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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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