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, 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.
[27] Coadjuteur.—A high office in the Church of Rome.
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.
The 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.