Not without justice, Ninon, who about this time had in more ways than one drawn unfavourable public criticism upon herself, complains that she was really less culpable, infinitely more decorously behaved in society, than many of the titled and fashionable dames, whose behaviour, scandalous as it was, passed unchallenged. They were constantly promenading in the Place Royale, chattering at the top of their voices, ogling, smoking, taking snuff, adorning their mantles and hats with knots of ribbon of various colours, each conveying a different significance, and generally comporting themselves after the manner of the lowest of their sex. Ninon de L’Enclos had made a law unto herself, a law of liberty, and she made no pretence of not abiding by it; but she rarely sinned in outward decorum, or forgot the good breeding of her station.
In the matter of de Rambouillet, if she did not acknowledge the false step, it was probable she was made to feel conscious of it, and decided soon after to divert public attention to some other topics of scandal, by absenting herself from Paris for a while and rusticating at Loches, the estate which her aunt had left her. On reaching le Mans, she was met by the Marquis de la Châtre—an amiable man for whom Ninon had sufficient attachment and constancy to allow the good provincials to imagine they were man and wife, and the two were widely welcomed and courted.
One evening, at a supper party to which they were invited, she met Scarron. He arrived in company with some canons from the cathedral, and to her great surprise she learned from him that he now held a canonry in le Mans cathedral, bestowed upon him for the assistance of his pen, than which few were more able than his in Lorraine, in drawing up a history of the duchy of Lorraine.
To Paul Scarron, the brilliant wit, comic poet, rhymester—so admired of another erratic genius, Oliver Goldsmith, who translated his Roman Comique—the sunny-natured, in earlier years scandalously debauched, and always bon vivant—brimming with the overflow of humour that wells from the depths of a sympathetic temperament—generous, kind-hearted—to:
“Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice,”
are words hardly to be more aptly applied. The sufferings of his childhood, due to the avarice of his artful stepmother, who contrived to separate him from his father and get possession of his fortune, cast him nearly penniless upon the world, when scarcely more than a child. It was one more instance of the game, ever new, which relatives intellectually inferior, incited by envy and greed, love to play upon the unfortunate talented one, and render life one long misery and struggle at the best, provided sufficient bread is somehow come upon to retain breath. So much the brave heart and exercise of his gifts enabled the lad to acquire, and he managed to enter ecclesiastical ranks; but only to the outermost degree—not, it may be, aspiring to the priesthood, which hardly could have lost anything from one whose character and mode of life were so glaringly ill adapted for the calling. Scarron’s vocation that way was worse than nil; nevertheless, in that lax time of ecclesiastical law and order, he obtained the canonry of le Mans cathedral, and thus dignified, Monsieur l’Abbé Scarron met Ninon again at the supper-table of the local receiver-general of taxes, and was more ready than ever for any lengths of wild uproariousness the chance brought him. It came just then with the Carnival, and Scarron, with one or two companions, conceived the notion of spreading a big mattress all over with goose’s feathers and down; then, smearing themselves from head to foot in honey, they rolled upon the mattress until they were encased in the feathers so thickly, that the disguise was impenetrable, and they looked like some hideous monstrosities of the bird-tribe, face and all covered in the plumage. Passing up the street, followed by a huge concourse, they made their way to Ninon’s château, and forced entrance, greatly to the anger of Monsieur de la Châtre, who quickly discovered who they were, and at once denounced them. The mob, furious at the thought of a churchman of their own cathedral indulging in such wild licence, set upon the feathered monsters, and flinging them down, pommelled and beat the unprotected bodies of the unfortunate masqueraders, and plucked off every feather, pursuing them without mercy, until they were compelled to jump into the rushes of the river for protection. There they were forced to remain for hours, and two of Scarron’s three companions died from the effects of the cold immersion, and the violence dealt them. Scarron himself escaped with breath, but little more. The chill and exposure brought on an illness from which he never recovered. It crippled him in every limb, and rendered him, as he himself says, an abridgment of human suffering—tied to his chair by the contraction of every muscle, in never-ending pain for all the years to come; yet never losing his gaiety, and for all the misery he had created for himself, winning the pity and the money gifts from the Court and from wealthy friends which enabled him to live in fair affluence.
A short time later the domestic felicity being enjoyed at the Loches château by Ninon and Monsieur de la Châtre was rudely broken up by a summons from Monsieur de la Châtre’s family, at Besançon, to repair to the deathbed of his father. The two parted with real regret, and so much devotion on the Marquis de la Châtre’s side, that nothing would content him short of a written and signed promise from Ninon of eternal fidelity to him. She accordingly wrote on a leaf of his tablets these words—
“I swear to love you always.—Ninon.”
Carefully bestowing this precious bond in black and white in an innermost pocket of his vest, de la Châtre conducted Ninon back to Paris. He would have preferred to leave her in Touraine, to pass the time of his absence in the rural tranquillity of her beautiful little domain; but if Ninon desired to ruralise, was there not her charming country residence at Picpus?—and Picpus is much nearer Paris than Loches; and just then the Maréchal de Sévigné had arrived in Paris, a man of noble presence, distinguished for his recent successes in the king’s service, and the young Vicomte de Turenne, already entered upon the paths of his renown, by his splendid service in Lorraine and Italy, and both, eagerly seeking introduction to Ninon, came, saw, and were conquered by her charm.