When Richelieu died, and the gentler, but more subtle Mazarin mounted his throne, Madame de Hautefort made another attempt to present her protege to the queen, and this time succeeded.  Anne of Austria had heard of the quaint little man who could laugh over a lawsuit in which his whole fortune was staked, and received him graciously.  He begged for some place to support him.  What could he do?  What was he fit for?  ’Nothing, your majesty, but the important office of The Queen’s Patient; for that I am fully qualified.’  Anne smiled, and Scarron from that time styled himself ‘par la grace de Dieu, le malade de la Reine.’  But there was no stipend attached to this novel office.  Mazarin procured him a pension of 500 crowns.  He was then publishing his ’Typhon, or the Gigantomachy,’ and dedicated it to the cardinal, with an adulatory sonnet.  He forwarded the great man a splendidly bound copy, which was accepted with nothing more than thanks.  In a rage the author suppressed the sonnet and substituted a satire.  This piece was bitterly cutting, and terribly true.  It galled Mazarin to the heart, and he was undignified enough to revenge himself by cancelling the poor little pension of L60 per annum which had previously been granted to the writer.  Scarron having lost his pension, soon afterwards asked for an abbey, but was refused.  ‘Then give me,’ said he, ’a simple benefice, so simple, indeed, that all its duties will be comprised in believing in God.’  But Scarron had the satisfaction of gaining a great name among the cardinal’s many enemies, and with none more so than De Retz, then coadjuteur[27] to the Archbishop of Paris, and already deeply implicated in the Fronde movement.  To insure the favour of this rising man, Scarron determined to dedicate to him a work he was just about to publish, and on which he justly prided himself as by far his best.  This was the ‘Roman Comique,’ the only one of his productions which is still read.  That it should be read, I can quite understand, on account not only of the ease of its style, but of the ingenuity of its improbable plots, the truth of the characters, and the charming bits of satire which are found here and there, like gems amid a mass of mere fun.  The scene is laid at Mans, the town in which the author had himself perpetrated his chief follies; and many of the characters were probably drawn from life, while it is likely enough that some of the stories were taken from facts which had there come to his knowledge.  As in many of the romances of that age, a number of episodes are introduced into the main story, which consists of the adventures of a strolling company.  These are mainly amatory, and all indelicate, while some are as coarse as anything in French literature.  Scarron had little of the clear wit of Rabelais to atone for this; but he makes up for it, in a measure, by the utter absurdity of some of his incidents.  Not the least curious part of the book is the Preface, in which he gives a description of himself, in order