Chapter 13 - Page 2

in question - very sketchable, if the sketcher could get
far enough away from it - is an elaborate little dusky
facade, overhanging the street, ornamented with panels
of stone, which are covered with delicate Renaissance
sculpture. A fat old woman, standing in the door of
a small grocer's shop next to it, - a most gracious old
woman, with a bristling moustache and a charming
manner, - told me what the house was, and also in-
dicated to me a rotten-looking brown wooden mansion,
in the same street, nearer the cathedral, as the Maison
Scarron. The author of the "Roman Comique," and
of a thousand facetious verses, enjoyed for some years,
in the early part of his life, a benefice in the cathedral
of Le Mans, which gave him a right to reside in one
of the canonical houses. He was rather an odd canon,
but his history is a combination of oddities. He wooed
the comic muse from the arm-chair of a cripple, and
in the same position - he was unable even to go down
on his knees - prosecuted that other suit which made
him the first husband of a lady of whom Louis XIV.
was to be the second. There was little of comedy in
the future Madame de Maintenon; though, after all,
there was doubtless as much as there need have been
in the wife of a poor man who was moved to compose
for his tomb such an epitaph as this, which I quote
from the "Biographie Universelle":-

"Celui qui cy maintenant dort,
Fit plus de pitie que d'envie,
Et souffrit mille fois la mort,
Avant que de perdre la vie.
Passant, ne fais icy de bruit,
Et garde bien qu'il ne s'eveille,
Car voicy la premiere nuit,
Que le Pauvre Scarron sommeille."

There is rather a quiet, satisfactory _place_ in front
of the cathedral, with some good "bits" in it; notably
a turret at the angle of one of the towers, and a very
fine, steep-roofed dwelling, behind low walls, which it
overlooks, with a tall iron gate. This house has two
or three little pointed towers, a big, black, precipitous
roof, and a general air of having had a history. There
are houses which are scenes, and there are houses
which are only houses. The trouble with the domestic
architecture of the United States is that it is not
scenic, thank Heaven! and the good fortune of an old
structure like the turreted mansion on the hillside of
Le Mans is that it is not simply a house. It is a per-
son, as it were, as well. It would be well, indeed, if
it might have communicated a little of its personality
to the front of the cathedral, which has none of its
own. Shabby, rusty, unfinished, this front has a
romanesque portal, but nothing in the way of a tower.
One sees from without, at a glance, the