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The Three Musketeers
Twenty Years Later
The Vicomte De Bragelonne
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Twenty Years Later 63 at Prostate Health
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 Pistaches 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
Richelieus, and had been a creature of the late cardinals,
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
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