“Le Roi, l’Etat, la Patrie,
  Partagent toute votre vie.”

That is a sample of their value.  Quack-medicine poets often do as well.  He wrote “Adonis” for Fouquet, and had worked three years at the “Songe de Vaux,” when the ruin of his patron caused him to lay it aside.  It is a dull piece.  Four fairies, Palatiane, Hortesie, Apellanire, and Calliopee, make long speeches about their specialty in Art, as seen at Vaux.  Their names sufficiently denote it.  A fish comes as ambassador from Neptune to Vaux, the glory of the universe, where Oronte (Fouquet’s alias, in the affected jargon of the period)

    “fait batir un palais magnifique,
  Ou regne l’ordre Ionique
  Avec beaucoup d’agrement.”

Apollo comes and promises to take charge of the live-stock, and of the picture-gallery.  The Muses, too, are busy.

  “Pour lui Melpomene medite,
  Thalie en est jalouse,”—­

and soon—­

Fouquet’s physician, Pecquet, is well known to physiologists by his treatise, “De Motu Chyli,” and by “Pecquet’s reservoir.”  His patron was warmly interested in the new discoveries in circulation, which were then, and so long after, violently opposed by the Purgons and the Diafoirus of the old school.  The Surintendant’s judgment was equally good in Art.  Le Brun, the painter, owed fame and fortune to him.  He gave him twelve thousand livres a year, besides paying a fixed price for each of his works.  With the exception of Renaudot’s journal, Loret’s weekly gazette, published in the shape of a versified letter to Mademoiselle de Longueville, was the only newspaper in France.  Fouquet furnished the editor with money and with items.  He allowed Scarron sixteen hundred livres a year, when Mazarin struck his name from the pension-list, as punishment for a “Mazarinade,” the only squib of the kind the Cardinal had ever noticed.  Poor Scarron was hopelessly paralyzed, and bedridden.  He had been a comely, robust fellow in his youth, given to dissipated courses.  In a Carnival frolic, he appeared in the streets with two companions in the character of bipeds with feathers,—­a scanty addition to Plato’s definition of man.  This airy costume was too much for French modesty, proverbially shrinking and sensitive.  The mob hooted and gave chase.  The maskers fled from the town and hid themselves in a marsh to evade pursuit.  The result of this venturesome travestissement was the death of both his friends, and an attack of inflammatory rheumatism which twisted Scarron for life into the shape of the letter Z.