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François de La Mothe Le Vayer is a paradoxical figure among 17th-century French free-thinkers, as a radical skeptic, allegedly an unbeliever, and a tutor of the royal family long tied to the court. This article aims to find a connection between his intellectual marginality and his political centrality through his social trajectory, focusing on the royal tutorship and using notarial and monarchic documents. Such an outlook proves useful for situating libertinage within learned Parisian society, for describing scholars’ proactivity within the monarchic system, and, for understanding the circumstantial evolution of a long-term patronage into a full political protection.