Scarron's last Moments. 251 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 priests 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, ‘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, 252 A Lesson for Gay and Grave. 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. FRANÇOIS DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULT AND THE DUC DE SAINT-SIMON. Rank and Good Breeding.-The Hôtel de Rochefoucault.-Racine and his Plays. La Rochefoucault's Wit and Sensibility.-Saint Simon's Youth.Looking out for a Wife.-Saint-Simon's Court Life.--The History of Louise de la Vallière.-A mean Act of Louis Quatorze.-All has passed away.Saint-Simon's Memoirs of His Own Time. HE precursor of Saint-Simon, the model of Lord Chesterfield, this ornament of his age, belonged, as well as Saint-Simon, 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'etre 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 brilliant personage, who combined the 254 Rank and Good Breeding. wit and the moralist, the courtier and the soldier, the man or literary tastes and the sentimentalist par excellence, was born in 1613. In addition to his hereditary title of duc, he had the empty honour, as Saint-Simon call it, of being Prince de Marsillac, a designation which was lost in that of De la Rochefoucault -so famous even to the present day. As he presented himself at the court of the regency, over which Anne of Austria nomi.nally presided, no youth there was more distinguished for his elegance or for the fame of his exploits during the wars of the Fronde than this youthful scion of an illustrious house. Endowed by nature with a pleasing countenance, and, what was far more important in that fastidious region, an air of dignity, he displayed wonderful contradictions in his character and bearing. He had, says Madame de Maintenon, beaucoup d'esprit, et peu de savoir;' an expressive phrase. He was,' she adds, 'pliant in nature, intriguing, and cautious;' nevertheless she never, she declares, possessed a more steady friend, nor one more confiding and better adapted to advise. Brave as he was, he held personal valour, or affected to do so, in light estimation. His ambition was to rule others. Lively in conversation, though naturally pensive, he assembled around him all that Paris or Versailles could present of wit and intellect. The old Hôtel de Rochefoucault, in the Rue de Seine, in the Faubourg St. Germain, in Paris, still grandly recalls the assemblies in which Racine, Boileau, Madame de Sévigné, the La Fayettes, and the famous Duchesse de Longueville, used to assemble. The time honoured family of De la Rochefoucault still preside there; though one of its fairest ornaments, the young, lovely, and pious Duchesse de la Rochefoucault of our time, died in 1852-one of the first known victims to diphtheria in France, in that unchanged old locality. There, where the De Longuevilles, the Mazarins, and those who had formed the famous council of state of Anne of Austria had disappeared, the poets and wits who gave to the age of Louis XIV. its true brilliancy, collected around the Duc de la Rochefoucault. What a scene it must have been in those days, as Buffon said of the earth in spring 'tout four-mille de vie? Let us people the salon of the Hôtel de Rochefoucault with visions of the past; see The Hôtel de Rochefoucault. 255 the host there, in his chair, a martyr to the gout, which he bore with all the cheerfulness of a Frenchman, and picture to ourselves the great men who were handing him his cushion, or standing near his fauteuil. Racine's joyous face may be imagined as he comes in fresh from the College of Harcourt. Since he was born in 1639, he had not arrived at his zenith till La Rochefoucault was almost past his prime. For a man at thirty-six in France can no longer talk prospectively of the departure of youth; it is gone. A single man of thirty, even in Paris, is ' un vieux garçon :' life begins too soon and ends too soon with those pleasant sinners, the French. And Racine, when he was first routed out of Port Royal, where he was educated, and presented to the whole Faubourg St. Germain, beheld his patron, La Rochefoucault, in the position of a disappointed man. An early adventure of his youth had humbled, perhaps, the host of the Hôtel de Rochefoucault. At the battle of St. Antoine, where he had distinguished himself, 'a musket-ball had nearly deprived him of sight. On this occasion he had quoted these lines, taken from the tragedy of Alcyonnée.' It must, however, be premised that the famous Duchess de Longueville had urged him to engage in the wars of the Fronde. To her these lines were addressed : 6 'Pour mériter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux, But now he had broken off his intimacy with the duchesse, and he therefore parodied these lines :— 'Pour ce cœur inconstant, qu'enfin je connais mieux, Nevertheless, La Rochefoucault was still the gay, charming, witty host and courtier. Racine composed, in 1660, his 'Nymphe de Seine, in honour of the marriage of Louis XIV., and was then brought into notice of those whose notice was no empty compliment, such as, in our day, illustrious dukes pay to more illustrious authors, by asking them to be jumbled in a crowd at a time when the rooks are beginning to caw. We catch, as they may, the shadow of a dissolving water-ice, or see the exit |