er
buffoon, and those who came to see, remained to laugh. He kept them all
alive by his coarse, easy, impudent wit; in which there was more
vulgarity and dirtiness than ill-nature. He had a fund of _bonhommie_,
which set his visitors at their ease, for no one was afraid of being
bitten by the chained dog they came to pat. His salon became famous; and
the admission to it was a diploma of wit. He kept out all the dull, and
ignored all the simply great. Any man who could say a good thing, tell a
good story, write a good lampoon, or mimic a fool, was a welcome guest.
Wits mingled with pedants, courtiers with poets. Abbes and gay women
were at home in the easy society of the cripple, and circulated freely
round his dumb-waiter.

The ladies of the party were not the most respectable in Paris, yet some
who were models of virtue met there, without a shudder, many others who
were patterns of vice. Ninon de l'Enclos--then young--though age made no
alteration in _her_--and already slaying her scores, and ruining her
hundreds of admirers, there met Madame de Sevigne, the most respectable,
as well as the most agreeable, woman of that age. Mademoiselle de
Scudery, leaving, for the time, her twelve-volume romance, about Cyrus
and Ibrahim, led on a troop of Moliere's Precieuses Ridicules, and here
recited her verses, and talked pedantically to Pellisson, the ugliest
man in Paris, of whom Boileau wrote:

'L'or meme a Pellisson donne un teint de beaute.'

Then there was Madame de la Sabliere, who was as masculine as her
husband the marquis was effeminate; the Duchesse de Lesdiguieres, who
was so anxious to be thought a wit that she employed the Chevalier de
Mere to make her one; and the Comtesse de la Suze, a clever but foolish
woman.

The men were poets, courtiers, and pedants. Menage with his tiresome
memory, Montreuil and Marigni the song-writers, the elegant De Grammont,
Turenne, Coligni, the gallant Abbe Tetu, and many another celebrity,
thronged the rooms where Scarron sat in his curious wheelbarrow.

The conversation was decidedly light; often, indeed, obscene, in spite
of the presence of ladies; but always witty. The hostility of Scarron to
the reigning cardinal was a great recommendation, and when all else
flagged, or the cripple had an unusually sharp attack, he had but to
start with a line of his 'Mazarinade,' and out came a fresh lampoon, a
new caricature, or fresh rounds of wit fired off at the Italian, from
the we