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NINON DE L’ENCLOS.
From an Original Picture given by herself to the Countess of Sandwich and by the present Earl of Sandwich to M^r Walpole 1757

NINON DE L’ENCLOS
AND HER CENTURY

BY

M. C. ROWSELL

AUTHOR OF

“THE FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE,” “TRAITOR OR PATRIOT,” “THORNDYKE
MANOR,” “MONSIEUR DE PARIS,” ETC. ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BRENTANO’S

NEW YORK

HURST & BLACKETT, LIMITED
LONDON
1910

Printed in Great Britain

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

NINON DE L’ENCLOS
AND HER CENTURY

NINON DE L’ENCLOS
AND HER CENTURY

CHAPTER I

Birth—Parentage—“Arms and the Man”—A Vain Hope—Contraband Novels—A Change of Educational System—Ninon’s Endowments—The Wrinkle—A Letter to M. de L’Enclos and What Came of it—A Glorious Time—“Troublesome Huguenots”—The Château at Loches, and a New Acquaintance—“When Greek meets Greek”—The Prisoners—“Liberty”—The Shades of Night—Vagabonds? or Two Young Gentlemen of Consequence?—Tired Out—A Dilemma—Ninon Herself Again—Consolation.

Anne de L’Enclos was born in Paris in 1615. She was the daughter of Monsieur de L’Enclos, a gentleman of Touraine, and of his wife, a member of the family of the Abra de Raconis of the Orléanois.

It would not be easy to find characteristics more diverse than those distinguishing this pair. Their union was an alliance arranged for them—a mariage de convenance. Diametrically opposite in temperament, Monsieur was handsome and distinguished-looking; while the face and figure of Madame were ordinary. She was constitutionally timid, and intellectually narrow, devoted to asceticism, and reserved in manner. She passed her time in seclusion, dividing it between charitable works, the reading of pious books, and attendance at Mass and the other services of the Church. Monsieur de L’Enclos, on the other hand, was a votary of every pleasure and delightful distraction the world could afford him. Among them he counted duelling; he was a skilled swordsman, and his rapier play was of the finest. A brave and gallant soldier, he had served the royal cause during the later years of Henri IV., and so on into the reign of Louis XIII. He was a bon vivant, and arms and intrigue, which were as the breath of life to him, he sought after wherever the choicest opportunities of those were likely to be found.

Notwithstanding, the rule of life-long bickering and mutual reproach attending such ill-assorted unions, would seem to be proved by its exception in the case of Ninon’s parents; since no record of any such domestic strife stands against them. Bearing and forbearing, they agreed to differ, and went their several ways—Madame de L’Enclos undertaking the training and instruction of Ninon in those earliest years, in the fond hope that there would be a day when she should take the veil and become a nun. Before, however, she attained to the years of as much discretion as she ever possessed, she had arrived at the standpoint of the way she intended to take of the life before her, which was to roll into years that did not end until the dawning of the eighteenth century; and it in no way included any such intention. So sturdily opposed to it, indeed, was she, that it irresistibly suggests the possibility of her being the inspiration of the old song—“Ninon wouldn’t be a nun”—

“I shan’t be a nun, I won’t be a nun,

I am so fond of pleasure that I won’t be a nun!”

For Ninon was her father’s child; almost all her inherited instincts were from him. The endeavours of Madame de L’Enclos failed disastrously. The monotony and rigid routine of the young girl’s life repelled the bright, frank spirit, and drove it to opposite extreme, resulting in sentiments of disgust for the pious observances of her church; and taken there under compulsion day in, day out, she usually contrived to substitute some plump little volume of romance, or other light literature, at the function, for her Mass-book and breviary, to while away the tedium.

In no very long time Monsieur de L’Enclos, noting the bent of his daughter’s nature, himself took over her training. He carried it on, it is scarcely necessary to say, upon a plane widely apart from the mother’s. A man of refined intellect, he had studied the books and philosophy of the renaissance of literature; and before Ninon was eleven years old, while imbuing her with the love of reading such books as the essays of Montaigne and the works of Charon, he accustomed her to think and to reason for herself, an art of which she very soon became a past-mistress, the result being an ardent recognition of the law of liberty, and the Franciscan counsel of perfection: “Fay ce qu’et voudray.” Ninon possessed an excellent gift of tongues, cultivating it to the extent of acquiring fluently, Italian, Spanish, and English, rendered the more easy of mastery from her knowledge of Latin, which she so frequently quotes in her correspondence.

