He was visited as a curiosity, as a clever
buffoon, and those who came to see, remained to laugh. He kept them all
alive by his coarse, easy, impudent wit; in which there was more
vulgarity and dirtiness than ill-nature. He had a fund of _bonhommie_,
which set his visitors at their ease, for no one was afraid of being
bitten by the chained dog they came to pat. His salon became famous; and
the admission to it was a diploma of wit. He kept out all the dull, and
ignored all the simply great. Any man who could say a good thing, tell a
good story, write a good lampoon, or mimic a fool, was a welcome guest.
Wits mingled with pedants, courtiers with poets. Abbes and gay women
were at home in the easy society of the cripple, and circulated freely
round his dumb-waiter.
The ladies of the party were not the most respectable in Paris, yet some
who were models of virtue met there, without a shudder, many others who
were patterns of vice. Ninon de l'Enclos--then young--though age made no
alteration in _her_--and already slaying her scores, and ruining her
hundreds of admirers, there met Madame de Sevigne, the most respectable,
as well as the most agreeable, woman of that age.
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