tumult occasioned by a great wedding passing through the street. For
some time he roved about Italy in an indigent and distressed condition,
till he was hospitably received by the Lord of Ravenna, his patron and
friend.

Paul Scarron, whose life abounds with curious features, married
Mademoiselle d'Aubigne, afterwards the celebrated Madame de Maintenon,
who was at that time only sixteen years of age. On his marriage, the
notary asked him what dowry he would settle upon his wife? he replied,
"Immortality: the names of the wives of kings die with them, but the
name of Scarron's wife shall live for ever." He was accustomed to talk
to his superiors with great freedom, and in a very jocular style. In a
dedication to the king, he thus addressed his majesty: "I shall
endeavour to persuade your majesty, that you would do yourself no
injury, were you to do me a small favour; for in that case I should
become gay. If I should become more gay, I should write sprightly
comedies; and if I should write sprightly comedies, your majesty would
be amused, and thus your money would not be lost. All this appears so
evident that I should certainly be convinced of it, if I were as great a
king as I am now a poor unfortunate man." Scarron took pleasure in
reading his works to his friends, as he composed them; he used to call
it trying them. Segrais and another person coming to him one day, "Take
a chair," he said, "and sit down, that I may examine my Comic Romance."
When he saw them laugh very heartily, he said he was satisfied, "my book
will be well received since it makes persons of such delicate taste
laugh." He was not disappointed in his expectations, for the Romance had
a great run. In the year 1638, he was attending the Carnival at Mons, of
which he was a canon. Having put on the dress of a savage, he was
followed by a troop of boys into a morass, where he was kept so long,
that the cold penetrated his debilitated limbs, which became contracted
in such a manner, that he used to compare his body to the shape of a Z.
He died in 1660, at the age of fifty; he said to his friends who
surrounded his dying bed, "I shall never make you weep so much as I have
made you laugh." In his epitaph, made by himself, he desires, in a
mixture of the comic and the pathetic, that the passengers would not
awaken, by their noise, poor Scarron from the first good sleep he had
ever enjoyed.

P.T.W.

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THE SELECT