Her love of music was great; she sang well, and was a proficient on the lute, in which her father himself, a fine player, instructed her. She conversed with facility, and doubtless took care to cultivate her natural gifts in those days when the arts of conversation and causerie were indispensable for shining in society, and she loved to tell a good story; but she drew a distinct line at reciting. One day when Mignard, the painter, deplored his handsome daughter’s defective memory, she consoled him—“How fortunate you are,” she said, “she cannot recite.”

The popular acceptation of Ninon de L’Enclos’ claims to celebrity would appear to be her beauty, which she retained to almost the end of her long life—a beauty that was notable; but it lay less in perfection of the contours of her face, than in the glorious freshness of her complexion, and the expression of her magnificent eyes, at once vivacious and sympathetic, gentle and modest-glancing, yet brilliant with voluptuous languor. Any defects of feature were probably those which crowned their grace—and when as in the matter of a slight wrinkle, which in advanced years she said had rudely planted itself on her forehead, the courtly comment on this of Monsieur de St Evrémond was to the effect that “Love had placed it there to nestle in.” Her well-proportioned figure was a little above middle height, and her dancing was infinitely graceful.

Provincial by descent, Mademoiselle de L’Enclos was a born Parisian, in that word’s every sense. Her bright eyes first opened in a small house lying within the shadows of Notre-Dame, the old Cité itself, the heart of hearts of Paris, still at that time fair with green spaces and leafy hedgerows, though these were to endure only a few years longer. Her occasionally uttered wish that she had been born a man, hardly calls for grave consideration. The desire to don masculine garments and to ride and fence and shoot, and to indulge generally in manly pursuits, occurred to her when she was still short of twelve years old, by which time she was able to write well; and her earliest epistolary correspondence included a letter addressed to her father. It ran as follows:—

“My Very Honoured Father,—I am eleven years old. I am big and strong; but I shall certainly fall ill, if I continue to assist at three masses every day, especially on account of one performed by a great, gouty, fat canon, who takes at least twelve minutes to get through the Epistle and the Gospel, and whom the choir boys are obliged to put back again on his feet after each genuflexion. I would as soon see one of the towers of Notre Dame on the altar-steps; they would move quite as quickly, and not keep me so long from breakfast. This is not at all cheering I can tell you. In the interest of the health of your only child, it is time to put an end to this state of things. But in what manner, you will ask, and how is it to be set about? Nothing more simple. Let us suppose that instead of me, Heaven had given you a son: I should have been brought up by you, and not by my mother; already you would have begun to instruct me in arms, and mounted me on horseback, which would have much better pleased me than twiddling along the beads of a rosary to Aves, Paters, and Credos. The present moment is the one for me to inform you that I decide to be no longer a girl, and to become a boy.

“Will you therefore arrange to send for me to come to you, in order to give me an education suitable to my new sex? I am with respect, my very honoured father,—Your little

Ninon.”

This missive, which Ninon contrived to get posted without her mother’s knowledge, met with her father’s hearty approval. No more time was lost than it took to make her a handsome suit of clothes, of the latest mode, the one bearing the palm for grace and picturesqueness, far and away from all the fashions of men’s attire, speaking for itself in the canvases of Vandyck; and Ninon stands forth in the gallant bravery of silken doublet, with large loose sleeves slashed to the shoulder; her collar a falling band of richest point lace; the short velvet cloak hanging to the shoulder; the fringed breeches meeting the wide-topped boots frilled about with fine lawn; the plumed, broad-brimmed Flemish beaver hat, well-cocked to one side upon the graceful head, covered with waves of dark hair falling to the neck; gauntleted gloves of Spanish leather; her rapier hanging from the richly-embroidered baldric crossing down from the right shoulder—a picture that thrilled the heart of Monsieur de L’Enclos with ecstasy; and when, splendidly mounted, she rode forth, ruffling it gallantly beside him, he was the proud recipient of many a compliment and encomium on the son of whose existence until now nobody had been as much as aware.

