17

Twenty Years After

by Alexandre Dumas

17, TWENTY YEARS AFTER by Alexandre Dumas
An eText from LiteratureClassics.com.

Please see the eText readme for important copyright information (available from the options menu above if you are browsing online or as a separate file in the archive if you are browsing offline.)



Describes how the Duc de Beaufort amused his Leisure Hours
in the Donjon of Vincennes.



The captive who was the source of so much alarm to the
cardinal and whose means of escape disturbed the repose of
the whole court, was wholly unconscious of the terror he
caused at the Palais Royal.

He had found himself so strictly guarded that he soon
perceived the fruitlessness of any attempt at escape. His
vengeance, therefore, consisted in coining curses on the
head of Mazarin; he even tried to make some verses on him,
but soon gave up the attempt, for Monsieur de Beaufort had
not only not received from Heaven the gift of versifying, he
had the greatest difficulty in expressing himself in prose.

The duke was the grandson of Henry VI. and Gabrielle
d'Estrees -- as good-natured, as brave, as proud, and above
all, as Gascon as his ancestor, but less elaborately
educated. After having been for some time after the death of
Louis XIII. the favorite, the confidant, the first man, in
short, at the court, he had been obliged to yield his place
to Mazarin and so became the second in influence and favor;
and eventually, as he was stupid enough to be vexed at this
change of position, the queen had had him arrested and sent
to Vincennes in charge of Guitant, who made his appearance
in these pages in the beginning of this history and whom we
shall see again. It is understood, of course, that when we
say "the queen," Mazarin is meant.

During the five years of this seclusion, which would have
improved and matured the intellect of any other man, M. de
Beaufort, had he not affected to brave the cardinal, despise
princes, and walk alone without adherents or disciples,
would either have regained his liberty or made partisans.
But these considerations never occurred to the duke and
every day the cardinal received fresh accounts of him which
were as unpleasant as possible to the minister.

After having failed in poetry, Monsieur de Beaufort tried
drawing. He drew portraits, with a piece of coal, of the
cardinal; and as his talents did not enable him to produce a
very good likeness, he wrote under the picture that there
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
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
Monsieur de Chavigny, who at first seemed inclined to like
the joke and laughed long and loud, but a frown succeeded,
and he bit his lips with vexation.

Then the duke put to Pistache this difficult question, who
was the greatest thief in the world?

Pistache went again around the circle, but stopped at no
one, and at last went to the door and began to scratch and
bark.

"See, gentlemen," said M. de Beaufort, "this wonderful
animal, not finding here what I ask for, seeks it out of
doors; you shall, however, have his answer. Pistache, my
friend, come here. Is not the greatest thief in the world,
Monsieur (the king's secretary) Le Camus, who came to Paris
with twenty francs in his pocket and who now possesses ten
millions?"

The dog shook his head.

"Then is it not," resumed the duke, "the Superintendent
Emery, who gave his son, when he was married, three hundred
thousand francs and a house, compared to which the Tuileries
are a heap of ruins and the Louvre a paltry building?"

The dog again shook his head as if to say "no."

"Then," said the prisoner, "let's think who it can be. Can
it be, can it possibly be, the `Illustrious Coxcomb, Mazarin
de Piscina,' hey?"

Pistache made violent signs that it was, by raising and
lowering his head eight or ten times successively.

"Gentlemen, you see," said the duke to those present, who
dared not even smile, "that it is the `Illustrious Coxcomb'
who is the greatest thief in the world; at least, according
to Pistache."

"Let us go on to another of his exercises."

"Gentlemen!" -- there was a profound silence in the room
when the duke again addressed them -- "do you not remember
that the Duc de Guise taught all the dogs in Paris to jump
for Mademoiselle de Pons, whom he styled `the fairest of the
fair?' Pistache is going to show you how superior he is to
all other dogs. Monsieur de Chavigny, be so good as to lend
me your cane."

Monsieur de Chavigny handed his cane to Monsieur de
Beaufort. Monsieur de Beaufort placed it horizontally at the
height of one foot.

"Now, Pistache, my good dog, jump the height of this cane
for Madame de Montbazon."

"But," interposed Monsieur de Chavigny, "it seems to me that
Pistache is only doing what other dogs have done when they
jumped for Mademoiselle de Pons."

"Stop," said the duke, "Pistache, jump for the queen." And
he raised his cane six inches higher.

The dog sprang, and in spite of the height jumped lightly
over it.

"And now," said the duke, raising it still six inches
higher, "jump for the king."

The dog obeyed and jumped quickly over the cane.

"Now, then," said the duke, and as he spoke, lowered the
cane almost level with the ground; "Pistache, my friend,
jump for the `Illustrious Coxcomb, Mazarin de Piscina.'"

The dog turned his back to the cane.

"What," asked the duke, "what do you mean?" and he gave him
the cane again, first making a semicircle from the head to
the tail of Pistache. "Jump then, Monsieur Pistache."

But Pistache, as at first, turned round on his legs and
stood with his back to the cane.

Monsieur de Beaufort made the experiment a third time, but
by this time Pistache's patience was exhausted; he threw
himself furiously upon the cane, wrested it from the hands
of the prince and broke it with his teeth.

Monsieur de Beaufort took the pieces out of his mouth and
presented them with great formality to Monsieur de Chavigny,
saying that for that evening the entertainment was ended,
but in three months it should be repeated, when Pistache
would have learned a few new tricks.

