Ninon de l'Enclos and her century

by Mary C. Rowsell

Tempora mutantur. Ninon, in the course of the years which were now bringing her to middle life, had seen many changes; but when her friend St Evrémond came back about this time from the wars, after seven or eight years’ absence, he told her that she had not changed with them. Beautiful and youthful-looking as ever he assured her she was, and to prove his words, he took a little mirror in one hand, and in the other the portrait Rubens had painted of her years before, and bade her make the comparison herself.

There is little doubt, at all events, that Time’s finger had scarcely dulled the delicacy of her complexion, or the brightness of her eyes.

Were thanks due to the Man in Black for this? It was a question she put to St Evrémond very seriously, but the cheery Epicurean had only a smile and a witticism for answer. The devil, he assured her, did not exist, and he proposed to escort her to the fair of St Germain that fine February afternoon. This was scarcely the best way to make good his assertion; for if his Satanic Majesty was to be found in Paris, it was certainly in that quarter; for was not the rue d’Enfer, whence the Capucins had ejected him from his house, hard by? This, however, had by no means hindered the brethren of St Germain des Prés countenancing the proceedings, which had come to be near to an orgy, of the annual market, or fair of St Germain des Prés—by the letting their ground for it to be held upon. From the king, to the most villainous of the populace, everybody went to the fair. The booths were within hail of the ground known as the Pré aux Clercs, the haunt of the basochiens, the lawyers’ clerks of the Palais de Justice, away upon the Ile de la Cité, between St Sulpice and St Germain—the church of the three steeples. The roof of the modern flower-market now covers this ground. Everything conceivable could be purchased at the stalls, from the richest silks and velvets to a pancake or a glass eye, or a wooden leg or a wax arm, or essences and waters for turning old people young again; every game of chance, thimblerig, lottery, cards, held out its temptation; every kind of entertainment, dancing, tumbling, jugglery, music of fiddle and fife, and drum and tabor—a deafening tintamarre; all kinds of beverages—wine, cider, tea, coffee—“to drive away melancholy;” syrups were concocted for the dust-dried throats of the surging crowd of fine ladies, students, lackeys, soldiers, dainty-shod, short-cloaked, blond-bewigged abbés, pages, beggars, gipsies. Respectable bourgeois families rubbed shoulders with flaunting women, and the wretched crew of mendicant impostors from the old cours de miracles. Often it was the scene of fracas and fisticuffs and damaged countenances. On one occasion, a page of the Duc de Bouillon cut off the ears of a clerk of the basoche and put them in his pocket. The students of the quarter fell to murderous assault upon the fellow, while the pages retaliated, and many a dead body of page and student was found afterwards in the ditches of the Abbaye. At once an earthly paradise and a pandemonium was the time-honoured annual market of St Germain des Prés, and in the midst of the madding riot and confusion a great deal of serious business was transacted among the merchants and foreign traders who came from afar to exhibit their wares, as for centuries had been the custom, ever since mediæval day, when church porches and convent gates were nearly the only rendezvous for buying and selling.

Not absolutely accepting St Evrémond’s theory, Ninon and her cavalier left the fair to walk homewards, little thinking that they were to be confronted by the blood-chilling tale the pale lips of Madame de Chevreuse poured hurriedly out to them from the window of her carriage, which she called to a halt as they passed across the Pont Neuf—a tale upon whose precise details the chronicles of the time slightly differ, even to casting doubt upon it as a fact, though the circumstances are no more than consonant with probability. The beautiful but profligate Madame de Montbazon, it will be remembered, had been sent by the queen, on account of her glaring attempts at mischief-making, to reflect upon her misdeeds at Tours. It was held that she would not find the punishment so tedious and unpleasant as it might have been if M. l’Abbé de Rancé had not been in the neighbourhood. He was her lover, and a most ardent one, constantly by her side, but not to persuade her to penitence; on the contrary, de Rancé was wild and profligate of life as the woman he adored. He was brilliantly clever. At school he out-rivalled his class-fellow Bossuet, and when but thirteen, he published an essay on the dignity of the soul; and beneath his dissolute ways the gold of a conscience, of which so many of the Courtly circle in which he moved seemed absolutely devoid, often shone through. Armand Jean de Rancé was one of an old and distinguished family, and he was only ten years old when the Abbey of la Trappe in Normandy was bestowed on him.