These delightful days were destined, however, to come quickly to an end. Fresh disturbances arose with the Huguenots of La Rochelle and Loudun, and Monsieur de L’Enclos was summoned to join his regiment. Ninon would doubtless have liked of all things to go with him; but while this was impossible, she was spared the dreaded alternative of the fat canon and the three Masses a day, by her father accepting for her an invitation from his sister, the Baroness Montaigu, who lived on her estate near Loches, on the borders of the Indre. This lady, a widow and childless, had long been desirous of making the acquaintance of her young niece, and on his way north-west, Monsieur de L’Enclos left Ninon at the château. “And when we have settled these wretched Huguenots,” said Monsieur de L’Enclos, as he bade her farewell, and slipped a double louis into her hands, “I will return for you.”

Madame de Montaigu was a charming lady, of the same spirited, gay temperament as her brother. She received her niece with the utmost kindness, and having been initiated into the girl’s whim for playing the boy, she laughingly fell in with it, and addressed her with the greatest gravity as “my pretty nephew,” introducing to her, a—shall it be said?—another young gentleman, by name François de la Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marsillac, the son of her intimate friend, the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld. The lad was a pupil at the celebrated Jesuits’ College of La Flêche, founded by Henri IV., and usually spent part of his holidays at the Loches château.

A year or two older than Ninon, Marsillac was a shy and retiring boy, and at first rather shrank from his robustious new companion, who, however, soon contrived to draw him out, putting him on his mettle by pretending to doubt his prowess with sword and rapier, and his skill generally in the noble art of fencing. She challenged him to measure weapons with her, and piqued at the idea of one younger than himself pretending to martial superiority, he cast aside his shyness, and the two falling on guard, clashed and clattered their steel in the galleries and chambers of the house, from morning till night, until the noise grew intolerable, and their weapons were taken away from them, in the fond hope of securing peace and quietness. It was, however, only partially realised; since the enforced idleness of Ninon’s hands suggested the surreptitious annexing of the head forester’s gun, with which she took aim at the blackbirds in the park avenues, and the young does in the forest: and then, seeking further variety, the two manned the pleasure-boat on the lake, and fared into such perilous places, that the voyages became strictly tabooed, and the boat was hidden away.

The constant tintamarre of the pair frequently brought its punishment; and one day, on the occasion of a too outrageous disturbance, they were locked into the library. Books they had no particular mind for that glorious sunshiny morning; still less enjoyable was the prospect of the promised dinner of dry bread and water, and they sat gloomily gazing upon the softly-waving boughs of the trees, and up through the open window into the free blue sky. Being some eighteen feet from the ground, it had not been thought necessary to bar the casement beyond possibility of their trying to escape. The feat would assuredly not so much as suggest itself. Nevertheless, the temptation crept into the soul of Ninon, and she quickly imparted it to Marsillac.

Looking down, they saw that soft green turf belted the base of the wall, and taking hurried counsel, they climbed to the window-sill, and at the risk of their necks, clutching by the carved stonework, and the stout old ivy trails with which it was mantled, they dropped to the ground, and then away they hied by the clipped yew alleys, mercilessly trampling the parterres—away till they found themselves in the forest. Free now as the sweet breeze playing in their hair, they ran on, pranking and shouting, now following the little beaten tracks, now bounding over the brushwood, heedless of the rents and scratches of the thorny tangles; until after some hours, Marsillac’s pace began to drag, and very soon he said he was tired.

“That is no matter,” said Ninon, “we will hire a carriage at the first place we come to”; but the name of that place was not even to be guessed at; inasmuch as they had not the least notion which way they had taken. The great thing was to arrive at last at Tours, where Ninon said they could at once enlist as soldiers. Marsillac was, however, tired—very tired; his legs ached, and he sat down for a little rest, observing rather crossly, in the cynical way which sometimes he had, that talking was all very well; but for one thing they were not big enough for soldiers, and for another, you could not have a carriage without paying for it.

