John has been under my care only five months. When he first came to my school I feared that he would never make a good scholar. He talks as well as the oldest members of the Institute, and is au fait in the common topics of the day. Deaf and Dumb Institute, Philadelphia.

ΜΑΙΝΤΕΝΟΝ.

ter at the mistakes which my-new-pupils have made in writing. On Saturday morning I wrote on a slate the word "hell," which I defined to be a place where condemned sinners suffer burning torments. A few days after one of my boys, who retains, to some extent, the power of speech, wrote on his slate the following sentence: "I see a hell." On my asking the meaning of this sentence, he pointed to a grate hard by. He thought the grate ROMANCE IN REAL LIFE; OR, MADAME DE was called hell. A little girl, whose mind is good but lacks energy, wrote: "I see a heaven." She thought that heaven was no other than the sky. She made many curious blunders, some specimens of which I shall insert, as expressive of the peculiar turn of her mind: "I see a meat ;" "I see a eye;" "I love a nose;" "I touch ageration in the phrase. Born in a prison, and tongue;" "A boy strikes a hand;" "I break a neck;" "I eat a tea;" "I love a snow;" "I love like rain;" "I catches a ceiling;" "A man a dog catches."

I asked the girl what was my name, and she spelled "Mount." I then asked if she liked me. A nod of the head was her reply. I then desired her to write something like the following: I like Mr. Mount. And the following was written: "I like the Mount."

Another girl pays no attention to the elementary principles of grammar, and always makes mistakes. For instance she writes, "A like a meat." "I man love pontaneux "-she means a potato. "A sun sees I." "I boy makes stool."

John is the smartest boy in my class, and learns as many words as he meets with in books or papers. I gave out some words, such as eat, like, love, make, break, drink, strike, and hate, and told him to construct passages in which the respective words should be introduced. He did so. "EAT.-I eat meat. I eat bread. A cow eats grass. A hog eats corn. A boy eats an apple. A man eats some mush. A boy eats a watermelon."

"THE

HE position of Madame de Maintenon," observes Madame de Sevigne, "is perfectly unique. Nothing ever was, nor probably ever will be compared to it." History in hand, we must acknowledge that there is but little exag

dying within the shadow of the crown, there is hardly an extreme of elevation or distress that may not be marked, in the long career of whom fortune favored so late that the tardy luster left in obscurity the charms, the graces, the fame of her early years. Appointed to tend poultry in her childhood, and scarcely less than queen in her maturity; the bride in little more than girlhood of a needy and deformed poet, and, when the bloom of womanhood was past, the consort of the man who had said, "I am the state!" now bound to the chair of the crippled Scarron, and now to the throne of Louis XIV-in a destiny thus strangely diversified we may be allowed to recognize something akin to the marvelous.

When the famous Agrippa d'Aubigne, at the end of his Memoirs, speaks of his son, Constantine d'Aubigne-the father of Madame do Maintenon-he premises that he would rather have remained silent, the information he has to communicate being “un facheux detail de ma famille." "The rascal," says the doughty comrade of Henri IV, "did nothing but gamble and get drunk at the University of Sedar, where I sent him to pursue his academical studies, and when

"LIKE.-I like Mount [referring to the teacher.] he returned to France he thought fit, without my I like meat. I like the man."

I

"LOVE.-I love bread. I love the snow. love my book. I love you. A man loves a good boy."

a fire.

consent, to marry an unfortunate woman, whom he afterward killed!" She was not the mother of any of his children. After many strange adventures and alternations of bad and good fortune, "MAKE.-A man makes bread. A boy makes such as were not uncommon to the troubled times A girl makes a doll." in which he lived, he won the affections of a lady “BREAK.—A man breaks a rod. A boy breaks of noble birth, to whom he was married on the a slate. A girl breaks her needle." 27th of December, 1627. At the end of four or DRINK.-A girl drinks water. A boy drinks five years, having spent the last farthing of his soup. A man drinks hot tea." patrimony, M. d'Aubigne embraced some project "STRIKE.-A boy strikes a girl. A girl strikes for establishing himself in Carolina. In furtherthe wall." ance of the scheme, he entered into negotiations “HATE.—I hate a snake. A man hates a bad with the English Government, which were deboy. A girl hates a hog." tected and deemed treasonable. He was impris

