The Comtesse Diane, more inclined to literary pursuits than her sister-in-law, one day, recommended her to read the "Iliad" and "Odyssey." The latter replied, laughing, that she was perfectly acquainted with the Greek poet, and said to prove it: "Homere etait aveugle et jouait du hautbois." (Homer was blind and played on the hautboy.) [This lively repartee of the Duchesse de Polignac is a droll imitation of a line in the "Mercure Galant." In the quarrel scene one of the lawyers says to his brother quill: 'Ton pere etait aveugle et jouait du hautbois.'] The Queen found this sort of humour very much to her taste, and said that no pedant should ever be her friend.
Before the Queen fixed her assemblies at Madame de Polignac's, she occasionally passed the evening at the house of the Duc and Duchesse de Duras, where a brilliant party of young persons met together.

They introduced a taste for trifling games, such as question and answer, 'guerre panpan', blind man's buff, and especially a game called 'descampativos'.

The people of Paris, always criticising, but always imitating the customs of the Court, were infected with the mania for these childish sports.

Madame de Genlis, sketching the follies of the day in one of her plays, speaks of these famous 'descampativos'; and also of the rage for making a friend, called the 'inseparable', until a whim or the slightest difference might occasion a total rupture..