abbe was soon the delight of the Marais. This distinct
and antiquated quarter of Paris was then the Mayfair of that capital.
Here lived in ease, and contempt of the bourgeoisie, the great, the gay,
the courtier, and the wit. Here Marion de Lorme received old Cardinals
and young abbes; here were the salons of Madame de Martel, of the
Comtesse de la Suze, who changed her creed in order to avoid seeing her
husband in this world or the next, and the famous--or infamous--Ninon de
l'Enclos; and at these houses young Scarron met the courtly
Saint-Evremond, the witty Sarrazin, and the learned but arrogant
Voiture. Here he read his skits and parodies, here travestied Virgil,
made epigrams on Richelieu, and poured out his indelicate but always
laughable witticisms. But his indulgences were not confined to
intrigues; he also drank deep, and there was not a pleasure within his
reach which he ever thought of denying himself. He laughed at religion,
thought morality a nuisance, and resolved to be merry at all costs.

The little account was brought in at last. At the age of five-and-twenty
his constitution was broken up. Gout and rheumatism assailed him
alternately or in leash. He began to feel the annoyance of the
constraint they occasioned; he regretted those legs which had figured
so well in a ronde or a minuet, and those hands which had played the
lute to dames more fair than modest; and to add to this, the pain he
suffered was not slight. He sought relief in gay society, and was
cheerful in spite of his sufferings. At length came the Shrove Tuesday
and the feathers; and the consequences were terrible. He was soon a prey
to doctors, whom he believed in no more than in the church of which he
was so great a light. His legs were no longer his own, so he was obliged
to borrow those of a chair. He was soon tucked down into a species of
dumb-waiter on castors, in which he could be rolled about in a party. In
front of this chair was fastened a desk, on which he wrote; for too wise
to be overcome by his agony, he drove it away by cultivating his
imagination, and in this way some of the most fantastic productions in
French literature were composed by this quaint little abbe.

Nor was sickness his only trial now. Old Scarron was a citizen, and had,
what was then criminal, sundry ideas of the liberty of the nation. He
saw with disgust the tyranny of Richelieu, and joined a party in the
Parliament to oppose the cardinal's measures. He even h