A fresh practical joke now occurred to the duke.  He had asked for crawfish for his breakfast on the following morning; he intended to pass the day in making a small gallows and hang one of the finest of these fish in the middle of his room —­ the red color evidently conveying an allusion to the cardinal —­ so that he might have the pleasure of hanging Mazarin in effigy without being accused of having hung anything more significant than a crawfish.

The day was employed in preparations for the execution.  Every one grows childish in prison, but the character of Monsieur de Beaufort was particularly disposed to become so.  In the course of his morning’s walk he collected two or three small branches from a tree and found a small piece of broken glass, a discovery that quite delighted him.  When he came home he formed his handkerchief into a loop.

Nothing of all this escaped Grimaud, but La Ramee looked on with the curiosity of a father who thinks that he may perhaps get a cheap idea concerning a new toy for his children.  The guards looked on it with indifference.  When everything was ready, the gallows hung in the middle of the room, the loop made, and when the duke had cast a glance upon the plate of crawfish, in order to select the finest specimen among them, he looked around for his piece of glass; it had disappeared.

“Who has taken my piece of glass?” asked the duke, frowning.  Grimaud made a sign to denote that he had done so.

“What! thou again!  Why didst thou take it?”

“Yes —­ why?” asked La Ramee.

Grimaud, who held the piece of glass in his hand, said:  “Sharp.”

“True, my lord!” exclaimed La Ramee.  “Ah! deuce take it! we have a precious fellow here!”

“Monsieur Grimaud!” said the duke, “for your sake I beg of you, never come within the reach of my fist!”

“Hush! hush!” cried La Ramee, “give me your gibbet, my lord.  I will shape it out for you with my knife.”

And he took the gibbet and shaped it out as neatly as possible.

“That’s it,” said the duke, “now make me a little hole in the floor whilst I go and fetch the culprit.”

La Ramee knelt down and made a hole in the floor; meanwhile the duke hung the crawfish up by a thread.  Then he placed the gibbet in the middle of the room, bursting with laughter.

La Ramee laughed also and the guards laughed in chorus; Grimaud, however, did not even smile.  He approached La Ramee and showing him the crawfish hung up by the thread: 

“Cardinal,” he said.

“Hung by order of his Highness the Duc de Beaufort!” cried the prisoner, laughing violently, “and by Master Jacques Chrysostom La Ramee, the king’s commissioner.”

La Ramee uttered a cry of horror and rushed toward the gibbet, which he broke at once and threw the pieces out of the window.  He was going to throw the crawfish out also, when Grimaud snatched it from his hands.