compromised the character of the daughter of his jailer,
and by her means escaped to America. He returned, and was again
arrested. His wife followed him to his cell; and it was in this cell
that the subject of this lecture was born (1635). Subsequently her
miserable father obtained his release, sailed with his family to
Martinique, and died there in extreme poverty. His wife, heart-broken,
returned to France, and got her living by her needle, until she too,
worn out by poverty and misfortune, died, leaving her daughter to
strive, as she had striven, with a cold and heartless world.

This daughter became at first a humble dependent on one of her rich
relatives; and "the future wife of Louis XIV. could be seen on a morning
assisting the coachmen to groom the horses, or following a flock of
turkeys, with her breakfast in a basket." But she was beautiful and
bright, and panted, like most ambitious girls, for an entrance into what
is called "society." Society at that time in France was brilliant,
intellectual, and wicked. "There was the blending of calculating
interest and religious asceticism," when women of the world, after
having exhausted its pleasures, retired to cloisters, and "sacrificed
their natural affections to family pride." It was an age of intellectual
idlers, when men and women, having nothing to do, spent their time in
_salons_, and learned the art of conversation, which was followed by the
art of letter-writing.

To reach the _salons_ of semi-literary and semi-fashionable people,
where rank and wealth were balanced by wit, became the desire of the
young Mademoiselle d'Aubigne. Her entrance into society was effected in
a curious way. At that time there lived in Paris (about the year 1650) a
man whose house was the centre of gay and literary people,--those who
did not like the stiffness of the court or the pedantries of the Hotel
de Rambouillet. His name was Scarron,--a popular and ribald poet, a
comic dramatist, a buffoon, a sort of Rabelais, whose inexhaustible wit
was the admiration of the city. He belonged to a good family, and
originally was a man of means. His uncle had been a bishop and his
father a member of the Parliament of Paris. But he had wasted his
substance in riotous living, and was reduced to a small pension from the
Government. His profession was originally that of a priest, and he
continued through life to wear the ecclesiastical garb. He was full of
maladies and miseries, and his only reli