Ninon de l'Enclos and her century

by Mary C. Rowsell

De Sévigné’s rendered homage was, however, on somewhat unconventional lines, the honeyed words of his admiration being tempered with just enough fault-finding as to render it unusually piquant; but Ninon’s favours, and just now especially, were in no wise exclusively bestowed on the heroes of the battlefield. She was no more précieuse than she was Platonicienne; but she was genuinely gifted with a love of letters, which had been fostered by the excellent education her father had given her, and she entered ardently into the great intellectual movement of the time, in which the drama figured so prominently. Richelieu himself was so warm a devotee, that his ambition to excel as a dramatist equalled, if it did not surpass, his political ambition; and while jealous to the mean extent envy can reach, he did not withhold his patronage from the great genius of him who has been styled the father of the French dramatists, Pierre Corneille. Even had Richelieu not desired as he did, to make use of the brilliant talent of Corneille for his own ends, it would not have been possible for him to hold aloof amid the enthusiasm of the world of letters, and of society generally, which hailed in 1636 the production of The Cid.

As every time “doth boast itself above better gone,” so must Corneille’s name yield place in a degree to what has since been seen. Still, ever remembering his fathering of it—for his predecessors in dramatic work worthy of any name were dull and lacked artistic knowledge of their craft, and Godelet, Gamier, and others are but names now and no more—Corneille’s masterpiece would challenge criticism in plenty now, placed before the delicate discrimination of the daily press of this time, or the judgment of the gallery, alike in his native country or elsewhere. It is but recently that the tragedy of a great French poet, not yet two generations passed away, revived at the Comédie Française, though reverently and finely acted, was derided and mocked at without mercy behind the scenes by those taking part in it. Exactly what will be the opinions of critics of future generations on the dramatic productions of the early years of the twentieth century, fortunately the means will probably be lacking to know; the fact remains that the fame of Pierre Corneille is a living force and a memory for all time.

It was the fashion of that day to model plays and novels on Spanish and Italian patterns; and advised to follow this ruling, Corneille selected the subject of The Cid—Rodriguez—on which to base a drama, not his first by several; but while the preceding ones were held in great esteem, The Cid was regarded as attaining to the highest excellence, and its fame as his crowning work has ever remained by it. Some of his dramas of a later date were unsuccessful; one of his comedies, Le Menteur—the only one which had popularity—is best known in this country by Steele’s translation of it, The Lying Lover.

Richelieu, stirred to dramatic ambition—finding probably that it was an art less easy than it seemed—sought the assistance of five dramatists to write up and give more effect to his tragedies; at least any other reason for such collaboration is not easy to be imagined. One of the five chosen was Corneille, who, naturally somewhat curt and abrupt in speech, did not spare to find fault with some of the details of the cardinal’s work, and the concatenation of The Cid’s success and of Corneille’s frankness over Euterpe and Mirame, stirred such offence in the cardinal’s jealous mind, that he endeavoured to drive a spoke in the wheel of Corneille’s car of triumph; and one of the earliest achievements of the recently constituted Académie Française was a critique on The Cid commanded of its members by its founder. It had no effect at all in lessening the enthusiasm of the world of letters, or of the general public for the drama. The poison did not act, in spite of the endeavours of several of the poetasters to second the pronouncements. One defect, that it was not original in plot and construction, but based on a Spanish dramatic model, was to be conceded; if defect that was which at the time was held to be almost indispensable in a play. There is nothing new under the sun. Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies alike—the English historical plays excepted—are one and all based on old legends and classic stories which he drew from Italian, and Spanish and French, and other sources that had, in their turn, sprung from tradition no longer traceable, hidden in origins lost in the lapse of centuries. Richelieu’s own dramatic effusions were reproductions of classical themes. It was the grandeur of the verse of Corneille, its lofty thought, its dignity and moral conception, its depicting of conflicting passions—this it was that won the admiration, and struck home to heartfelt sympathies, in its power of presenting character, under other names, of living men and women, the contemporaries of Ninon’s time, contending, suffering, striving in the stormy political atmosphere, darkening in now with the shadows of the Thirty Years’ War.