“Of course not,” acquiesced Ninon, proudly producing her double louis. “Can I not pay?” But the hours passed, the sun declined, and not so much as a solitary cottage had presented itself to their eyes, into which a shade of anxiety had crept; and ere long they began to feel certain they saw wolves and lions and bandits lurking in all directions behind the huge black forest tree-trunks, and young Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld had now grown so tired that, he wanted nothing so much as to go to bed. Even supper was a secondary consideration. Still, desperately hungry as they both were, liberty is such a glorious thing; and were they not free?—free as the air that was growing so chilly, and the pale moonlight rays as they broke through some darkening clouds, seemed to make it almost shuddery. These, however, suddenly crossed something white, and though terrifying for the moment, the second glance to which they schooled themselves brought reassurance. The white patch they saw was a bit of a cottage wall pierced by a little lattice, through which gleamed the yellow light of a tallow candle; for the two, creeping close to the panes, peeped in. But noiselessly as they strove to render their movements, the attention of a couple of big dogs of the boule-dogue breed was aroused, to the extent of one of them fastening upon Marsillac’s haut-de-chausses, and he was only induced to forbear and drop off, under the knotty, chastising stick of a man, apparently the master of the house, who turned upon the trembling truants, and bade them clear off for the vagabonds they were. Their mud-stained and torn apparel, rendered more dilapidated in Marsillac’s case, by the dog’s teeth, justified to a great extent the man’s conclusions; but on their asseverating that they were not good-for-nothing at all; but two very well-born young gentlemen who had lost their way, and would be glad to pay generously for a supper, he called his wife, and committing them to her care, bade her entertain them with the best her larder afforded, and to put a bottle of good wine on the table. Then he went out, while an excellent little piece of a haunch of roe-deer—cooking apparently for the supper of the worthy couple themselves—which Dame Jacqueline set before the hungry wanderers, was heartily appreciated by both. Washed down by a glass or two of the fairly good wine, Marsillac grew hopelessly drowsy. Tired out, he wanted to go to bed. “And why not?” said the dame, not without a gleam of malice in her eyes, which had been keenly measuring the two—“but I have only one bed to offer you, our own, and you must make the best of it.” She smiled on.

“Not I,” said Ninon, rising from the settle like a giant refreshed—“I am going on to Tours. The moon is lovely. It will be delightful. How much to pay, dame? And a thousand thanks for your hospitality. Come, Marsillac,” and Ninon strode to the door. But the glimpses of the pillows within the shadow of the alcove had been too much for Marsillac, and he had already divested himself of his justaucorps, and jumped into bed.

“And now, my young gentleman, what about you?” inquired Jacqueline of the embarrassed Ninon, who seated herself disconsolately on a little three-legged stool. “Come, quick, to bed with you!”

“No!” said Ninon, “I prefer this stool.”

“Oh, ta! ta! that will never do,” said Jacqueline, who was beginning to heap up a broad old settle with a cushion or two, and some wraps. “Sooner than that, I would sit on that stool myself all night, and give you up my place here beside my—Ah! à la bonne heure! There he is,” she cried, as the heavy footsteps of the master of the house, crunching up the garden path, amid the barking of the dogs, grew audible—“and, as I say, give you up my own place—”

“Ah, mon Dieu! no,” distractedly cried Ninon, tearing off her cloak; and bounding into the alcove, to the side of the already fast asleep Marsillac, she dragged the coverings over her head.

“Well, good-night! Sweet repose, you charming little couple,” laughed on Dame Jacqueline, as she drew the curtains to. “But I’d not go to sleep yet awhile, look you. Some friends of yours are coming here to see you. Ah yes, here they are! This way, ladies.”

And the next moment, Madame de Montaigu and the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld stood within the alcove, gazing down with glances beyond power of words to describe.

Dragged by the two ladies from their refuge, Marsillac was hustled into his garments, but Ninon was bidden to leave hers alone, and to don the petticoats and bodice which the baroness had brought for the purpose. “No more masquerading, if you please,” said her aunt, in tones terrible with indignation and severity, “while I have you under my charge. Now, quick, home with you!”

And home they were conducted, disconsolate, crestfallen, arriving there in an extraordinarily short space of time; for the château lay not half a league off, and the two runaways, who had imagined that the best part of Touraine had been covered by them that fine summer day, discovered that the mazes of the forest paths had merely led them round and about within hail of Loches, and Dame Jacqueline and her husband had at once recognised them. The man had then hastened immediately to the château, and informed the ladies, to their indescribable relief, about the two good-for-nothings; for the hue and cry after Mademoiselle Ninon and young Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld had grown to desperation as the sun westered lower and lower.

