Note 61 — CABINET CYCLOPÆDIA. (continued 5)

Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy, was one of those unfortunate men who, from some malconformity in the structure of their minds, inherit infamy from the use they make of their talents. His youth was spent in gambling, dissipation, duels, and all the disorders of a disorderly period. He was in the army during his early years, and became attached to the great Condé. He served under him when that prince blockaded Paris, and was one of the faction of young men of quality who attempted to govern the court on its return, and who received the name of Petits-Maîtres from the witty Parisians, a name afterwards preserved to designate young coxcombs of fashion in almost all countries. When Condé was arrested, he made war against the king in Berri. When liberated, he abandoned him. Insolent and presumptuous, he made an enemy of this great man as well as of Turenne. Bussy attacked the latter in a dull epigram. Turenne's reply was far more witty: he wrote to the king, that "Bussy was the best officer, for songs, that he had in his troop." In like manner, he at first paid his court to Fouquet, and afterwards caballed against him. He had frequently been imprisoned in the Bastille. In 1569 he was exiled. He amused himself during his banishment by writing his "Amours des Gaules," a scandalous history of the time, whose wit cannot redeem the infamy attached to his becoming the betrayer and chronicler of the faults and misfortunes of his friends. Allowed to return to court, he entered into a cabal for the ruin of the duchesse de la Vallière—his own was the consequence. Deprived of his employment, imprisoned in the Bastille, and afterwards exiled, he drank deep of the cup of disappointment and mortification. He continued his work in his retreat; but the exercise of malice and calumny did not compensate for being driven from the arena on which he delighted to figure. Sixteen years after, wards he was allowed to return to court; but it had then lost its charms, especially as the king did not regard him with an eye of favour, so he returned once again to his country retreat. He died in 1693, aged seventy-one. Ill brought up and uneducated, wit, sharpened by malice, was his chief talent. He wrote a pure style, but his letters are stiff and dull; and his chief work is remarkable for its license and malice rather than for talent.