Ninon de l'Enclos and her century

by Mary C. Rowsell

CHAPTER XIV

Les Précieuses Ridicules—Sappho and Le Grand Cyrus—The Poets of the Latin Quarter—The Satire which Kills—A Lost Child—Periwigs and New Modes—The Royal Marriage and a Grand Entry.

Molière’s comedy, Le Cocu Imaginaire—which had created such unrestrainable delight in the ex-queen of Sweden—had been preceded a year earlier by the famous Précieuses Ridicules. To call this play the dramatist’s masterpiece, is to do rank injustice to his work of greater length and importance, notably, if one dare to choose, to Le Tartufe. The Précieuses, however, took Paris by storm, and was accounted a gem. Still a delightful little bit of humour, and not lacking now in its way of a home-thrust, it carried a double-edged power in the days of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, when the affectations of speech and conversation had run to such absurd extravagance, that Molière’s satire was little or no exaggeration. Mademoiselle de Scudéri’s “Inutile! retranchez le superflu de cet ardente,” is distinctly precious.

Of the queens of these intellectual réunions, Mademoiselle de Scudéri was the reigning novelist. Her long life, exceeding Ninon’s in years, was devoted to the production of romances and the lighter sort of literature, which ran to a lengthy record. Le Grand Cyrus stands best remembered, but is scarcely more than a memory. A long day’s journey would be needed to find the most ardent of fiction-readers who would now care to follow through the windings of that romance which in its day created such enthusiasm, and made a lioness of the amiable if some way from beautiful Madeleine de Scudéri. Artamène; ou, le Grand Cyrus, after all, was, to be sure, scarcely fiction. It was composed of little more than thinly-veiled facts, presenting under classic names the living men and women of society; heroes and heroines of antiquity stood sponsors to the fine, broad-skirted, perruqued gentlemen and fashionable dames of Versailles and the Louvre and the Palais Royal. Artaban, Agathyse, Zenocrates—these were, in their modish habit as they lived, severally the Duc de St Bignon, M. de Rainez, M. Ysern, and others—while Mademoiselle de Scudéri herself was Sappho. It was in her salon that was drawn up the famous Carte du Tendre—gazetteer of articles necessary to the pursuit of love. Mademoiselle de Scudéri wrote with grace and much sense; but her romances were insufferably prolix. Ninon found them wearisome to a degree, even though the Grand Cyrus is a record of the great Prince de Condé. George de Scudéri, Madeleine’s brother, was also a very fertile novelist of his day, scarcely to be rivalled in speed of production by Dumas himself. Nor does there appear that the ghosts who worked for this great, more modern enchanter of the realm of historical romance, rendered any services to the seventeenth-century novelist. The salons of Madame de Rambouillet and of Madame de Sablé were the rendezvous of the most aristocratic of these versifiers and epigram-makers, who really occasionally uttered something witty or poetical; though for the most part the wit and poetry did not rise above such greatness as that of Sir Benjamin Backbite, in Lady Sneerwell’s drawing-room, on the macaroni ponies whose

“Legs were so slim,

And their tails were so long.”

The refinements and elegance of speech to be heard at those réunions, fostered, and indeed were a powerful influence in, the reformation effected by the Académie for the French language. But the passion for these improvements was often torn to tatters, and the puerilities and affectations excited a reaction among men of the more Bohemian class of writers and versifiers, such as Scarron, St Amand and others, and the curious mixture of real poetic expression and thought, profanity and coarseness, in their productions, carry back to the days of Rabelais and of Villon, with echoes of Ronsard and of Charles of Orléans. But the simplicity and beauty of their numbers only now and again shone through the grossness of their compositions, and sheer opposition to the “Clélies” and “Uranies” and “Sapphos” probably inspired the numerous parodies and the odes to cheese and good feeding produced by these authors, who hailed with delight the now famous actor-manager Molière’s Précieuses Ridicules.

The piece was first produced at the Petit-Bourbon early in the winter of 1659. The plot, deep-laid if simple, consists of the successful playing off by two lovers respectively of the two charming young women they love honestly and deeply, but who meet refusal on the score of their language being too natural, and their attire not sufficiently fashionable. The two young men thereupon dress up their valets, Mascarille and Jodelet, in fine costumes, bestow on them the titles of marquis and vicomte, and contrive to introduce them to the précieuses. The exquisite humour of the dialogue between Gorgibus, the father of one of the two girls, and uncle of the other, sets the ball rolling; his contempt for the new names, Aminte and Policène, which they have selected in place of those given them, as he says, by their godfathers and godmothers; his dim grasp of what he calls their jargon, when they try to instil into him some idea of its elegancies, is the essence of genuine comicality, as are the compliments of the two aristocratic visitors who inform the ladies that it is the reports of their exquisite attractions and beauty, reaching far and wide, which has brought them to their feet. Then follows the flutter of delight, veiled under the attempt at calm graciousness, of the précieuses. “But Monsieur,” says Cathos to Mascarille, the marquis, inviting him to sit down, “I entreat you not to be inexorable to this armchair, which has been stretching out its arms to you for this quarter of an hour past; allow it the satisfaction of embracing you.” The fun grows apace, as the slips of tongue and bearing of the two pretended gentlemen begin to disconcert the two infatuated girls. At last a dance is proposed, the fiddlers are sent for, and behind them enter the two masters of the valets, who tear their fine coats off their backs, and turn them out. “And you,” says Gorgibus, chasing the précieuses from the room, to repent at leisure of their affectations and thirst for la galantérie, “out of my sight, and to the devil with all these verses, romances, sonnets, and the rest of it—pernicious amusements of do-nothings and idlers!” So the curtain descended on the Précieuses Ridicules, and the story goes that before very long the play extinguished the glory of the salon of the Hôtel de Rambouillet.

The Comte de Fiesque, who had gone with Condé to Spain, was killed in Catalonia by the bursting of a bomb. Ninon, not able personally to ask the widow where the child was which de Fiesque regarded as his, commissioned two persons to ascertain for her from Madame de Fiesque some intelligence concerning its whereabouts, but the countess asserted that she had no knowledge of this. The remorse and regret of Ninon were of no avail: she was unable to trace the lost one.