Ninon wept tears of chagrin and humiliation at the penalty she had to pay of being a girl again; but Marsillac’s spirits revived with astonishing rapidity. He even seemed to be glad at the idea of his fellow-scapegrace being merely one of the weaker and gentler sex, and in her dejection he was for ever seeking to console her. “I love you ever so much better this way, dear one,” he was constantly saying. “Ah, Ninon, you are beautiful as an angel!”

But alas! for the approach of Black Monday, and the holidays ended, Marsillac had to go back to school.

CHAPTER II

Troublesome Huguenots—Madame de L’Enclos—An Escapade, and Nurse Madeleine—Their Majesties—The Hôtel Bourgogne—The End of the Adventure—St Vincent de Paul and his Charities—Dying Paternal Counsel—Ninon’s New Home—Duelling—Richelieu and the Times.

The attack upon La Rochelle, and the incessant Huguenot disturbances generally, detained Monsieur de L’Enclos almost entirely away from Ninon, who remained at Loches in the care of her aunt. From time to time he paid flying visits to Loches—one stay, however, lasting many months, enforced by a severe wound he had received. This period he spent in continuing the instruction of his daughter, on the plan originally mapped out, of fitting her to shine in society. The course included philosophy, languages, music, with his special objections to the matrimonial state—engendered, or at least aggravated by his own failure in the search after happiness along that path. Far better, undesirable as he held the alternative, to be wedded to cloistered seclusion than any man’s bride; and well knowing Ninon’s horror of a nun’s life, he left her to argue out the rest for herself in her own logical fashion; and there is no doubt that the whole of her future was influenced by the views he then inculcated. A modest decorum and sobriety of bearing were indeed indispensable to good breeding; but carpe diem was the motto of Monsieur de L’Enclos, as he desired it to be hers; and every pleasure afforded by this one life, certainly to be called ours, ought to be enjoyed while it lasted; and unswervingly, to the final page of her long record, Ninon carried out the comfortable doctrine.

At seventeen years of age, she was perfectly equipped. Beautiful and highly accomplished, amiable and winning, and though always well dressed, troubling vastly little over the petty fripperies and vanities ordinarily engrossing the female mind, she appears to have gained the commendation and affection of her aunt, who parted from her with great regret, when the failing health of Madame de L’Enclos necessitated Ninon’s departure from Loches, to go to Paris, where the invalid was residing.

Monsieur de L’Enclos fetched Ninon himself from Loches, and in a day or two she was by her mother’s couch. Madame de L’Enclos received her with affection, and affectionately Ninon tended her, going unmurmuringly through the old courses of religious reading and observance, even to renewing acquaintance with the gouty canon in Notre-Dame; but the invalid’s chamber was triste and monotonous, and now and again Ninon effected a few hours’ escape from it, ostensibly for the purpose of attending Mass or Benediction, or some service at one or other of the neighbouring churches. One of them, St Germain l’Auxerrois, was of special interest to Ninon, by reason of neighbouring the hotel of Madame de la Rochefoucauld; and she one day interrogated the guardian of the porte cochère, in the hope of learning some news of Marsillac, whom Time’s chances and changes had entirely removed from her ken; but whose memory endured in her heart; for she had been very sincerely attached to him. The Suisse informing her that he very rarely came to Paris, the philosophical mind of Ninon soon turned for consolation elsewhere. On this plea of devout attendance at church, Ninon was freely permitted leave of absence from the sick room, duennaed by her old nurse, Madeleine, who, however, frequently permitted herself to be dropped by the way, at a small house of public entertainment, above whose door ran the following invitation to step inside:—

“If of dyspepsia you’ve a touch,

Ache of tooth, or head, or such,

There’s nothing like a nip, you see,

Of my delicious Eau de Vie.”

