Summary
King Louis tells Queen Anne the date of the ball, and his expectation that she will wear the diamonds to the ball. The Queen is very distressed and scared that her secret will be revealed. Madame Bonancieux offers to help get a message to Buckingham, and the Queen gives her a letter. Madame Bonancieux now has to figure out how to get the letter to England without anyone knowing. She goes home and reunites with her husband, who is now loyal to the Cardinal and Rochefort, since he sees them as the ones who got him out of prison and gave him money. Madame Bonancieux asks her husband to take the letter to Buckingham in England, but he refuses.
After Bonancieux leaves, D'Artagnan arrives. He has overheard the conversation and offers to deliver the letter to Buckingham. After some hesitation, Madame Bonancieux agrees and gives him the letter. While they are together, D'Artagnan and Madame Bonancieux notice they can hear her husband on the street, talking to Rochefort. Bonancieux is telling Rochefort about his conversation with his wife, and Rochefort rebukes him for not having agreed to accept the mission. If Bonancieux had agreed to act as the messenger, they would now have the Queen's letter in their possession and could use it against her. Bonancieux offers to go find his wife and claim to have changed his mind; he heads in the direction of the palace, since he believes that is where she is.
D'Artagnan reports to Treville, explaining that he has been entrusted with an important mission related to the honor of the Queen. Treville agrees to let D'Artagnan leave Paris, and orders Athos, Porthos, and Aramis to accompany him for safety. D'Artagnan gathers his friends and their servants from their respective dwellings, telling them only that they all need to travel to England in service of the French crown. The group sets off and gets as far as the city of Chantilly before Athos gets involved in a fight with a man who claims loyalty to the Cardinal. The others cannot wait for him, so they leave him there to fight his duel. A little later, they get involved in another quarrel, which ends with Aramis and his servant being wounded. Their injuries will slow the pace of the group, so the two of them are left in Crevecoeur to recover. At Amiens, Porthos and D'Artagnan are accused of fraud; Porthos gets into a fight with the innkeeper and his men, but urges D'Artagnan to go on alone. D'Artagnan and his servant Planchet are the only ones to make it to the port city of Calais.
At Calais, they run into trouble because no one is allowed to sail without the Cardinal's permission. D'Artagnan is able to play a trick by adopting the identity of a man named Comte de Wardes in order to get aboard a ship and sail to England (Porthos stays behind to deal with the officials). In London, D'Artagnan meets the Duke of Buckingham and gives him the letter. Buckingham is happy to send the diamonds back to Paris but when he goes to get them, he realizes that two of them are missing. They have been stolen by the Comtesse de Winter (Milady) on the Cardinal's orders. Racing against the clock, Buckingham and D'Artagnan have a jeweler make two identical diamond studs, and D'Artagnan rushes back to Paris with the full set of diamonds.
On the night of the ball, Queen Anne shows up without any diamonds. Gleefully, the Cardinal points this out to the King, who commands his wife to go and put on the diamonds. A few minutes later, she returns in a beautiful costume, wearing the diamonds. Although the Cardinal and King present her with the "missing" two, she feigns confusion, since she is already wearing the full set. The Cardinal's plot to embarrass her is foiled. D'Artagnan watches everything unfold happily, and before he leaves the palace, Queen Anne gives him a ring as a token of thanks for his service.
Analysis
In literature, comparisons between a woman's reputation/chastity and jewels are not uncommon. The plot around the diamond studs symbolically hints at an incomplete or imperfect record of chastity for Queen Anne. The diamonds are intimate objects, associated with being close to her body, and the idea of giving them to a man hints that she may have actually given Buckingham her body as well. The act of giving away the diamonds is also particularly treacherous because they were a gift from Anne's husband, heightening the betrayal of her having shared them with another man. The diamonds function as a metaphor for her infidelity. While Anne's betrayal may have been private, her shame will be public. The Cardinal has carefully orchestrated all the circumstances of the ball to maximize her embarrassment and the conflict this will create with her husband. While the musketeers can publicly defend their honor and integrity by fighting, Queen Anne has to rely on passively performing to protect her honor. Her husband can insist that she display her loyalty, and he does so because he wants the world to see him as a powerful and virile man who has control over his wife as well as his kingdom.
The tense situation has been created by Queen Anne preferring another man over her husband; the solution is enacted because Constance Bonancieux also trusts a man who is not her husband either. Constance shows her loyalty and devotion to the Queen by quickly coming to her aid. This may be because Constance feels partially responsible for the situation (she has helped to facilitate meetings between Buckingham and the Queen, including when the diamonds were given away), and as Constance experiences deeper and deeper attraction to D'Artagnan, she may be growing more sympathetic to the Queen's infidelity. However, Constance cannot simply travel to England herself, and she is reliant on a man being willing to take on this dangerous mission and risk the wrath of the Cardinal. When her husband refuses to take this risk, D'Artagnan positions himself as her true protector and lover by boldly agreeing to get the message to Buckingham.
Despite D'Artagnan's good intentions, and the faithful support of the other musketeers, the journey to France becomes almost a parody of men who are too busy picking fights to actually carry out their mission. Although Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are supposed to be helping D'Artagnan and honoring their duty to the French crown, their short tempers and impulsiveness mean they end up being hindrances. D'Artagnan is still alone by the time he gets to Calais, and he has to use his own skills and ingenuity to circumvent the Cardinal's attempts at control. The fact that the Cardinal can track who sails out of France shows the extent and reach of his power. Nonetheless, D'Artagnan is still able to find a way to get to England, which shows that he is deserving of eventually becoming a Musketeer and already has the required heroic capacities.
D'Artagnan is also the ideal protagonist to meet with Buckingham because at this point the two men share a bond: they are both in love with married women. D'Artagnan is sympathetic to the passion and suffering Buckingham endures, and the suave older man functions as another mentor figure and model of masculinity for the young Frenchman. At the same time, Buckingham reveals his impulsive and reckless nature. Closing the harbor will essentially create a state of warfare between England and France. Historically, at this time, military tension was rife in Europe since the Thirty Years War had broken out in 1618. France had been singled out as a natural ally for the Roman Catholic Hapsburg empire, but had both refused to side with the Hapsburgs, or to ally with England against them. For the sake of his own emotional connection to Queen Anne, Buckingham creates a political situation which will almost certainly result in a loss of life.
The resolution of the diamond studs episode closes one of the initial plot arcs, and marks a crucial stage in D'Artagnan's character development. He has gone from an unproven boy with no heritage or credentials to a young man who has proven himself worthy of providing high stakes and high profile service to the French crown. When he receives a diamond ring from Queen Anne, the gift implicitly acknowledges that D'Artagnan has now earned a place within the world of the French court. The fact that he had to fulfill the majority of the mission alone raises the profile of D'Artagnan's victory even higher, since the other musketeers cannot be credited for his success. At the same time, D'Artagnan has earned himself both glory and enemies. He is no longer an innocent outsider; he is now someone who has acted directly against the interests of the Cardinal and who will almost certainly be a target for revenge.
