Her ancestors had been noblemen of Normandy
before the Conqueror ever thought of crossing the English Channel, and
her grandfather, General Theodore d'Aubigne, had won distinction as a
soldier on many a battlefield. It was to her father, profligate and
spendthrift, who, after squandering his patrimony, had found himself
lodged in jail, that Francoise owed the ignominy of her birthplace, for
her mother had insisted on sharing the captivity of her ne'er-do-well
husband.

When at last Constant d'Aubigne found his prison doors opened, he shook
the dust of France off his feet and took his wife and young children
away to Martinique, where at least, he hoped, his record would not be
known. On the voyage, we are told, the child was brought so near to
death's door by an illness that her body was actually on the point of
being flung overboard when her mother detected signs of life, and
rescued her from a watery grave. A little later, in Martinique, she had
an equally narrow escape from death as the result of a snakebite. A
child thus twice miraculously preserved was evidently destined for
better things than an early tomb, more than one declared; and so indeed
it proved.

When the father ended his mis-spent days in the West Indian island, the
widow took her poverty and her fledgelings back to France, where
Francoise was placed under the charge of a Madame de Villette, to pick
up such education as she could in exchange for such menial work as
looking after Madame's poultry and scrubbing her floors. When her mother
in turn died, the child (she was only fifteen at the time) was taken to
Paris by an aunt, whose miserliness or poverty often sent her hungry to
bed.

Such was Francoise's condition when she was taken one day to the house
of Paul Scarron, the crippled poet, whose satires and burlesques kept
Paris in a ripple of merriment, and to whom the child's poverty and
friendless position made as powerful an appeal as her budding beauty and
her modesty. It was a very tender heart that beat in the pain-racked,
paralysed body of the "father of French burlesque"; and within a few
days of first setting eyes on his "little Indian girl," as he called
her, he asked her to marry him. "It is a sorry offer to make you, my
dear child," he said, "but it is either this or a convent." And, to
escape the convent, Francoise consented to become the wife of the
"bundle of pains and deformities" old enough to be her father.

In the marriage-contrac