According to popular tradition, Caillette was to Triboulet, what the simpleton in the _Auberge des Adrets_ was to Robert Macaire,--the scapegoat for the other’s offences. He was, we are told, idiotic, or pretended to be so; and when witty, it was more after the fashion of a clown in a pantomime, than that of a happy low comedian, to which Triboulet may sometimes be compared; though the latter occasionally interfered with politics and spoke little brilliant things like a fine gentleman in a comedy. Jean Marot, however, says of him, that he had as much wit when he was thirty as when he was three years old. The court pages, say the biographers, could do as they pleased with Caillette, and on one occasion they nailed him by the ear to a beam. The poor fool thought he was condemned to remain there for life. On being discovered by some police authority, he was questioned; but he only replied that he did not know who had fixed him there. The pages were confronted with him, but each declared in turn, “I had nothing to do with it,” and each time, Caillette added, “And I had nothing to do with it either.” The alleged offence was, that the fool had cut off a page’s aiguillettes and attached them to his person in the guise of a tail. A similar story is told of Triboulet by the “Bibliophile Jacob” (Paul Lacroix) in his ‘Deux Fous,’ to which volume I am indebted for many antiquarian details touching the discipline of jesters at French courts, as well as for various incidents in the lives both of Triboulet and his rival Caillette. Tradition, without bringing down to us any samples of the quality of Caillette, was long inconsistent with itself, by diversely representing this jester, now as a sorry, and at other times as a very brilliant, practitioner of his craft. There can be little doubt of the existence of a father and son of this name and office; and Paul Lacroix has followed out this idea in his work, noticed above. According to this writer, who, it is necessary to remember, mingles a good deal of fiction with his antiquarian facts, the elder Caillette was a very inferior wit to Triboulet, and hung himself out of vexation at having been defeated by him at a match of cudgelling of brains. I do not know how much of reality or how much of merely fanciful is included in the following details; some portions may be less _vrai_ than _vraisemblable_, and with this warning, I place before my readers an outline of the younger Caillette, whose elaborate full-length has been superbly painted by a master in the romance of history.