Ninon de l'Enclos and her century

by Mary C. Rowsell

Notwithstanding, the rule of life-long bickering and mutual reproach attending such ill-assorted unions, would seem to be proved by its exception in the case of Ninon’s parents; since no record of any such domestic strife stands against them. Bearing and forbearing, they agreed to differ, and went their several ways—Madame de L’Enclos undertaking the training and instruction of Ninon in those earliest years, in the fond hope that there would be a day when she should take the veil and become a nun. Before, however, she attained to the years of as much discretion as she ever possessed, she had arrived at the standpoint of the way she intended to take of the life before her, which was to roll into years that did not end until the dawning of the eighteenth century; and it in no way included any such intention. So sturdily opposed to it, indeed, was she, that it irresistibly suggests the possibility of her being the inspiration of the old song—“Ninon wouldn’t be a nun”—

“I shan’t be a nun, I won’t be a nun,

I am so fond of pleasure that I won’t be a nun!”

For Ninon was her father’s child; almost all her inherited instincts were from him. The endeavours of Madame de L’Enclos failed disastrously. The monotony and rigid routine of the young girl’s life repelled the bright, frank spirit, and drove it to opposite extreme, resulting in sentiments of disgust for the pious observances of her church; and taken there under compulsion day in, day out, she usually contrived to substitute some plump little volume of romance, or other light literature, at the function, for her Mass-book and breviary, to while away the tedium.

In no very long time Monsieur de L’Enclos, noting the bent of his daughter’s nature, himself took over her training. He carried it on, it is scarcely necessary to say, upon a plane widely apart from the mother’s. A man of refined intellect, he had studied the books and philosophy of the renaissance of literature; and before Ninon was eleven years old, while imbuing her with the love of reading such books as the essays of Montaigne and the works of Charon, he accustomed her to think and to reason for herself, an art of which she very soon became a past-mistress, the result being an ardent recognition of the law of liberty, and the Franciscan counsel of perfection: “Fay ce qu’et voudray.” Ninon possessed an excellent gift of tongues, cultivating it to the extent of acquiring fluently, Italian, Spanish, and English, rendered the more easy of mastery from her knowledge of Latin, which she so frequently quotes in her correspondence.

Her love of music was great; she sang well, and was a proficient on the lute, in which her father himself, a fine player, instructed her. She conversed with facility, and doubtless took care to cultivate her natural gifts in those days when the arts of conversation and causerie were indispensable for shining in society, and she loved to tell a good story; but she drew a distinct line at reciting. One day when Mignard, the painter, deplored his handsome daughter’s defective memory, she consoled him—“How fortunate you are,” she said, “she cannot recite.”

The popular acceptation of Ninon de L’Enclos’ claims to celebrity would appear to be her beauty, which she retained to almost the end of her long life—a beauty that was notable; but it lay less in perfection of the contours of her face, than in the glorious freshness of her complexion, and the expression of her magnificent eyes, at once vivacious and sympathetic, gentle and modest-glancing, yet brilliant with voluptuous languor. Any defects of feature were probably those which crowned their grace—and when as in the matter of a slight wrinkle, which in advanced years she said had rudely planted itself on her forehead, the courtly comment on this of Monsieur de St Evrémond was to the effect that “Love had placed it there to nestle in.” Her well-proportioned figure was a little above middle height, and her dancing was infinitely graceful.

Provincial by descent, Mademoiselle de L’Enclos was a born Parisian, in that word’s every sense. Her bright eyes first opened in a small house lying within the shadows of Notre-Dame, the old Cité itself, the heart of hearts of Paris, still at that time fair with green spaces and leafy hedgerows, though these were to endure only a few years longer. Her occasionally uttered wish that she had been born a man, hardly calls for grave consideration. The desire to don masculine garments and to ride and fence and shoot, and to indulge generally in manly pursuits, occurred to her when she was still short of twelve years old, by which time she was able to write well; and her earliest epistolary correspondence included a letter addressed to her father. It ran as follows:—

“My Very Honoured Father,—I am eleven years old. I am big and strong; but I shall certainly fall ill, if I continue to assist at three masses every day, especially on account of one performed by a great, gouty, fat canon, who takes at least twelve minutes to get through the Epistle and the Gospel, and whom the choir boys are obliged to put back again on his feet after each genuflexion. I would as soon see one of the towers of Notre Dame on the altar-steps; they would move quite as quickly, and not keep me so long from breakfast. This is not at all cheering I can tell you. In the interest of the health of your only child, it is time to put an end to this state of things. But in what manner, you will ask, and how is it to be set about? Nothing more simple. Let us suppose that instead of me, Heaven had given you a son: I should have been brought up by you, and not by my mother; already you would have begun to instruct me in arms, and mounted me on horseback, which would have much better pleased me than twiddling along the beads of a rosary to Aves, Paters, and Credos. The present moment is the one for me to inform you that I decide to be no longer a girl, and to become a boy.