Born in the American islands, where her father, perhaps a gentleman, had gone to seek his bread, and where he was stifled by obscurity, she returned alone and at haphazard into France.  She landed at La Rochelle, and was received in pity by Madame de Neuillant, mother of the Marechale Duchesse de Navailles, and was reduced by that avaricious old woman to keep the keys of her granary, and to see the hay measured out to her horses, as I have already related elsewhere.  She came afterwards to Paris, young, clever, witty, and beautiful, without friends and without money; and by lucky chance made acquaintance with the famous Scarron.  He found her amiable; his friends perhaps still more so.  Marriage with this joyous and learned cripple appeared to her the greatest and most unlooked-for good fortune; and folks who were, perhaps, more in want of a wife than he, persuaded him to marry her, and thus raise this charming unfortunate from her misery.

The marriage being brought about, the new spouse pleased the company which went to Scarron’s house.  It was the fashion to go there:  people of the Court and of the city, the best and most distinguished went.  Scarron was not in a state to leave his house, but the charm of his genius, of his knowledge, of his imagination, of that incomparable and ever fresh gaiety which he showed in the midst of his afflictions, that rare fecundity, and that humour, tempered by so much good taste that is still admired in his writings, drew everybody there.

Madame Scarron made at home all sorts of acquaintances, which, however, at the death of her husband, did not keep her from being reduced to the charity of the parish of Saint-Eustace.  She took a chamber for herself and for a servant, where she lived in a very pinched manner.  Her personal charms by degrees improved her condition.  Villars, father of the Marechal; Beuvron, father of D’Harcourt; the three Villarceaux, and many others kept her.

This set her afloat again, and, step by step, introduced her to the Hotel d’Albret, and thence to the Hotel de Richelieu, and elsewhere; so she passed from one house to the other.  In these houses Madame Scarron was far from being on the footing of the rest of the company.  She was more like a servant than a guest.  She was completely at the beck and call of her hosts; now to ask for firewood; now if a meal was nearly ready; another time if the coach of so-and-so or such a one had returned; and so on, with a thousand little commissions which the use of bells, introduced a long time after, differently disposes of.

It was in these houses, principally in the Hotel de Richelieu, much more still in the Hotel d’Albret, where the Marechal d’Albret lived in great state, that Madame Scarron made the majority of her acquaintances.  The Marechal was cousin-german of M. de Montespan, very intimate with him, and with Madame de Montespan.  When she became the King’s mistress he became her counsellor, and abandoned her husband.