Madame de Longueville, who was wedded to an old man, was singularly fascinating, from her gentle manners and amiability. Her face was not strictly beautiful, and bore traces of the smallpox, the cruel scourge then of so many beautiful faces; her eyes were full of a softened light, and she had the gift of a most sweet voice, while her smile was gentle and irresistibly winning. The dreamy, romantic, somewhat melancholy-natured de la Rochefoucauld’s heart was laid at her feet in whole and undivided adoration. For their conscious love, each strove against the temptation, she so earnestly, that she shut herself away from all chance of so much as seeing him for a little while. But Ninon slipped in with her philosophy. It was quite true, she argued to Madame de Longueville, that there were grave considerations to be respected—the indissoluble tie of marriage, convenances to be observed—all these; but to hide herself away, to refuse the unhappy prince the alleviation of gazing at her, of exchanging a few fleeting words—no, it was monstrously absurd. The very Platoniciens did not go such lengths. No, if complete happiness could not be theirs, at least a smile, a glance, was permitted; and Ninon’s counsel wound up with a suggestion to the disconsolate prince, that he should try what a little note to the woman he adored would effect, and he wrote—“Show yourself—be beautiful, and at least let me admire you.”
And Ninon delivered the billet, and its effect was marvellous. It conquered the young duchess’s natural timidity and retiring disposition. She took courage; she assumed her rightful place in the world; she appeared at the Louvre; she kept open house and gave brilliant receptions; she took her seat on the tabouret of the duchesses; her toilettes were magnificent; she shone brilliantly in conversation, and began to take part in Court intrigues; ere long very actively.
“With two lines of a man’s writing,” had said Mazarin’s great predecessor, “I could condemn him”; and with two lines of that magical pen of the Count de la Rochefoucauld, Madame de Longueville became another woman. As in the matter of her warm attachment to her lover, she was constant in her politics; while Louis de Condé, all-conquering at Rocroi, yielded himself captive to the charms of Ninon de L’Enclos—a veritable lion in love; not so blindly, however, that he was insensible to the wrongs of the people, upon whom a tax had been levied of a specially hateful kind. It was called the Toisé, and was a revival of an old edict long fallen into desuetude. To the Italian, d’Eméri, to whom Mazarin had entrusted the control of public finances, was due its discovery and resuscitation. This edict forbade the enlargement of the borders of Paris, and as recently new buildings had been, and were being, in course of construction far and wide, the owners of these were threatened with confiscation of their materials, unless they consented to pay for their newly-erected houses and other buildings, a rate regulated by measurement of the size of them. This pressed cruelly on the people. Loud murmurs were excited. The Parliament expostulated, and the Toisé was withdrawn. It was the first stone slung by the Fronde. Condé’s indignation was great; and one day, in the rue St Antoine, he laid flat with his sword the body of some wretched collector who had snatched away a child’s cradle from a poor woman. His act gave great offence to the queen, who saw in it defiance of Mazarin. Both at home and abroad, there was plenty stirring to keep existence from stagnating; but for a few brief delightful weeks the Duc d’Enghien sought retirement and tranquillity in his château of Petit Chantilly, in company with Ninon, who left the rue des Tournelles dwelling to take care of itself. It was the iniquitous Toisé which broke in upon their content; for the queen sent for the duke, to consult him in the emergency created by the cardinal favourite.
After the Toisé prologue, however, the opening scenes of the inglorious turmoil of the Fronde did not see Condé; for Austria once more took up arms, and he lost not a moment in hastening to the frontier. If it is indeed a fact that Ninon accompanied him thither in the guise of a young aide-de-camp, mounted on a fiery charger, it was but to re-enact her former exploits; and Ninon was nothing if not daring. That her presence on the field of Nordlingen could have been really anything but exceedingly encumbering, is more than imaginable. At all events Condé soon begged her to return to Paris, in order to go and console his sister, Madame de Longueville, who had been summoned to attend his father, the Duc de Condé, in an illness threatening to be fatal. Arrived at Paris, she found the sufferer very much better, and writing to inform the Duc d’Enghien of this pleasant intelligence, she begged to be allowed to return to him. The duke, however, replied that it was hardly worth while; as he should soon be back. To pass the tedium of his absence, Ninon resumed her réunions, finding pleasant distraction in the society of her friends, among which were two ladies distinguished for their birth and undoubted talents, scarcely less than notorious, even in those days, for their openly lax mode of life. One of these was Madame de la Sablière, a notable member of the Hôtel de Rambouillet côtérie. A really brilliant mathematician, she was at least equally skilful in the science of love—so ardent a student, that one day her uncle, a grave magistrate, scandalised out of all endurance at her ways, remonstrated severely, reminding her that the beasts of the field observed more order and seasonable regulation in their love-affairs.
“Ah, dear uncle,” said the gifted lady, “that is because they are beasts.”
Madame de Chevreuse was the other specially chosen spirit of her own sex Ninon now consorted with. After the death of Richelieu, who had exiled her at the time of the Val de Grâce affair, she was allowed to return to France, attended by the Abbé de Retz, Paul de Gondi, whom Louis XIII., on his deathbed, had appointed coadjutor to the new archbishopric of Paris. De Retz had himself aspired to the archbishopric, and swore that he would obtain a cardinalate.
The Court was now brilliantly gay. The gloomy and sombre atmosphere of Louis XIII. and of Richelieu’s day faded all in a succession of balls and fêtes and every sort of festivity. Anne of Austria enlarged the south side of the Louvre, and Grimaldi and Romanelli adorned the chambers and galleries with their exquisite skill. Poussin, whose friezes terminated the ends of the great gallery, had had apartments assigned him in the Louvre, in order to carry on his work with greater facility; but he had retired in displeasure at the criticisms of his brother-artists, and went to Rome, where he spent the rest of his life, leaving in Paris immortal memories of his genius, among them the altarpiece for the chapel of St Germain en Laye, and the mournful Arcadian Shepherd, “Et in Arcadia Ego.”
So the never-ending round of gaiety was set in motion by Mazarin, and Anne of Austria was the regent. Anne, still handsome, and by nature frivolous under her somewhat cold Spanish demeanour—surely a born coquette, delighting in show and magnificence, none the less that she had so long lived under repression. The queen, apparently, was the reigning power; but it was the crafty prime-minister who pulled the strings, and set the puppets dancing and fiddling, and amorously intriguing, so that they should leave him to carry on his politics, and mount to the heights of his ambition and power in his own unhindered way. Unlike his great predecessor, he was handsome, and good-natured in manner, and therefore an ornament in those brilliant assemblies. Wrote St Evrémond—
“J’ai vu le temps de la bonne régence,
Temps où régnait une heureuse abondance,