In the delight of Corneille’s presence in Paris, Ninon sacrificed all the ordinary routine of her life. It was in her salon, if the chronicling of the fact is to be trusted, that Corneille read to the assembled company his manuscript of The Cid, all the principal members being present of the Hôtel Bourgogne, and the few other talented “rogues and vagabonds” proscribed of the Church, though ill to be spared by it, if the cardinal’s plays were to have any sort of success. The Comédie Française was yet an institution of the future; and the stage of the Hôtel Bourgogne, with the two or three other theatres were not much more than glorified fair platforms, while the theatre in the rue Guénégaud ordinarily confined itself to the presentment of Chinese shadows. The drawing-room of the Louvre and of the Palais Cardinal were utilised for masques and such plays as there were, called in request for the Court and the more exalted circles of society. Richelieu’s own pieces were thus performed. The drama was in transition. It was a far cry now from Clement Marot and the antics of the clerks of the Basoche upon the huge marble table of the Hall of Lost Footsteps, to the Académie Française and the Hôtel de Rambouillet; and the language of the country was undergoing changes, even as the aspect of the city itself was no longer that of a few years earlier, when Ninon first came to Paris. Then Notre-Dame was nearly surrounded by green spaces of meadowland and field and hedgerow, stretching between the streets and the grassy banks of the Isle de la Cité. Now here, and away to the Palais de Justice; and northwards of the Louvre, streets were gathering, and houses began to crowd about the old towers of the Conciérgerie; while on the banks of the Seine, right and left, the old walls of Philip Augustus were laid low or broken up to afford room for new buildings. Behind the Louvre, far extending to the gardens and palace of the Tuileries, Richelieu’s magnificent residence dominated the rue de Rivoli—the Palais Cardinal, so soon to pass as a gift to the king and take the name of the Palais Royal, till the Revolution of 1793 changed it to the Palais Égalité, and the lordly “pleasure-house” of the great upholder of kingly power was cut up into gaudy shops and gaming-houses.

After the performance of The Cid, which took place before the king and queen, and Court, and a vast company of illustrious persons, Corneille returned home to Rouen, to pursue the great career he was now launched upon. The fulminations of the cardinal through the Académie Française far from proving destructive to his fame, had probably cast a brighter lustre on it. “I never undertake anything without well first considering, but once I have resolved, I go straight to my aim; I throw all down that is in my path; I mow down all, and I cover all with my red robes,” he once said, and it was no empty boast. Yet the ruling found its exception; his rancour and jealousy did its worst, but it could not crush Corneille. It did not at all events do so. Even for Richelieu it might have been dangerous and impolitic. Gaston d’Orléans, the king’s brother, who belonged to the party of the queen, threw in his influence to support anything he dared in opposition to the cardinal—and at this time Gaston was a frequent visitor at Ninon’s house. He invited himself one evening to dinner with her, attended by several gentlemen, and Ninon, who was kept in countenance by her friend, Marion Delorme, and another lady, entertained her royal guest with an elegant repast of fish, flesh and fowl, although she had ventured to remind “Monseigneur” that, being the season of Lent, it was a questionable proceeding to have anything but dishes of the first served up. Gaston, however, had insisted, especially in the matter of roast capon, and good wine—cela va sans dire. Whether the wine was partly answerable, or it was merely the manners of the time that prompted one of the guests—Monsieur de Boisrobert, my lord cardinal’s secretary—who was fingering the leg-bone of a fowl, to fling it out of window at the head of Monsieur l’Abbé Dufaure, the venerable dean of St Sulpice, that was what he did. The abbé was a Jesuit priest, and the scandal of insult to him was doubled by the sin of eating meat in Lent. Monseigneur and his companions finished the evening by adjourning to the house of Monsieur la Navarre, a neighbour of Ninon’s, and breaking up the furniture. Then the prince himself sent for the magistrate, and the functionary arriving, demanded to be informed which was the culprit. The unfortunate neighbour, who did not know who Gaston was, pointed him out, and forthwith six archers were sent for, who laid hands on the prince, and he was threatened with handcuffing if he did not immediately go quietly to prison. Upon this the gentlemen in attendance, hearing the uproar, entered, and with profoundest respect proceeded to inquire what had happened, addressing Monseigneur by name. Terrified out of his senses at what he had done, the magistrate besought pardon, which the prince gravely granted, not without commanding him to make amende honorable by holding a lighted wax taper in his hand, and, on bended knees, confessing his crime before all and individually of the women of the household, who were summoned to attend for the purpose.

So much for Monseigneur’s little amusement: it was Ninon who was the sufferer. The insulted abbé complained to his Superior, who complained to the magistrate of the district, and from mouth to mouth the story flew. Not one man in black, but constant contingents of the black-soutaned fraternity haunted the rue des Tournelles, and invaded Ninon’s apartments, subjecting her to such severe inquisition about her affairs generally, that it became unendurable, and she wrote to the prince in severe reproach for allowing the blame of his folly to burden and annoy her. Whereupon Gaston sent two of his friends to mollify the wrath of the magistrate, who tore up the Jesuit Superior’s letter of complaint. But the scandal only aggravated the soreness and complications of the opposing parties of the Court, and it made an additional grievance for Richelieu against Gaston; though, on the other hand, it was Boisrobert, his own secretary, who was also his own jester-in-chief, who had been at the bottom of the offence, so that the affair cut both ways, and the cardinal may have preferred to see it hushed up.

