When the father ended his mis-spent days in the West Indian island, the widow took her poverty and her fledgelings back to France, where Francoise was placed under the charge of a Madame de Villette, to pick up such education as she could in exchange for such menial work as looking after Madame’s poultry and scrubbing her floors.  When her mother in turn died, the child (she was only fifteen at the time) was taken to Paris by an aunt, whose miserliness or poverty often sent her hungry to bed.

Such was Francoise’s condition when she was taken one day to the house of Paul Scarron, the crippled poet, whose satires and burlesques kept Paris in a ripple of merriment, and to whom the child’s poverty and friendless position made as powerful an appeal as her budding beauty and her modesty.  It was a very tender heart that beat in the pain-racked, paralysed body of the “father of French burlesque”; and within a few days of first setting eyes on his “little Indian girl,” as he called her, he asked her to marry him.  “It is a sorry offer to make you, my dear child,” he said, “but it is either this or a convent.”  And, to escape the convent, Francoise consented to become the wife of the “bundle of pains and deformities” old enough to be her father.

In the marriage-contract Scarron, with characteristic buffoonery, recognises her as bringing a dower of “four louis, two large and very expressive eyes, a fine bosom, a pair of lovely hands, and a good intellect”; while to the attorney, when asked what his contribution was, he answered, “I give her my name, and that means immortality.”  For eight years Francoise was the dutiful wife of her crippled husband, nursing him tenderly, managing his home and his purse, redeeming his writing from its coarseness, and generally proving her gratitude by a ceaseless devotion.  Then came the day when Scarron bade her farewell on his death-bed, begging her with his last breath to remember him sometimes, and bidding her to be “always virtuous.”

Thus Francoise d’Aubigne was thrown once more on a cold world, with nothing between her and starvation but Scarron’s small pension, which the Queen-mother continued to his widow, and compelled to seek a cheap refuge within convent walls.  She had however good-looks which might stand her in good stead.  She was tall, with an imposing figure and a natural dignity of carriage.  She had a wealth of light-brown hair, eyes dark and brilliant, full of fire and intelligence, a well-shaped nose, and an exquisitely modelled mouth.

Beautiful she was beyond doubt, in these days of her prime; but there were thousands of more beautiful women in France.  And for ten years Madame Scarron was left to languish within the convent walls with never a lover to offer her release.  When the Queen-mother died, and with her the pitiful pension, her plight was indeed pitiful.  Her petitions to the King fell on deaf ears, until Montespan, moved by her tears and entreaties, pleaded for her; and Louis at last gave a reluctant consent to continue the allowance.