The household she entered was indeed a villainous one.  Scarron rather gloried in his early delinquencies, and, to add to this, his two sisters had characters far from estimable.  One of them had been maid of honour to the Princesse de Conti, but had given up her appointment to become the mistress of the Duc de Tremes.  The laugher laughed even at his sister’s dishonour, and allowed her to live in the same house on a higher etage.  When, on one occasion, some one called on him to solicit the lady’s interest with the duke, he coolly said, ’You are mistaken; it is not I who know the duke; go up to the next storey.’  The offspring of this connection he styled ‘his nephews after the fashion of the Marais.’  Francoise did her best to reclaim this sister and to conceal her shame, but the laughing abbe made no secret of it.

But the laugher was approaching his end.  His attacks became more and more violent:  still he laughed at them.  Once he was seized with a terrible choking hiccup, which threatened to suffocate him.  The first moment he could speak he cried, ’If I get well, I’ll write a satire on the hiccup.’  The priests came about him, and his wife did what she could to bring him to a sense of his future danger.  He laughed at the priests and at his wife’s fears.  She spoke of hell.  ‘If there is such a place,’ he answered, ’it won’t be for me, for without you I must have had my hell in this life.’  The priests told him, by way of consolation, that ‘God had visited him more than any man.’—­He does me too much honour,’ answered the mocker.  ‘You should give him thanks,’ urged the ecclesiastic.  ‘I can’t see for what,’ was the shameless answer.

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: