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-BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
S.A. Bent, comp. Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. 1887.
Paul Scarron
[A French dramatist and comic writer; born in Paris, about 1610; having lost the use of his limbs by an accident at the age of twenty-seven, devoted himself to literature; died 1660.]
The names of the wives of kings die with them, but the name of Scarron’s wife shall live forever.
When the notary asked him what dowry he would give his wife, Mlle. d’Aubigné, afterwards Mme. de Maintenon.Being seized, during his last illness, with so violent a hiccough that it was thought he would die, he said, “If I recover, I will write a fine satire on the hiccough!” (Si je m’en reviens, oh, la belle satire que je ferai contre le hoquet!) His death was worthy the gayety with which he had supported a life of unremitted physical suffering. “My good friends,” he remarked to those at his bedside, “I shall never make you weep for me as much as I have made you laugh.” After a long fainting-fit he rallied sufficiently to bequeath fifty pounds of patience to the brothers of Corneille, and to his wife the permission to marry again, of which she profitably availed herself twenty-four years afterwards. His last words were, “I should never have thought it was so easy a matter to laugh at the approach of death” (Je ne me serais jamais imaginé qu’il füt si facile de se moquer de la mort).
