SCARRON'S LAST MOMENTS. 307 the Duc de Trêmes. The laugher laughed even at his sister's dishonour, and allowed her to live in the same house on a higher étage. When, on one occasion, some one called on him to solicit the lady's interest with the duke, he coolly said, 'You are mistaken; it is not I who know the duke; go up to the next storey.' The offspring of this connection he styled his nephews after the fashion of the Marais.' Françoise did her best to reclaim this sister and to conceal her shame, but the laughing abbé made no secret of it. But the laugher was approaching his end. His attacks became more and more violent: still he laughed at them. Once he was seized with a terrible choking hiccup, which threatened to suffocate him. The first moment he could speak he cried, If I get well, I'll write a satire on the hiccup.' The priests came about him, and his wife did what she could to bring him to a sense of his future danger. He laughed at the priests and at his wife's fears. She spoke of hell. If there is such a place,' he answered, it won't be for me, for without you I must have had my hell in this life.' The priest told him, by way of consolation, that God had visited him more than any man.'-' He does me too much honour,' answered the mocker. You should give him thanks,' urged the ecclesiastic. I can't see for what,' was the shameless answer. On his death-bed he parodied a will, leaving to Corneille 'two hundred pounds of patience; to Boileau (with whom he had a long feud), the gangrene; and to the Academy, the power to alter the French language as they liked.' His legacy in verse to his wife is grossly disgusting, and quite unfit for quotation. Yet he loved her well, avowed that his chief grief in dying was the necessity of leaving her, and begged her to remember him sometimes, and to lead a virtuous life. His last moments were as jovial as any. When he saw his friends weeping around him he shook his head and cried, 308 A LESSON FOR GAY AND GRAVE. 'I shall never make you weep as much as I have made you laugh.' A little later a softer thought of hope came across him. No more sleeplessness, no more gout,' he murmured; 'the Queen's patient will be well at last.' At length the laugher was sobered. In the presence of death, at the gates of a new world, he muttered, half afraid, 'I never thought it was so easy to laugh at death,' and so expired. This was in October, 1660, when the cripple had reached the age of fifty. Thus died a laugher. It is unnecessary here to trace the story of his widow's strange rise to be the wife of a king. Scarron was no honour to her, and in later years she tried to forget his existence. Boileau fell into disgrace for merely mentioning his name before the king. Yet Scarron was in many respects a better man than Louis; and, laugher as he was, he had a good heart. There is a time for mirth and a time for mourning, the Preacher tells us. Scarron never learned this truth, and he laughed too much and too long. Yet let us not end the laugher's life in sorrow: 'It is well to be merry and wise,' &c. Let us be merry as the poor cripple, who bore his sufferings so well, and let us be wise too. There is a lesson for gay and grave in the life of Scarron, the laugher. FRANCOIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULT AND THE DUC DE SAINT-SIMON. THE precursor of Saint-Simon, the model of Lord Chesterfield, this ornament of his age, belonged, as well as SaintSimon, to that state of society in France which was characterised as Lord John Russell, in his Memoirs of the Duchess of Orleans,' tells us-by an idolatry of power and station. 'God would not condemn a person of that rank,' was the exclamation of a lady of the old régime, on hearing that a notorious sinner, 'Pair de France,' and one knows not what else, had gone to his account impenitent and unabsolved; and though the sentiment may strike us as profane, it was, doubtless, genuine. Rank, however, was often adorned by accomplishments which, like an exemption from rules of conduct, it almost claimed as a privilege. Good breeding was a science in France; natural to a peasant, even, it was studied as an epitome of all the social virtues. N'être pas poli' was the sum total of all dispraise: a man could only recover from it by splendid valour or rare gifts; a woman could not hope to rise out of that Slough of Despond to which good-breeding never came. We were behind all the arts of civilization in England, as François de Rochefoucault (we give the orthography of the present day) was in his cradle. This |