In the latter spirit, he humbled himself before Mazarin, in spite of the publication of his ‘Mazarinade,’ and was, as he might have expected, repulsed.  He then turned to Fouquet, the new Surintendant de Finances, who was liberal enough with the public money, which he so freely embezzled, and extracted from him a pension of 1,600 francs (about L64).  In one way or another, he got back a part of the property his stepmother had alienated from him, and obtained a prebend in the diocese of Mans, which made up his income to something more respectable.

He was now able to indulge to the utmost his love of society.  In his apartment, in the Rue St. Louis, he received all the leaders of the Fronde, headed by De Retz, and bringing with them their pasquinades on Mazarin, which the easy Italian read and laughed at and pretended to heed not at all.  Politics, however, was not the staple of the conversation at Scarron’s.  He was visited as a curiosity, as a clever 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.