To return to the official female fool, we must go back to the Court of the father of the King, under whom this lady lived, namely, the Court of Henri IV. There was there a Mathurine, who seems to have held the office of _Plaisante_, not to the Queen exclusively, but for the benefit and amusement of the Court generally. Of what quality was the wit of these _plaisantes_, some of whom I think were dwarfs, I am unable to say; the only certain fact I can tell of them is, that they, though not more than the male fools, continued to wear out the soles of their shoes with great rapidity. The registers of accounts show an extraordinary consumption of shoe leather. In the ‘_Collection de la Chambre des Comptes_,’ under the year 1319, thirty-two pairs of shoes are set down as having been supplied _at one time_ to the Queen’s dwarf! It is said of Mathurine that she employed her wit in laughing people out of the Huguenot faith into Catholicism. Mathurine was present in 1594 when Jean Chastel wounded Henri, in his attempt on that king’s life, and she ran great risk of sharing the fate of the would-be assassin, for the monarch, aware of her frantic zeal for the Roman Catholic Church, and that she only looked on Henri as half a Romanist, or believing that she was playing too serious a joke by right of her office, ordered her under arrest as an accomplice. Mathurine, however, proved her innocence, and was set free. She died previous to the year 1627. De Tillot quotes two authors who make mention of this female fool, Mathurine. The first is the anonymous author of ‘La Lunatique,’ who, addressing the King’s male jester, “Maître Guillaume,” remarks: “Thou doest well to have small love for the Reformers. Satan himself looks on them only with regret; and for a good reason, seeing that if the Reformers could have their way, there would soon be an end of court fools and buffoons. Ah, poor Mathurine, and you poor fellows, Angoulevent, Maître Guillaume, and indeed all you other fools, as well without hoods as with, where would all your pensions be if the Reformers had the upper hand?” It is a significant fact, this, of the Reformers being the opponents of the expensive follies, and their professors, patronized at Court. Ogive, the second author cited by De Tillot, speaks also of Mathurine, as a salaried fool, appointed by the King: “Folle à gages, et appointée du Roi.” He writes, in 1627, saying, “Truly it is a marvellous thing that noble personages, who have been brought up all their lives with the parrots and apes of the Louvre, and who do not less belong to the Court than Mathurine did, or the Queen-Mother’s dwarfs _do_, should not have learnt in their cabinets to write reasonably.”