It was about this time that Richelieu lost by death the man he called his right hand—Père Joseph, the Capucin friar—in other words, “The Grey Cardinal,” as he was nicknamed; but in fact and deed the poor man never even received the bishopric long promised, never bestowed. Richelieu himself was already in failing health, worn by stress and anxiety for the care of the vast structure of kingly power he had built up and sustained, as it were, by his own hand, that was against so many, and Louis himself was almost as much a nonentity as any of the rois fainéants of old days. It is almost impossible to realise that he and his false-hearted, selfish brother should have been the sons of the dauntless Henry of Navarre.

Louis was not vicious; it was his valetudinarian melancholy temperament which appears to have rendered him indifferent to ordinary human interests. He made less than no pretence of affection for his Spanish wife, for whose bright glances other men would have staked existence. For her, Buckingham forgot honour and duty to his own royal master, and did not spare compromising her repute. That is a page of history that remains sealed. How far it affected Louis’s feelings towards her through the rest of his life, remains an open question, or whether from the beginning, love and mutual inclination were at fault. “The wind bloweth where it listeth,” and the beauty and attractions of Anne of Austria may never have struck a responsive chord in the king’s heart. He was not destitute of sentiment. More than once he strove to fill the dreary void with the sympathy of other women of repute about the Court, and, in one instance at all events, not unsuccessfully; but he was not one to win love and friendship generally; and the consciousness of this chilled his manner still more, and threw him back upon himself. Gaston d’Orléans, with all his grave faults, had at least quicker outward intelligence and sufficient animation to win some extensive suffrages of the gentler sex, notably of Anne herself, who tolerated his attentions and coquetted with him up to a certain point; though how far this was policy, or from real sentiment, Court intrigues veil too entirely to attempt to determine, and the jealousy of Richelieu, himself enamoured of the queen, had soon put an end to all the aspirations of the two dukes. “There is no such word as fail,” Richelieu was often heard to say, and he did not fail to put his foot down very decisively when a league was formed, which the queen herself was said to favour, whose end and aim was to depose Louis the Just, crown Gaston, and give him Anne of Austria to wife.

“I should not have sufficiently gained by the change,” was, however, Anne’s reply, when the accusation of her desire for this was made against her in the course of the rigorous inquiry and treatment to which she and her friends were subjected. If on account alone of that time, years back now, when Gaston, to save himself, permitted one of his noblest adherents, Chalais, to perish on the scaffold at Richelieu’s command, Monsieur was not likely to be very favourably regarded by her. Nearly half a score of years had passed since the brave man had died in the flower of his life, tortured and hacked by countless bungling strokes of a creature found at last, among the dregs of the prison, to do the hideous task which the professional headsman managed to evade by absenting himself and remaining perdu. In the interval, the queen’s mother had been effectually, and for ever, banished from France. “The Day of Dupes” had come and gone, leaving Richelieu all-triumphant; but still the contest raged, and the virulence of the minister against the queen broke furiously on the pretext he found at last, of discovering that she was keeping up a private correspondence with the King of Spain, and the cardinal infant, her two brothers, and also with persons in Madrid and Brussels, whose friendship she valued—the more, doubtless, for the isolation and lack of affection and harshness surrounding her. It was a boast of Richelieu’s, that with only two lines of an innocent man’s writing he could ruin him. Naturally, therefore, however innocent the correspondence, Anne was anxious to hold her letters uninspected by the cardinal, and she kept them in her own private oratory chamber in the Benedictine convent of the Val de Grâce, in the rue St Jacques, which she had founded. The letters, on their arrival, were received by one of the nuns, who placed them away in a closet to await the queen’s coming, and her replies to them were forwarded from thence. But Richelieu’s spies were at work; they swarmed of course in Paris; and before long they scented out the secret correspondence, and Richelieu informed the king of it, holding up before His Majesty’s dreary imagination all the terrors of national peril it signified. The alarmed king hurried the queen out of Paris to the Château of Chantilly, where she was confined to her own rooms and compelled to listen to a string of rigid interrogation from the chancellor. She was in a cruelly forlorn situation; for, in fear of Richelieu’s anger and the activity of his spies, the courtiers and following of the royal pair did not venture so much as to lift their eyes to her window as they passed. For her own servants, they had been at once disposed of in various prisons; while the chancellor proceeded to ransack the convent of Val de Grâce for more papers and letters. But it was labour lost, which possibly was no more than he expected; since it is believed that the queen had warning from him of his intended visit, and the documents, for all they might be worth, were safe in the care of Madame de Sourdis. The alarm and suspicion intensified, when there was found upon the person of la Porte, the queen’s confidential servant, a letter from her to the Duchess of Chevreuse, long exiled. La Porte was thereupon, as a man of strict honesty and fidelity to his royal mistress, locked away in one of the towers of the Bastille, and all the efforts to draw from him anything incriminating the queen, were absolutely abortive; though Richelieu employed every art to shake him, from promises and emoluments, to threats of torture, which were rendered more real to his imagination, by his being taken to the torture-chamber for a sight of its equipments.