Ninon de l'Enclos and her century

by Mary C. Rowsell

And the next night, during the performance of a ballet at the Louvre, she glided near to Lauzun, and slipped a paper into his hand. It bore only these words—“It is you.”

Then it was a very different affair. Who so ardent, and passionately in love as Lauzun? Carried away by his feelings, he broke into the bedchamber of Mademoiselle unannounced, and falling at her feet where she sat before a mirror, in the scantiest of déshabillé, eloquently gave way to expressions of rapture, and the good fortune which had impelled him to seek her at such a delightful moment, when her charms lay revealed in all the fulness of their beauty. The Grande Mademoiselle was thin to scragginess—but qu’importe?

She believed his protestations, loved Lauzun ever more and more, and passed her time in devising the way for obtaining the king’s consent to their union.

Meanwhile the king’s conduct, in publicly taking about with him his two mistresses, was beginning to create such gross scandal, that it called down forcible rebuke from the pulpits. In regard to la Montespan, while her husband must have been dense indeed not to be aware of the true state of the case, he was allowed to be credited with the ignorance of it. Among the preachers most severe in their rebuke, was the Père Bourdaloue, the eloquent Jesuit. He spared no word in endeavouring to bring Louis to some sense of decent living, and it was not without effect—before all, on Louise de la Vallière, whose weeping was audible from where she sat in a dark corner of the Jesuit church of St Louis.

Ninon, whose orthodoxy was not rigid, and had found herself only too often sufficiently well justified in the small faith she placed in the religious professions coming within her experience, determined on the bold amusement of testing the sincerity of Bourdaloue. She pretended to be seriously ill, and sent to him to visit her, in, of course, his spiritual capacity. Dressed in the most becoming of invalid négligés, she received the priest with all her winning smiles and words and fascinating glances. They were absolutely ineffective. Bourdaloue having completed his exhortations and pious counsels, rose to take his leave, observing, as he departed, that he perceived the malady afflicting Ninon was not of the body, but of the spirit, and that he would beseech the great Healer of souls to cure her.

The tale of this interview got wind, and brought down some satirical verses on Ninon’s defeat—which she frankly acknowledged, not even without considerable content; for it taught her that the religious profession was not one vast fraud, but that the Church might have many true shepherds of its fold, cumbered as it might be with the false and venal.

Among these last she had signalised Monseigneur d’Autun, apparently with reason enough. He was a mild-mannered, smiling prelate, with a paternal, beneficent air, one who had several times changed sides in the days of the Fronde. Ninon had first met him at that time at the house of Madame de Longueville, and thenceforward he was one of the circle of rue des Tournelles. Frequently he had begged or borrowed, “for the poor,” considerable sums of money from his open-handed hostess; but Ninon entertained doubts of the bishop’s saintliness, and one day they were set at rest beyond all question by the conclusions he drew from certain arguments he had propounded to her. Then throwing off the mask of the virtuous living he professed, he boldly declared his passionate admiration for her. That a man of the world would have been repulsed by Ninon is not very probable; but she felt the instinctive aversion for the touch of some insidious, poisonous reptile, and she shrank from him, and ordered him from her presence; and departing, Monseigneur d’Autun looked the vengeance his muttered words threatened.

In discussing with Molière her experiences of more than one distinguished prelate, Richelieu and Mazarin not forgotten, she asked him how it was possible to discern the true from the false?

Molière replied that there was nothing more easy, and with Ninon’s permission to introduce her latest clerical admirer, he would put the answer to her question before her in less than six weeks. He had her joyous consent, and the answer within the given time. It was Le Tartufe.

Molière’s recent plays had raised him to the height of his fame. He suffered from the usual gnat-bites and little stings of jealousy inseparable from literary success. The critics did their spitefullest. The critics, said Molière, were like the children who can whip horses, but cannot drive them.