The monastery of la Grand Trappe du Perche, said to have been so named from its hidden position among the dense forests of the stormy Norman headland, is of very ancient foundation. It was established in the twelfth century by Robion, Comte du Perche. The brethren followed the Cistercian rule, and for several centuries it was in high repute for the sanctity of its community, and for its wealth, which was put to its legitimate charitable uses. In course of time, like so many other abbeys, it was given in commendam, and its pious repute fell away to such an extent that the seven monks—all that remained in the monastery—were called by the surrounding peasantry “the brigands of la Trappe.” They were notorious for their evil-living, spending the time in drinking and hunting; and shunned alike by men, women and children, the Trappist monks were the terror of the district.

It was at this time that the child, Armand de Rancé, was made Abbé, and affairs at la Trappe continued to fall from bad to worse. As de Rancé grew up, among many benefices conferred on him, he was appointed Almoner to the Duke of Orléans, and spent most of his time in a whirl of dissipation in the Courtly circles in Paris. His splendid entertainments, his magnificent house, the trappings of his horses, especially those of the chase, were the talk of Paris, and his daring intrigues startled even the licence indulged in by the society he moved in. In this circle de Rancé specially singled out the stepmother of the Duchesse de Chevreuse, Madame de Montbazon, a woman as notorious for her profligacy and unscrupulous character as she was physically beautiful.

After a time spent in banishment at Touraine, she had been permitted to return to her Paris home, and de Rancé, who had been absent for a short time, returning to Paris, hastened to call upon her. Arrived at the house, he found it deserted, and passing in by an open door, he hurried along the silent passages, calling for the servants and upon her name, but there was no response. At last he reached the door of her apartments, and rushing across the anteroom, he flung aside the portières of her bedchamber. An open, trestle-supported coffin, across which a sheet lay carelessly flung, met his eyes, and turning from it to the table close by, the decapitated head of Madame de Montbazon confronted him. Momentarily he failed to recognise the features of the ghastly object; for the face was blurred with the ravages of smallpox. The fell disease had attacked Madame de Montbazon, and she had died of it. The body and head were being prepared for embalming, and for this end—or as some versions of the tale tell, because the coffin had not been made long enough—the head had been cut off, and placed upon the table.

The silent horror of this ghastly experience carried an eloquence beyond all power of words to the heart of de Rancé. Swayed by a revulsion of feeling, naturally sensitive and imaginative, he looked back upon his past life with loathing. The hollowness of worldly pleasures, and uncertainties of a worldly existence were yet still more deeply impressed upon his mind, by a serious accident he suffered in the hunting-field, and by the death of his patron, the Duc d’Orléans. All seemed vanity.

De Rancé was at this time thirty-four years old. With the exception of the ancient monastery of la Trappe, lost amid the wild forests verging on the perilous rock-bound shores of extreme North-Western Normandy, he divested himself of his property and possessions, and went to take up his residence in la Trappe, endeavouring to establish the old discipline in it. But the seven spirits he found there were unruly, and had no mind for being disturbed. So entirely were they opposed to the abbé’s reforms, that his life was in danger from them, for they threatened to throw him into the fish-ponds; and Brigadier Loureur, stationed at Mortagne, the nearest town of importance, begged de Rancé to accept a guard of his soldiery; but de Rancé decided that since the brigands of la Trappe had clearly less than no vocation for the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, they were best entirely got rid of—and he pensioned them off and sent them away, not in wrath, but in peace. Their place was filled by Cistercian brethren of the strict observance.

The position of an abbé, or for that matter, an abbess in the ranks of the Church, had long become an anomalous one. The relaxation of the old rigid conventual ruling had wrought great changes. It was not unusual to find some lady of a noble family appointed to the nominal charge of a monastery, and some equally nobly-born gentleman set over a community of nuns; and in either case, as likely as not, they had no knowledge, or next to none, of the everyday mode of life or working of such community. At the fair of St Germain the abbés always swarmed thick as flies, in their short black habits and delicate little linen bands, as where did they not congregate in the society of the time? The salons of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and other brilliant assemblies were dotted all over with them. They were the makers of petits vers and bouts rimés, and, if nothing more, pretty well indispensable to the following of a fine lady as cavaliere serventis. They were wont to make themselves generally amusing and agreeable, everything, in short, but useful to the spiritual needs of the Church in whose ranks they were supposed to serve. They wore their vows too lightly for the Abbé de Rancé to dream of exercising real authority in virtue of the title alone; and he qualified himself for the dignity he intended to assume of Superior of the monastery of la Trappe in Normandy—by entering as a novice in the Cistercian Abbey of Persigny. This ended, he took the vows, in company with a servant who was deeply attached to him, and was confirmed abbot.