Ninon de l'Enclos and her century

by Mary C. Rowsell

CHAPTER XXI

A distinguished Salon—The Duke’s Homage—Quietism—The disastrous Edict—The writing on the Window-pane—The persecution of the Huguenots—The Pamphleteers—The story of Jean Larcher and The Ghost of M. Scarron—The two Policies.

“The house of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos,” writes a contemporary author, “was then, 1694, the rendezvous of the persons of the Court and of the city who were regarded as the most intellectually gifted and estimable. The house of Ninon was, perhaps, in these latter years of her life, the only one where talent and wit found fair breathing-room, and where the time was passed without card-playing and without ennui, and until the age of eighty-seven she was sought by the best company of the time.”

“And,” writes another eminent chronicler—

“Ninon had illustrious friends of all sorts, and showed such wit and tact that she never failed to keep them in good humour with each other; or at all events free of petty differences. Her friends were of the most refined and mentally gifted of the people of the Court; so that it was esteemed very desirable to mingle with them in her salon. There was never any gaming, nor loud laughter, nor disputing, nor religious or political discussion, but much flow of wit, and conversing on topics new and old, subjects of sentiment or of gallantry, but these never transgressing the bounds of good taste. All was delicate, graceful, well-balanced, and furnished themes which she was well able to render full of interest from her stores of memories of so many past years. The consideration she had acquired, the number and distinction of her friends and acquaintance, continued to be her attraction when the charm of her beauty had faded. She knew all about the intrigues of the present Court, as of the old, serious and otherwise. Her conversation was charming, disinterested, frank, guarded, and accurate at every point, and almost to a weakness blameless and pure. She frequently assisted her friends with money, and would enter for them into important negotiations, and ever faithfully guarded money and secrets entrusted to her keeping. All these things won for her a repute and respect of the most marvellous kind.”

Such, on the testimony of the Marquis de la Fare and of St Simon, was the Ninon de L’Enclos of the closing years of her life and of the century. She herself records, with pardonable pride, that “when the great Condé used to meet her out driving, he would descend from his carriage, and cause the window of hers to be let down, that he might offer her his compliments.”

It has been said that Paris no longer had any salon except hers where people of wit and breeding and celebrity forgathered. There came Racine, her near neighbour, Boileau, Fontenelle, la Fontaine, Huydens, Bussy Rabutin, Charleval, Montreuil, la Fare, Benserade, Desmarets, Quinault, La Bruyère, and with them many of the prominent men and women of the Court. Thither also came frequently Fénelon, and it was in Ninon’s salon that his relative, Madame Guyon, first expounded her doctrine of Quietism.

Now and again Madame de Maintenon would come to the rue des Tournelles, and Ninon concedes that she had the good taste not to unduly assert herself on these occasions; though the air of strict and devout propriety seemed ever more and more to enfold her. At that time she showed considerable favour to the theories of Madame Guyon and of Fénelon; but the Jesuit Père la Chaise had small appreciation of anything savouring of liberty of conscience, and the Edict of Nantes was imminent, the evil thing engendered in the brain of the trio ruling him whose proud mottoes, “Nec pluribus impor,” “Vires acquiret eundo,” so belied the weak, superstitious shadow into which the Grand Monarque had faded.

Louis’s liking for his Huguenot subjects had always been so entirely of the smallest, that it verged on hatred. Thanks to Mazarin’s plan of mental cultivation for him, his understanding of the doctrinal questions at issue between Catholic and Calvinist was so infinitesimal as to be of no account. It was his arrogant claim of authority over the minds and bodies of his subjects, far more than any spiritual convictions, which needed but the representations of Madame de Maintenon, of the egotistical, vain and unsympathetic minister Louvois, and of the Jesuit intolerance of Père la Chaise, to fire the smouldering flame of extermination of the “reformed” Christianity of France; and on the 22nd of October, 1685, was re-enacted the new version of the tragedy of St Bartholomew, the chief rôle in it played by the descendant of the murdered Coligny’s friend, who had been the progenitor of Françoise d’Aubigné, the ambitious Madame Louis Quatorze. Gentle and patient in adversity, as Scarron’s wife, admirable, and perhaps really lovable, in that far-off day when she did not even then scruple, and successfully, to win her friend Ninon’s lover away from her—a fact by no means forgotten, nor likely to be, recorded as Monsieur de Villarceaux had recorded it at the time on a window of “the Yellow Room” in the rue des Tournelles. There, diamond-graven on the pane of glass, that erotic quatrain proclaimed the charms of Françoise as unmistakably as ever; and though Ninon had no part in it, somehow the lines found their way into Monsieur Loret’s journal, and forthwith it created other couplets, which commemorated more than one incident in the life of Madame Louis Quatorze. The precious rhyming ran into several verses, varied only by the several names of Madame’s former admirers, starting gaily with Monsieur de Villarceaux:

“On est ravi que le roi notre sire,