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