Among the frequenters of the court of Francis we occasionally meet with personages who had too much wit to be official _fous_, but whose humour was sometimes exercised like theirs, but without license. Their wit was enjoyed, but it was exercised at their risk and peril. Marot was one of those; and many are the stories of him that are little worth relating. Of the best of them, there is one which tells of his feigned simplicity, when he saw the French Ambassador at Rome kiss the Pope’s foot. “Merciful powers!” cried Marot, “if the representative of the King of France kisses his Holiness’s foot, what may a poor fellow like me be called upon to salute!” Marot, too, is the author of a smart saying that has been turned and re-turned in many a handbook of wit since his time. He was walking with a very fine court personage, who hated wits and poets, and who remarked to Marot, who was to the right of him, “I cannot bear, Marot, to have a fool on my right-hand.” “Can you not?” said the wit, slipping round to the left, “I can bear it very well!” This wit satirized with his pen the hypocritical priests as stingingly as Triboulet did with his tongue the nobles whom he hated; and he was, consequently, once menaced with the vengeance of a bishop on whom he had been particularly severe. “Oh!” remarked Marot, “I am in no anxiety, I know a place where I can easily escape the research of the bishop. I will go and sit in his library.” It is true, that though the especial duty of the _fou_ was to laugh and make laugh, and that he possessed not the privilege of weeping if choice or calamity urged him thereto, he had license of speech, and sometimes used it for the admonition as well as amusement of his master. In this respect, the _plaisant_ often became a political personage or agent of considerable importance; and an instance of this is recounted of Briandas, who was one of the official fools of Francis I., after the death of Triboulet, about the year 1538.