Les Français rougiront un jour
De leur peu de reconnaissance,
Il leur fallut un comédien
Qui mit à les polir, sa gloire et son étude.
Mais Molière, a ta gloire il ne manquerait rien,
Si, parmi les défauts que tu peignis si bien,
Tu les avais repris de leur ingratitude.”
P. Bonhours.
And so the journey of her life, shadowed more and more by the dropping away into the mists of death of so many of the well-loved ones, Ninon’s own years fled on, still finding content in the society of the many friends, young and old, not gone before. Among these was Madame de la Sablière, with la Fontaine ever in attendance; Marsillac, the comrade of Ninon’s youth—now the Duc de la Rochefoucauld—with his Maxims, which she keenly criticised, as based on the philosophy of self-love: that self only was the motive power of human thought and action; Corneille, growing old, and preferring his latest tragedy of Surène to the immortal Cid, a preference shared by few; with him came his nephew, Fontenelle, the brilliant scholar and centenarian to be, short of a few weeks, who on his deathbed said—“My friends, I do not suffer; only I find existence a little difficult,” and who followed the viâ media philosophy so closely, that he was wont to boast he never either laughed or wept. Then Ninon would tune her lute, and play the airs of the new musical conductor of the king’s orchestra, Lulli, the miller’s son, a scullion once, risen to be master of French dramatic music, who met his death so disastrously from the bungling treatment of a quack doctor. The priest who attended his last hours refused to give him the consolations of religion until he had consented to have the score of his latest opera destroyed. He consented, to the indignation of a friend who was with him. “Hush, hush!” said Lulli; “there is a fair copy of it in my drawer.”
Sometimes Racine, a neighbour now of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos, would declaim passages from his Iphigénie, or Madame de la Fayette would read from her history of Henrietta of England, just then on point of completion. She and Madame Montausier were Ninon’s sincerest and best-beloved friends. One day Madame de la Fayette asked her the cause of the coolness existing between herself and Madame de Sévigné. It was a coolness all on one side, shrugged Ninon. To be sure, she had the young Marquis de Grignan, Madame’s grandson, at her feet—as in times gone by, the Marquis père, and the Marquis grandpère had sighed there. She inclined, however, to his marrying as his mother desired, all the more that, besides entertaining no overwhelming admiration for the little marquis, she was jealous of his worshipping also at the shrine of the great tragic actress, la Champmeslé, who had rendered herself so famous in the Andromaque of Racine. The poet had introduced de Sévigné to the tragédienne, to whom Ninon conceded talent, but no beauty. The affair came to an amiable conclusion, and while a reconciliation was effected between Ninon and la Champmeslé, she concluded a peace with Madame de Sévigné, esteeming her friendship above the folly and trifling of her grandson.