Twenty Years Later by Dumas, Alexandre. Part one

might be little doubt regarding the original: “Portrait of

the Illustrious Coxcomb, Mazarin.” Monsieur de Chavigny, the

governor of Vincennes, waited upon the duke to request that

he would amuse himself in some other way, or that at all

events, if he drew likenesses, he would not put mottoes

underneath them. The next day the prisoner’s room was full

of pictures and mottoes. Monsieur de Beaufort, in common

with many other prisoners, was bent upon doing things that

were prohibited; and the only resource the governor had was,

one day when the duke was playing at tennis, to efface all

these drawings, consisting chiefly of profiles. M. de

Beaufort did not venture to draw the cardinal’s fat face.

The duke thanked Monsieur de Chavigny for having, as he

said, cleaned his drawing-paper for him; he then divided the

walls of his room into compartments and dedicated each of

these compartments to some incident in Mazarin’s life. In

one was depicted the “Illustrious Coxcomb” receiving a

shower of blows from Cardinal Bentivoglio, whose servant he

had been; another, the “Illustrious Mazarin” acting the part

of Ignatius Loyola in a tragedy of that name; a third, the

“Illustrious Mazarin” stealing the portfolio of prime

minister from Monsieur de Chavigny, who had expected to have

it; a fourth, the “Illustrious Coxcomb Mazarin” refusing to

give Laporte, the young king’s valet, clean sheets, and

saving that “it was quite enough for the king of France to

have clean sheets every three months.”

The governor, of course, thought proper to threaten his

prisoner that if he did not give up drawing such pictures he

should be obliged to deprive him of all the means of amusing

himself in that manner. To this Monsieur de Beaufort replied

that since every opportunity of distinguishing himself in

arms was taken from him, he wished to make himself

celebrated in the arts; since he could not be a Bayard, he

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Dumas, Alexandre – Twenty Years After

would become a Raphael or a Michael Angelo. Nevertheless,

one day when Monsieur de Beaufort was walking in the meadow

his fire was put out, his charcoal all removed, taken away;

and thus his means of drawing utterly destroyed.

The poor duke swore, fell into a rage, yelled, and declared

that they wished to starve him to death as they had starved

the Marechal Ornano and the Grand Prior of Vendome; but he

refused to promise that he would not make any more drawings

and remained without any fire in the room all the winter.

His next act was to purchase a dog from one of his keepers.

With this animal, which he called Pistache, he was often

shut up for hours alone, superintending, as every one

supposed, its education. At last, when Pistache was

sufficiently well trained, Monsieur de Beaufort invited the

governor and officers of Vincennes to attend a

representation which he was going to have in his apartment

The party assembled, the room was lighted with waxlights,

and the prisoner, with a bit of plaster he had taken out of

the wall of his room, had traced a long white line,

representing a cord, on the floor. Pistache, on a signal

from his master, placed himself on this line, raised himself

on his hind paws, and holding in his front paws a wand with

which clothes used to be beaten, he began to dance upon the

line with as many contortions as a rope-dancer. Having been

several times up and down it, he gave the wand back to his

master and began without hesitation to perform the same

evolutions over again.

The intelligent creature was received with loud applause.

The first part of the entertainment being concluded Pistache

was desired to say what o’clock it was; he was shown

Monsieur de Chavigny’s watch; it was then half-past six; the

dog raised and dropped his paw six times; the seventh he let

it remain upraised. Nothing could be better done; a sun-dial

could not have shown the hour with greater precision.

Then the question was put to him who was the best jailer in

all the prisons in France.

The dog performed three evolutions around the circle and

laid himself, with the deepest respect, at the feet of

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