44

oned in consequence in the fortress of ChateauTrompette, under the jailership of his own fatherin-law, M. de Cardillac, at whose death he was transferred to Niort in Poitou. In the Conciergerie of this prison Madame d'Aubigne gave birth, on the 27th of November, 1635, to her daughter Francoise, the future spouse of Louis XIV. A sister of Constant d'Aubigne's, Madame de Villette, took pity upon his children, and carried them to a chateau where she resided, not far distant from Niort. In 1638 Madame d'Aubigne obtained her husband's release, and shortly after he embarked with the whole of his family for Martinique. Fortune this time allowed herself to be caught. The talents which sufficed to gain money, failed, however, to induce the prudence which retains it. The chances of play swept away his newly-acquired wealth in far less time than it had cost him to accumulate it, and he died discharging the duties of a small military employment, of which the scanty pay barely sufficed to keep his family from want. At his death his widow returned to France with her children, and this arrival of our little heroine from the colonies, before she had completed her tenth year, led to the subsequent belief that she was a native of the tropics. Hence the name of "La belle Indienne," so generally applied to her upon her first entrance into society at Paris. As to Madame d'Aubigne, her whole time, till the day of her death, seems to have been divided between the manual labor by which she gained a scanty subsistence, and the fruitless endeavors to obtain from relations richer than herself certain moneys and lands which Agrippa d'Aubigne, while disinheriting his worthless son, had yet bequeathed to his heirs. She was so severe a mother that Madame de Maintenon used to relate that she had never been embraced by her but twice, and this after a long separation. But she chanced to render her daughter one enormous service. She set her to read the "Lives of Plutarch"-a work which has nourished the early growth of so many great minds-and forbade her and her brother to speak of any thing else. With the ready ingenuity of children they converted the task into an eager rivalry of sex. She espoused the cause of the women, he of the men. When she had vaunted the qualities of a heroine, he opposed the acts of a hero, and she returned to her Plutarch to find new matter to sustain the supremacy of her sex. A thousand formal lessons, in which the mind had a feeble interest, would have done little for her education in comparison with this earnest application of her powers.

66

more intrusted to the care of her aunt. "I fear the poor little wretch," writes her mother, "may be of no small inconvenience to you; God grant her the means of one day requiting all the kindness you show her!" How well the aunt discharged her office is sufficiently attested by the gratitude felt by the child for her benefactress. "I am ready to believe any thing," she said in childhood during a course of religious instruction, so long as I am not required to believe my aunt de Villette will be damned!" The answer was given after she had been transferred, by an order from the court, from the care of Madame de Villette, who was a Calvinist, to that of Madame de Neuillant, another near relation, and a zealous Catholic. This lady, finding an unexpected resistance to her doctrines in spite of the professed readiness of her pupil to believe in any thing, resolved upon trying the efficacy of humiliation. She ordered her ward to be banished from the drawing-room and confined to the society of the servants. Dressed in a coarse straw hat, with a basket on her arm and a long stick in her hand, the future wife of the king of France was sent out every morning to keep watch over turkeys, and her "reign," as she used to say in after years, "began by dominion over the poultry-yard." Madame de Neuillant was even more avaricious than bigoted, and the Marquis de la Fare asserts that the young Francoise was set to discharge these menial offices from motives of economy. He had heard that she was compelled, in the absence of the coachman, to groom the horses. The only thing which this harsh guardian appears to have cherished was the poor girl's complexion, since she was made to wear a mask, that she might escape being tanned.

This system of compulsion producing no effect, it was decided to place her in the Convent of Ursulines at Niort; but the sordid avarice of Madame de Neuillant soon left her to be supported by the sisters, who returned her to her mother. She was shortly after admitted into the Ursuline Convent of the Rue Saint Jacques, in Paris, where at first the nuns succeeded no better than their precursors in the task of converting her. "My mother's harsh conduct to me at this time," she says in one of her entretiens, or rather lectures to the Demoiselle de Saint Cyr, "had so irritated me, that, probably, if I had remained longer with her I should never have embraced the Catholic faith." Methods as mistaken were adopted by the sisters of the Ursuline Convent. She says:

"Whenever they met me, they each of them When she got back to France she was once played a sort of part; one would run away, another

she was her relative, left her without clothing from avarice." The short and scanty dress was disappearing altogether.

the process would be reversed, and that it was to his having been the husband of a “king's wife" that he would principally owe the recollection of his name by posterity.

