Her marriage with Louis is believed to have been celebrated in the chapel of the château[7] in 1683—she being fifty and the king forty-seven years old—in the presence of Harlay and Louvois, the nuptial knot being tied by the confessor of the marquise, Père la Chaise. She further obtained his appointment to the office of the king’s confessor.
Père la Chaise was a priest of the Company of Jesus, a man, if “neither fanatical nor fawning,” intolerant of all religious creeds outside his own; and now, holding the conscience of Louis XIV. and of Madame Louis XIV., Père la Chaise soon became a power in the land.
One by one death was bearing away the friends of Ninon’s earlier years. The death of Madame de Chevreuse, at Port Royal, was followed close by that of Madame de Longueville. Madame de Maintenon’s prediction that de la Rochefoucauld would quickly follow her to whom his heart had been unchangingly given, was verified. A few months, and Marsillac, the friend of Ninon’s merry days at Loches, was no more.
A deep melancholy darkened in upon Ninon as she thought of all those gone hence, and the many missing now from the circle in the rue des Tournelles, although new faces were not wanting there, and she maintained the old hospitalities. She was not sorry, however, to put an end to these for a while, in order to fall in with the proposition of Monsieur le Nôtre, that she, with Madame de la Fayette, should accompany him to Rome, whither he was bound with his friend, the poet Santeuil, a canon of St Victor, who was making the journey in order to try and obtain the sanction of the pope to the use of a certain collection of Latin hymns he had composed—in all the churches of Christendom; while the pope was anxious to consult the royal gardener upon the laying out of the parterres of the Vatican.
They went by way of Geneva, Turin, Parma, and Florence, and arrived in Rome. His Holiness received the travellers with the most gracious and fatherly of welcomes, surrounded by all the members of the Sacred College. After a while he conducted the visitors to the gardens, where he paused on the brink of a great pond, containing fish of all kinds, some of them carp two hundred years old. Presently one of the cardinals rang a bell hanging to a post near the water’s edge, and all the fishes came swimming with lightning rapidity, their heads lifting high above the surface of the water, and a page approached with two baskets, one filled with bread-crumbs, the other with grain. These dainties the pope threw into the pond to his favourites, who snapped up every morsel in a trice. Then the bell rang again, the fish twisted and turned joyously for a little while, as if to display their gratitude and satisfaction, and then disappeared. De Santeuil remarked that the fish set a fine example to the religious Orders, observing so excellently as they did, the rule of silence, and drinking nothing but water. The observation was not very cordially received by either the pope or his cardinals, and in any case, de Santeuil, who did not then obtain the permission to use his hymns, was inclined to blame the fishes. Some grace was accorded the hymns later; but the Consistory was of opinion that they bore a flavour of paganism.
Ninon, on returning from the Holy City to Paris, found Corneille at the point of death. Memories now were her best consolation, and though she had not been eight months away from Paris, she found as many changes on her return, as if she had been absent a century. The king, to begin with, had become converted, and the Court had followed suit. Everyone was occupied with the concerns of his future salvation. The king had cut off his moustache, and the courtiers had all shaved their upper lips. As His Majesty had decided that a grey wig would add to his air of respectability, everybody had powdered their hair. Hitherto, hair-powder had been used by women only. Hair had become so enormously expensive, that moderately-supplied purses had to be content with a thin kind of crape puffed into curls. The justaucorps, after having developed into a cassock kind of garment, was now a coat, and the nether clothes Ninon considered to have grown disgracefully ugly in shape.
The women had borrowed from Spain the hideous deformity of vertugadins, cage-like objects composed of wire, horsehair, or both, which they bound upon their hips, to extend the hang of their petticoats. On the top of this monstrosity came the panier, a whalebone contrivance covered with cloth stuff, put to similar ends, and so greatly obstructing the thoroughfares, that the women were frequently obliged to stand on one side to allow of others passing. Pairing off with the older fashions, went the old French natural gaiety, graceful manners and conversation, and pompous deportment and stilted formalities of speech were the vogue. Ninon almost found consolation for growing old in face of these dreary surroundings, fostered and assiduously tended by Madame Louis Quatorze and her Jesuit director, Père la Chaise. Of what consequence was France and her well-being, provided these two carried their own ends to fruition?
Possibly this altered state of things had something to do with Monsieur de St Evrémond’s decision to remain in England, where the natural atmosphere might be brumous, but the social conditions far less lugubrious. He wrote, at all events, to Ninon that, everything considered, he preferred to remain where he had now been for fifteen years, and would content himself with correspondence with her, and “I shall read with vast satisfaction about things which you will tell me that I know,” he writes, “but above all, tell me of the things about which I do not know.”
And Ninon did write bright letters to her old friend, full of chat and the social events of the day, as of the days that were past—a sort of long confession, in which she did not specially spare anyone; certainly not herself.