Marriage had not by any means fixed his inconstant tastes. Marie Héricart, whom he had been induced to marry in 1647, was endowed with beauty and intellect, but was unsupplied with those solid qualities, love of order, industry, and that firmness of character which might have exercised a wholesome discipline over her husband. Whilst she was reading romances, La Fontaine sought amusement away from home, or brooded either over his own poems or those of his favourite authors. The natural consequence was, that the affairs of the young people soon fell into disorder; in addition to this, when La Fontaine's father died, he left our poet an inheritance encumbered with mortgages, which had been the only means of paying debts, and preserving the family estate intact; these became fresh sources of embarrassment to our poet, who being, as may well be supposed, anything but a man of business, incapable of self-denial, and unassisted by his wife, soon, as he himself gaily expressed it, devoured both capital and income, and in a few years found himself without either. La Fontaine seems to have confined his duties, as supervisor of woods and waters, to simply taking long rambles under the venerable trees of the forests submitted to his care, or to enjoying prolonged slumbers on the verdant banks of murmuring brooks. And that this was the case we may reasonably suppose, since at sixty years of age he declared that he did not know what foresters meant by round timber, ornamental timber, or <i>bois de touche.</i> His soul was wrapped up in poetry. His first poems were what might be called album verses, and could scarcely have been understood beyond Château-Thierry. These verses, however, obtained so favourable a reception, that at length he ventured to attempt a comedy. But, as the faculty of construction had been denied him, he only <i>adapted</i> one of Terence's plays, changing the names of the characters, and taking certain liberties with the situations. The piece which he had selected, the "Eunuchus," was very unsuited to the boards of the French stage, and he never attempted to get it produced; but he published it, and it was by means of this mediocre, although neatly versified work, that his name first became known to the public, when he had already entered his thirty-third year.