The orphan had formed an attachment to a girl at Paris of her own age, and writing to her from The once famous though licentious author of Niort, in 1650-"I can not," she says, "express the "Roman Comique" was not always the to you upon paper all I feel; I have neither courwretched Caliban, whose image has descended to age nor wit sufficient. I promise you half, and us as a type of grotesque deformity. Up to the the remainder when I shall be as clever as M. age of twenty-seven he was a handsome man, Scarron." This was shown to the poet, and so and distinguished for his skill in music and dancspontaneous a tribute was not lost upon him. He ing. Different versions have been given of the immediately took up his pen and addressed his cause of his deformity. Tallemant des Reaux admirer in the words we have quoted above. states that it was a medicine administered by a When Mme. de Neuillant revisited Paris, she quack which deprived him of the use of his brought her fair charge with her. The twelve limbs. months which had elapsed had contributed to develop her understanding and beauty; and her second appearance in the beau monde of Scarron's soirees produced a still livelier impression than the first. "I wish you would give me some news of that young Indian, to whom you introduced me, and whom I loved from the moment I saw her," writes the Duchess de Lesdiguieres to the Chevalier de Mere; and a similar sentiment appears to have been general in the circle. Scarron felt so much for her misery in being subject to the penurious tyranny of Mme. de Neuillant, that, constantly as he was in need of money, he offered her a sum sufficient to procure her admission into a convent. She declined the proposal; and by degrees the idea of a retreat that was to separate her from every one became transformed into the notion of a union that was to bind her exclusively to himself. This project of a marriage between a buffoon-rhymster of forty-two and a girl of sixteen was termed by himself "a mighty poetic license." But any thing seemed better than to live on with Mme. de Neuillant; and as to the other alternative, she frankly avowed to her acquaintances, according to Tallemant des Reaux, "I preferred marriage with Scarron to a convent." The homage she saw him receiving, and the intoxicating elevation to a girl who was trampled on at home, of presiding over the brilliant society which assembled at this house, had a large share in determining her choice.

Accordingly, in the month of June, 1652, she became Mme. Scarron. Such was her poverty that her wedding-dress was lent for the occasion by Mlle. de Pons. The account which her husband gave of his property was far enough from promising. To the question of the notary, "what jointure he insured her?" the poet replied, "Immortality! the names of kings' wives die with themselves, but the name of Scarron's wife will endure eternally!" No suspicion crossed his mind that

In one of his poems he speaks of having been thrown from a vehicle, and his neck was twisted by the fall in a way which ever after prevented his looking upward. Whatever was the origin of his maladies, “his form," to use his own words, "had become bent like a Z." "My legs," he adds, "first made an obtuse angle with my thighs, then a right and at last an acute angle; my thighs made another with my body. My head is bent upon my chest; my arms are contracted as well as my legs, and my fingers as well as my arms. I am, in truth, a pretty complete abridgment of human misery." His head was too big for his diminutive stature, one eye was set deeper than the other, and his teeth were the color of wood. At the time of his marriage he could only move with freedom his hand, tongue, and eyes. His days were passed in a chair with a hood, and so completely was he the abridgment of man he describes himself, that his wife had to kneel to look in his face. He could not be moved without screaming from pain, nor sleep without taking opium. The epitaph which he wrote on himself, and which is very superior to his usual style of versification, is touching from its truth:

"Tread softly-make no noise,
To break his slumbers deep;
Poor Scarron here enjoys

His first calm night of sleep."

Yet with all his infirmities his cheerfulness was imperturbable. "It is, perhaps," says Tallemant des Reaux, "one of the wonders of our age, that a man in that state, and poor, should be able to laugh as he does." "The Prometheus, the Hercules, and the Philoctetes of fable, and the Job of the holy Scriptures," says another cotemporary writer, Balzec, "utter, in the violence of their torments, many sublime and heroic things, but no comical ones. I have often met in antiquity with pain that was wise, and with pain that was elo

quent; but I never before saw pain joyous, nor found a soul merrily cutting capers in a paralytic frame."

of literature and art, the former in turn became the guest in the salons of Scarron.

