ach 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 su