Three days afterward Pistache was found dead -- poisoned.

Then the duke said openly that his dog had been killed by a
drug with which they meant to poison him; and one day after
dinner he went to bed, calling out that he had pains in his
stomach and that Mazarin had poisoned him.

This fresh impertinence reached the ears of the cardinal and
alarmed him greatly. The donjon of Vincennes was considered
very unhealthy and Madame de Rambouillet had said that the
room in which the Marechal Ornano and the Grand Prior de
Vendome had died was worth its weight in arsenic -- a bon
mot which had great success. So it was ordered the prisoner
was henceforth to eat nothing that had not previously been
tasted, and La Ramee was in consequence placed near him as
taster.

Every kind of revenge was practiced upon the duke by the
governor in return for the insults of the innocent Pistache.
De Chavigny, who, according to report, was a son of
Richelieu's, and had been a creature of the late cardinal's,
understood tyranny. He took from the duke all the steel
knives and silver forks and replaced them with silver knives
and wooden forks, pretending that as he had been informed
that the duke was to pass all his life at Vincennes, he was
afraid of his prisoner attempting suicide. A fortnight
afterward the duke, going to the tennis court, found two
rows of trees about the size of his little finger planted by
the roadside; he asked what they were for and was told that
they were to shade him from the sun on some future day. One
morning the gardener went to him and told him, as if to
please him, that he was going to plant a bed of asparagus
for his especial use. Now, since, as every one knows,
asparagus takes four years in coming to perfection, this
civility infuriated Monsieur de Beaufort.

At last his patience was exhausted. He assembled his
keepers, and notwithstanding his well-known difficulty of
utterance, addressed them as follows:

"Gentlemen! will you permit a grandson of Henry IV. to be
overwhelmed with insults and ignominy?

"Odds fish! as my grandfather used to say, I once reigned in
Paris! do you know that? I had the king and Monsieur the
whole of one day in my care. The queen at that time liked me
and called me the most honest man in the kingdom. Gentlemen
and citizens, set me free; I shall go to the Louvre and
strangle Mazarin. You shall be my body-guard. I will make
you all captains, with good pensions! Odds fish! On! march
forward!"

But eloquent as he might be, the eloquence of the grandson
of Henry IV. did not touch those hearts of stone; not one
man stirred, so Monsieur de Beaufort was obliged to be
satisfied with calling them all kinds of rascals underneath
the sun.

Sometimes, when Monsieur de Chavigny paid him a visit, the
duke used to ask him what he should think if he saw an army
of Parisians, all fully armed, appear at Vincennes to
deliver him from prison.

"My lord," answered De Chavigny, with a low bow, "I have on
the ramparts twenty pieces of artillery and in my casemates
thirty thousand guns. I should bombard the troops till not
one grain of gunpowder was unexploded."

"Yes, but after you had fired off your thirty thousand guns
they would take the donjon; the donjon being taken, I should
be obliged to let them hang you -- at which I should be most
unhappy, certainly."

And in his turn the duke bowed low to Monsieur de Chavigny.

"For myself, on the other hand, my lord," returned the
governor, "when the first rebel should pass the threshold of
my postern doors I should be obliged to kill you with my own
hand, since you were confided peculiarly to my care and as I
am obliged to give you up, dead or alive."

And once more he bowed low before his highness.

These bitter-sweet pleasantries lasted ten minutes,
sometimes longer, but always finished thus:

Monsieur de Chavigny, turning toward the door, used to call
out: "Halloo! La Ramee!"

La Ramee came into the room.

"La Ramee, I recommend Monsieur le Duc to you, particularly;
treat him as a man of his rank and family ought to be
treated; that is, never leave him alone an instant."

La Ramee became, therefore, the duke's dinner guest by
compulsion -- an eternal keeper, the shadow of his person;
but La Ramee -- gay, frank, convivial, fond of play, a great
hand at tennis, had one defect in the duke's eyes -- his
incorruptibility.

Now, although La Ramee appreciated, as of a certain value,
the honor of being shut up with a prisoner of so great
importance, still the pleasure of living in intimacy with
the grandson of Henry IV. hardly compensated for the loss of
that which he had experienced in going from time to time to
visit his family.

One may be a jailer or a keeper and at the same time a good
father and husband. La Ramee adored his wife and children,
whom now he could only catch a glimpse of from the top of
the wall, when in order to please him they used to walk on
the opposite side of the moat. 'Twas too brief an enjoyment,
and La Ramee felt that the gayety of heart he had regarded
as the cause of health (of which it was perhaps rather the
result) would not long survive such a mode of life.

He accepted, therefore, with delight, an offer made to him
by his friend the steward of the Duc de Grammont, to give
him a substitute; he also spoke of it to Monsieur de
Chavigny, who promised that he would not oppose it in any
way -- that is, if he approved of the person proposed.

We consider it useless to draw a physical or moral portrait
of Grimaud; if, as we hope, our readers have not wholly
forgotten the first part of this work, they must have
preserved a clear idea of that estimable individual, who is
wholly unchanged, except that he is twenty years older, an
advance in life that has made him only more silent;
although, since the change that had been working in himself,
Athos had given Grimaud permission to speak.

But Grimaud had for twelve or fifteen years preserved
habitual silence, and a habit of fifteen or twenty years'
duration becomes second nature.