The society which collected about the burlesque poet was probably the principal solace of his life. The method by which he succeeded in attracting so much rank, fashion, and talent round his hooded chair is not easy to conjecture. "Kind, serviceable, faithful in friendship," says Segrais, "he was invariably agreeable and amusing, even in anger or in sorrow." With a man so poor and afflicted, this was a slender resource for constituting him the center of one of the most brilliant circles in Paris. Even his powers of entertaining are less favorably represented by Tallemant des Reaux. "He sometimes," says this rather cynical

On the death of his father in 1643, Scarron's inheritance was little more than a lawsuit with his step-mother, which he lost almost simultaneously with his health. A pension, paid him by Cardinal Richelieu, expired with that statesman in 1642. He had recourse to his pen for support, and in 1644 he published "The Typhon, or War of the Giants against the Gods," dedicated to Cardinal Mazarin. Two or three years later appeared the "Virgile Travesti," to which he owed his fame, and which won for him the incongruous epithets of "the divine" and "the inimitable." So great was the rage for his works that the book-writer, "lets drop a humorous observation, but not sellers called every poem "Burlesque ;" and there was one instance of a sacred and entirely serious piece being announced as written en vers berlesques. It was to no purpose, that some high authorities tried to check this perverse tendency. "Even your father," observed Boileau to Racine's son, "had the defect of sometimes reading Scarron, and laughing over him, though he always concealed this from me." But Boileau was hardly more severe to the creator of burlesque poetry in France than Scarron was to himself. "I am ready to attest before any one," he declares in the dedicatory epistle of the fifth book of his "Eneide Travestie," "that the paper I employ for my writings is only so much paper wasted. The whole of these parodies, and my 'Virgil' at the head, are rank absurdities. It is a style which has spoiled the taste of all the world."

often. He is always trying to be facetious, which is the way to defeat the intention." The account is too probable to be entirely rejected. His reputation was founded upon his talents for jest, and what remains to us of his writings and sayings leads to the conclusion that his ambition was always to sustain his part. But, though the motive which originally brought the gay world of Paris to his door is not apparent, the custom, once established, was kept up without effort. Then it was not Scarron only that people went to see, but the celebrities of whom each was an attraction to the other.

At the time of his marriage in 1652 Scarron had enjoyed his fame and its advantages for about eight years. He assigned as his reason for the match "that it was to insure society, for that otherwise people would not come to see him. If his guests had begun to drop off, the method he took to win them back was entirely successful. Tallemant des Reaux himself allows the exceeding popularity of his youthful wife. In her old age she gave a curious and self-complacent account of the estimation in which she was held at this period, and the mode by which she obtained it:

Much, however, as he may have condemned the productions of his pen, Scarron was reduced to live by them, and this he was wont to call his Marquisat de Quinet, from the name of the bookseller who published his works. Although he has himself styled his house l'Hotel de l'Impecuniosite, we learn from Segrais, that he was "very creditably lodged, that his furniture was covered with yellow damask of the value of five or six thousand livres, that he wore garments of fine velvet, and had several servants at his command." Here it was that he received the beaux-esprits and court gallants of the time at his evening reunions and suppers-here that noble and high-born dames mixed freely with Menage, Benserade, and PelisThat no species of celebrity might be wanting them. When I was with that poor cripple I ing, even the too famous Ninon de l'Enclos-the modern Leontium-was to be seen exchanging courtesies with virtuous ladies who would have scorned to receive her at their own houses. It has been truly remarked that if, at the Hotel Rambouillet, the great world received the world

son.

"In my tender years I was what is called a good child; every body loved me: there was no one, down to the domestics of my aunt, who were not charmed with me. When I was older and I was placed in those convents, you know how I was cherished by my mistresses and companions and always for the same reason, that from morning to night I only thought of serving and oblig

found myself in the fashionable world, where I was sought after and esteemed. The women loved me because I was unassuming in society, and much more taken up with others than with myself. The men followed me because I had the beauty and graces of youth. The partiality