Ninon de l'Enclos and her century

by Mary C. Rowsell

“My child, you see that all that remains to me in these last moments, is but the sad memory of pleasures that are past; I have possessed them but for a little while, and that is the one complaint I have to make of Nature. But alas! how useless are my regrets! You, my daughter, who will doubtless survive me for so many years, profit as quickly as you may of the precious time, and be ever less scrupulous in the number of your pleasures, than in your choice of them.”

The fortune of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos had been greatly diminished by the reckless extravagances of her father; and conscious, probably, of this error in himself, he was careful to protect her best interests, by purchasing for her an annuity which brought her 8,000 livres annual income. His prodigality was, however, one of the few of his characteristics she did not inherit. On the contrary, she displayed through life a conspicuous power of regulating the business sides of it with a prudence which enabled her to be generous to her friends in need, while not stinting herself, or the ordering of her households, and the entertainment of the company she delighted in; for the réunions and evenings of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos were a proverb for all that was at once charming and intellectual; varied as they were with sweet music, to which her own singing contributed—more notably still, by her performances on the lute, which were so skilful; though by these hangs the complaint that she ordinarily needed a great deal of pressing before she would indulge the company—a curious exception to the ruling of the ways of Ninon, ordinarily so entirely innocent of affectation.

At this time her beauty and accomplishments, united with her fortune, drew many suitors for her hand, and of these there would probably have been many more, but for the certainty she made no secret of, that marriage was not in the picture of the life she had sketched out for herself. Her passion for liberty of thought and action in every aspect, fostered ever by her father, was dominant in her, and not to be sacrificed for the most brilliant matrimonial yoke.

One of her first proceedings was the establishment of a home for herself. It consisted of a handsome suite of rooms in the rue des Tournelles, in the quarter of the Marais, then one of the most fashionable in Paris, and distinguished for the many intellectual and gifted men and women congregating in the stately, red-bricked, lofty-roofed houses surrounding the planted space in whose centre, a little later, was to stand the equestrian statue of Louis XIII. The square had been planned by Mansard, and Ninon’s home—Number 23—had been occupied by the famous architect himself.

A few doors off was the residence of Cardinal Richelieu, and within the convenient distance of a few houses—Number 6—lived Marion Delorme. For years this Place Royale, as it is now called—at one time Place des Vosges—had been, until Mansard transformed it, held an accursed spot, and let go to ruin; for here it was stood the palace of the Tournelles, a favourite residence of Henri II., and in its courtyard took place the fatal encounter between him and the Englishman Montgomery, whose lance pierced through the king’s eye, to his brain, and caused his death. Catherine de Médicis, in her grief and indignation at the tragic ending of that day’s tilt, caused the palace to be razed to the ground; but the old associations clung to the place, for it became the favourite spot for the countless duels which the young bloods and others were constantly engaging in; until Richelieu put an almost entire stop to them by his revival of the summary law against the practice, whose penalty was death by decapitation. The great cardinal’s ruling was not to be evaded, and several men of rank suffered death upon the scaffold for disobeying it.

Away beyond the St Antoine Gate at Picpus, Ninon established another dwelling for herself, in which it was her custom to rusticate during the autumn.

Beautiful—though in features not faultlessly so—she bore some resemblance to Anne of Austria, the adored of Buckingham, a likeness close enough to admit of the success of a freak played years later, when she contrived to deceive Louis the Great into the notion that the shade of his mother appeared to him, to chide him for certain evil ways. Her nose, like the queen’s, was large, and her beautiful teeth gleamed through lips somewhat full in their curves; her hair was dark and luxuriant, while her intelligent and sympathetic eyes expressed an indescribable mingling of reserve and voluptuous languor, magnetising all, coupled as it was with the charm of her gentle, courteous manner and conversation that sparkled with the wit and sentiment of a mind enriched by careful training and study of the literature of her own time, and of the past. It was her crowning grace that she made no display of these really sterling acquirements, and entertained a wholesome detestation of the pedantry and précieuse taint of the learned ladies mocked at so mercilessly by that dear friend of hers, Molière. Few could boast a complexion so delicately fresh as hers. She stands sponsor to this day to toilette powders and cosmetics. Bloom and poudre de Ninon boxes find place on countless women’s dressing-tables to this hour; but in her own case art rendered little assistance, possibly none at all; except for one recipe she employed daily through her life. The secret of it, sufficiently transparent, was equally in the possession of the beautiful Diana of Poitiers, who also retained her beauty for such a length of years.

For all who list to read, her letter-writing powers stand perpetuated in her published correspondence, and while the theme is almost unvarying—the philosophy of love and friendship—her wit and fancy treat it in a thousand graceful ways. Fickle as she was in love, she was constant in friendship, and the heat of the first, often so startlingly transient, frequently settled down into life-long camaraderie rarely destroyed. While not ungenerous to her rivals in the tender passion, she could be dangerously jealous; but gifted with the saving grace of humour, of which women are said to be destitute, the anger and malice were oftentimes allowed to die down into forgiveness, and perhaps also, forgetfulness. Rearing and temperament set Ninon de L’Enclos apart; even among those many notable women whose intimate she was. Essentially a product of her century, she lived her own life in its fulness. Following ever her father’s counsel, she was at once as boundlessly unrestricted in her observance of that perfect law of liberty to which she yielded obedience, as she was scrupulous in selection. Says Monsieur de St Evrémond of her—“Kindly and indulgent Nature has moulded the soul of Ninon from the voluptuousness of Epicurus and the virtue of Cato.”

And at last, after an interval of six years, Ninon and Marsillac met again. It was in the salon of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Mademoiselle de L’Enclos, beautiful, sought after, already the centre of an admiring circle, the talk of Paris, and Monsieur le Capitaine de la Rochefoucauld, already for two or three years a gallant soldier, chivalrous, romantic, handsome with the beauty of intellect, interesting from his air of gentle, cynical pensiveness, ardent in the cause of the queen so mercilessly persecuted by Richelieu, and therefore lacking the advancement his qualities merited, still, however, finding opportunity to indulge in the gallantries of the society he so adorned. Someone has said that few ever less practically recognised the doctrines of Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld’s maxims, than did Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld himself, and the aphorisms have been criticised, and exception has again and again been taken to them, not perhaps altogether unreasonably; but in any case he justified himself of his dictum that “love is the smallest part of gallantry”; for when at last—and it took some time—Marsillac recognised his old scapegrace chum of the Loches château, homage and admiration he yielded her indeed; but it was far from undivided, and shared in conspicuously by her rival, Marion Delorme, a woman of very different mould from Ninon. Like her, beautiful exceedingly, but more impulsive, softer-natured, more easily apt to give herself away and to regret later on. Intellectually greatly Ninon’s inferior, she was yet often a thorn in the side of the jealous Mademoiselle de L’Enclos.