foot and searches for an apartment suited to his scant means. He finds a sort of garret in the Rue des Fossoyeurs, near the Luxembourg, and pays earnest money to take possession of it. The street is modest, and the chamber itself is a simple attic consisting of an antechamber and a bedroom, where his lackey Planchet sleeps on a coverlet taken from d'Artagnan's own bed. The address is recorded as No. 14, and it is here that d'Artagnan sews ornamental braiding onto his doublet, has a new blade put to his sword, and sleeps the sleep of the brave after his first day in Paris.

The Mousetrap and the Rescue of Constance

The Rue des Fossoyeurs becomes the scene of a cardinalist trap when Monsieur Bonacieux is arrested and his apartment is turned into a mousetrap. For several days, anyone who knocks at the door is seized and interrogated by the cardinal's agents. D'Artagnan, lodging on the first floor above, converts his chamber into an observatory, removing a plank from his floor to listen through the ceiling to the interrogations below. When Constance Bonacieux, who has escaped her captors, returns to her home and is seized by the men in black, d'Artagnan hears her cries, lets himself down from his window, and rushes into the room to rescue her. After defeating the four officers, he flees with Constance through the streets, eventually hiding her in Athos's apartment in the Rue Ferou.

A Hub for the Four Friends

The street and d'Artagnan's garret become a regular meeting place for the four inseparables. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis frequently visit, and it is in d'Artagnan's chamber that they hold councils, such as the one where they decide to help Constance and where d'Artagnan first learns of the queen's need for a messenger to London. The proximity of the street to the hotel of Monsieur de Treville in the Rue du Vieux-Colombier is noted as a happy augury for d'Artagnan's journey. The street is also the site of the arrest of Athos, who is mistaken for d'Artagnan by the cardinal's guards and taken to the Fort l'Eveque, an event that prompts the four friends to intensify their efforts.

Confrontations and the Landlord's Betrayal

The Rue des Fossoyeurs is the stage for d'Artagnan's tense encounters with his landlord, Monsieur Bonacieux. After Constance's second abduction, d'Artagnan notices that Bonacieux's shoes and stockings are stained with the same mud as his own boots, leading him to suspect that the mercer himself presided over his wife's kidnapping. Later, when d'Artagnan returns from his journey to England, he finds Bonacieux at the door, who greets him with a hateful look and tells him that a pretty girl is waiting upstairs—a reference to Kitty, Milady's maid, who has fled to d'Artagnan for protection. The street thus becomes a place of both refuge and betrayal, where the personal and political dramas of the novel converge around the modest home of a Gascon guardsman.