On being liberated he went back to Paris, where he was not more fortunate than he had been in Italy, for he was committed to the Bastile, in 1675, whence he was transferred to the Châtelet. To his licentious conduct and writings he is said to have been indebted for his imprisonment, which lasted six months. He died about 1679. His principal works are, “Ovid in good humour,” which is a travestie upon part of the Metamorphoses; Claudian’s Rape of Proserpine burlesqued; and many poems in a similar style. Dassouci, who was sometimes called “the ape of Scarron,” received a lash from the satirical scourge of Boileau, and he complained heavily of the injury. In his Art of Poetry, Boileau thus alludes to the popularity which Dassouci had once enjoyed: “The scurviest joker charmed some kindred mind, And even Dassouci could readers find.” It must be owned, however, that in the works of “the emperor of the Burlesque,” there are some passages which prove that, though his taste and his morals were defective, he was not destitute of talent. The reader has seen that, with very few exceptions, the prisoners who have been mentioned in this chapter belonged to the courtier-class; that they were men who seemed to feel a difficulty of breathing whenever they did not inhale the vapours of a frivolous and voluptuous court. We ought always to abhor injustice, and therefore we must hate the power which was unjust to them; but they have no title to that liberal share of our pity which is the right of humbler victims, for it was an implied condition of their artificial existence that they should bend to a despot’s will; they purchased the smiles of their master, the pleasures, such as they were, of the Louvre and Versailles, and a portion of the public spoils, by the renunciation of their free agency, and by encountering the risk of being capriciously transferred from a palace to a dungeon. If, relying on his good luck, a man will venture to play with a gambler whom he knows to assert the privilege of now and then cogging the dice, his folly perhaps deserves more compassion than his misfortune.