But his stepmother was not content with getting rid of young Paul, but had her eye also on his fortune, and therefore easily persuaded her husband that the service of the church was precisely the career for which the young reprobate was fitted.  There was an uncle who was Bishop of Grenoble, and a canonry could easily be got for him.  The fast youth was compelled to give in to this arrangement, but declined to take full orders; so that while drawing the revenue of his stall, he had nothing to do with the duties of his calling.  Then, too, it was rather a fashionable thing to be an abbe, especially a gay one.  The position placed you on a level with people of all ranks.  Half the court was composed of love-making ecclesiastics, and the soutane was a kind of diploma for wit and wickedness.  Viewed in this light, the church was as jovial a profession as the army, and the young Scarron went to the full extent of the letter allowed to the black gown.  It was only such stupid superstitious louts as those of Mans, who did not know anything of the ways of Paris life, who could object to such little freaks as he loved to indulge in.

The merry little 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.