The wretchedness of poor Scarron, at whose jests, burlesques, and buffooneries all France was laughing, may be guessed at from his own description. 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 (to the beautiful and gifted Mademoiselle d'Aubigne, afterward Madame de Maintenon, the wife for thirty years of Louis XIV.!) he could only move with freedom his hand, tongue, and eyes. His days were passed in a chair with a hood, and so completely 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 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." Balzac said of him, "I have often met in antiquity with pain that was wise, and with pain that was eloquent; but I never before saw pain joyous, nor found a soul merrily cutting capers in a paralytic frame." He continued to jest to the last; and seeing the bystanders in tears, he said, "I shall never, my friends, make you weep as much as I have made you laugh."