Ninon de l'Enclos and her century

by Mary C. Rowsell

And when young de Villiers arrived in Paris, Ninon received him in her salon, as she received other young people who sought entry there, or for whom it was sought, that they might acquire the tone of good society and le bon goût. Ninon was then over sixty years of age. Whether, as it is said, she absolutely retained all the beauty and freshness of her youth, may perhaps be taken cum grano salis; but that much of it clung about her with all the charm of her manner, seems indisputable, since she fascinated the young man of twenty-two.

He fell passionately in love with her; but for a long time he maintained silence, until he could conceal his love no longer, and Ninon could no longer remain blind to the true state of the case. She was deeply distressed and perplexed. She assumed a sort of maternal tenderness towards him, which had simply the effect of heating the young man’s ardour to frenzy, and she was forced to forbid him her house. Fear of never seeing her again, drove him to say that he would cease to love her. Love forced him to do this, and to this promise love made him false. The excess of his passion would not permit him to exist longer in a state of doubt. He sought a last interview of her. Ninon had gone to her country-house, and thither he followed. He found her alone, and spoke like a man driven, as indeed he was, to desperation. Ninon, overcome with pity, overwhelmed with grief at being the cause of her son’s misery, could no longer maintain her firmness, and young de Villiers, believing that the moment of his happiness had arrived, approached her with passionate gestures. Seized with horror, she shrank from him and told him the truth. “I am your mother!” she cried in her distress. One instant de Villiers stood as if thunderstruck; then he turned and rushed into the garden, hurrying blindly on till he reached the little thicket at the end of it. There, in his despair, he drew his sword and stabbed himself to the death.

Ninon waited, and when he did not return, she went in search of him, to find him weltering in his own blood. He was still breathing, and strove to speak; but his words were undistinguishable. The passionate love he felt for her still burned in his eyes; but the agitation her tenderness and despair occasioned him, only hastened the end, and he died in her arms.

The horror of this tragedy nearly drove Ninon to take away her own life. Her pitying friends strove to bring some assuagement to her sufferings, and Madame Scarron nursed her in the long illness which ensued, and her gentle, tender ways and words, and her manner of winning Ninon to speak of the unhappy lost one, at last brought tears to her eyes, parched with her mental agony, and so relief came, and Françoise Scarron, weeping with her, was then her best friend. It was she who ordered a mausoleum tomb for the dead. It was placed where Charles de Villiers had been interred, a monument of black marble. Night and day the tapers burned around it, and many an hour in prayer Ninon knelt beside the last resting-place of Charles de Villiers.

At this time, Madame Scarron, hitherto very far from a devotee, introduced to her a young priest of St Sulpice. His name was de la Mothe Fénelon. His touching words and sincere, gentle sympathy brought healing as time passed; but the shadow of sorrow and suffering never fully lifted—the gay, frivolous Ninon was known no more. Henceforth, till death, she was Mademoiselle de L’Enclos, bearing herself with dignity, self-restrained, and esteemed by most.

The consent of the king to the marriage of Lauzun and the Grande Mademoiselle having been at last wrung from him, Lauzun grew insufferable. His pride was boundless. Except to the king, he would not even doff his hat. He occupied himself exclusively in arranging the details of the festivities and ceremonial of the marriage.

But his enemies were at work. His folly and vanity had created a host of them, and among them were the powerful Louvois, and the vindictive and ambitious favourite, Madame de Montespan, whom he had frequently grossly insulted; while Louvois found himself constantly thwarted and provoked by him. Madame de Montespan, thinking over the matter of Mademoiselle’s marriage, decided that her vast property would be much better disposed among the eight children she had brought the king, than in the pockets of Lauzun, and finding a supporter in Louvois, she represented the case to His Majesty, the result being that he withdrew his consent to the marriage, and de Lauzun was lodged in the Bastille, his character blackened—no such difficult matter—by the two. The friends of the lovers had warned them of the imminent possibility of this; and it was believed that they accepted the advice, and contrived to be privately married. De Lauzun vented his wrath for the promise—this time so undisputedly broken—by denouncing Madame de Montespan for her wifely unfaithfulness to her husband; but it did not hinder his imprisonment, which he spent for five years in the fortress of Pignerol, that dreary stronghold of deportation for offending, blue-blooded courtiers. He was conducted thither by Monsieur d’Artagnan, lieutenant of the Guards. Five years’ further incarceration after this in Pignerol was allotted him; though on conditions slightly ameliorated. The treatment had first been hard in the extreme, and had rigidly condemned him to one cell.

Sympathy extended only to the disconsolate Mademoiselle, the victim of an ambitious coxcomb, and of a venal, faithless woman.

Attention was, however, soon turned entirely from this affair, by the terrible and sudden death of Henrietta, the Duchesse d’Orléans of England—daughter of King Charles I.—the amiable and universally beloved wife of the king’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans.

She was one evening enjoying the cool air on the great balcony of the palace of St Cloud, in company with her ladies, and requested one of them to fetch her a glass of chicory water from her apothecary. The apothecary arrived in a few moments with an enamelled goblet containing the drink, which he presented to her. Scarcely had she drunk it, than she was seized with violent convulsive agony, and cried out that she was poisoned.