France -- History -- Louis XIV, 1643-1715 -- Fiction
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 Maréchal Ornano
and the Grand Prior of Vendôme; but he refused to promise that he would
not make any more drawings and remained without any fire in the room
all the winter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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