On one of these occasions, her charge went off in the company of a fairly good-looking and agreeable young gentleman who addressed her, as she halted for an instant at the corner of the Pont Neuf, in terms of mingled respect and admiration. Under his escort, she gathered some conception of the manners and mode of existence in the gay city, and in the course of their first walk together, they ran against two of her cavalier’s friends, who were to be associated intimately with her future—Gondi, the future Cardinal de Retz, and the young Abbé Scarron—Abbé by courtesy, since he never went beyond the introductory degree of an ecclesiastical career. In the company of these three merry companions, she visited the Hôtel Bourgogne, a place which may be described as answering more to the music-halls, than to the theatres of the present time. Its frequenters could dine or sup at its tables, take a turn at tarot or thimblerig, and enjoy a variety entertainment carried out on lines mainly popular. It was a vast edifice, built in the Renaissance style, by Francis I., on the site of the gloomy, fortress-like mansion of Jean Sans Peur; and for a time it had been devoted to the representation of the Passion and Mystery plays, and the performances of the clerks of the Basoche, but grown decadent in these days of Louis XIII. Ninon obtained on her way a passing glimpse of His Majesty as he drove by, describing him “as a man of twenty-five; but looking much older, on account of his morose and taciturn expression, responding to the acclamations of the people only by a cold and ceremonious acknowledgment; while Anne of Austria, who followed in a coach preceded by other carriages, saluted the crowd with gracious smiles and wavings of her white hand.”

Having partaken of a light collation at one of the tables, the party gave attention for a while to the actors on the stage, whose performances were coarse, and not much to Ninon’s taste. Then Gondi and Scarron took leave of the two, and the sequel of the adventure proved a warning to young women endowed with any measure of self-respect, to refrain from making acquaintance with gallants in the street. Fortunately she escaped the too ardent attentions of the man, through the intervention and protection of one of more delicacy and honour. Though this one was quickly equally enthralled, he went about his wooing of the beautiful girl in more circumspect fashion, a wooing nipped in the bud by his death from a wound received a short time later.

In the sombre calm of the invalid’s room stands out the grand figure of St Vincent de Paul, bringing to her, as to all the afflicted and heavy-laden, the message of Divine love and pity, and impressing Ninon with a lasting memory of reverence for the serene, pure face and gentle utterances of a heart filled with devotion for the Master he served. Never weary in well-doing, seeming ever to see God, his life was one long self-sacrifice and work of charity. Moved to such compassion for the poor convict of the galleys, who wept for the thought of his wife and children, that the good priest took the fetters from the man’s limbs, and bidding him go free and sin no more, wound them upon his own wrists: a heart so thrilled with love and sorrow for the lot of the miserable little forsaken children of the great city, that he did not rest till he had effected the reforms so sorely-needed for their protection.

Hitherto the small waifs and strays had been under the superintendence of the Archbishop of Paris. The charge of them was, however, delegated to venal nurses, who would frequently sell them for twenty sous each. On fête and red-letter days, it had for long been a custom to expose the little creatures on huge bedsteads chained to the pavement of Notre-Dame, in order to excite the pity of the people, and draw money for their maintenance. St Vincent de Paul was stirred to the endeavour of putting a stop to these scandals; and instituted a hospital for the foundlings. It was situated by the Gate of St Victor, and the work of it was carried on by charitable ladies. The Hospital of Jesus, for eighty poor old men, was another of his good works; while he ministered to the lunatics of the Salpétrière, and to the lepers of St Lazare, within whose church walls he was laid to rest when at last he rendered up his life to the Master he had served; until the all-destroying Terror disturbed his remains: but “his works do follow him.” His compassion alone for the little ones will keep his memory green for all time.

Kneeling at his feet, at her mother’s bidding, the good priest bade Ninon rise, saying that to God alone the knee should be bent. Then he laid his hand on her head, calling down a benediction on her, and praying that she should be protected from the temptations of a sinful world. His words thrilled her powerfully for the time being. She felt moved to pour out all her heart to him, but “Satan,” she says, “held me fast, and would not let me approach God,” and the spell of the saintly man’s influence passed with his presence.

A few days later, Madame de L’Enclos died, calmly, and tended by her husband and her child, leaving at least affectionate respect for her memory. A year later, Monsieur de L’Enclos died. True to the last to his rule of life, the dying words he addressed to his daughter were these—

“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.

ARMAND JEAN DU PLESSIS
Cardinal Duc de Richelieu
Né à Paris le 5^e 7^bre 1585. Mort le 4 Décembre 1642.
Paris chez Odieuvre M^d d’Estampes Quai de l’Ecole vis à vis la Samarit^e à la belle Image; C.P.R.

To face page 24.

The times, as a great commentator has defined them, were indeed peculiar. The air, full of intrigue, was maintained by Richelieu at fever-heat, and wheel worked fast and furiously within wheel. There was the king’s party, though the king was little of it, or in it. The iron hand of the Cardinal Prime-Minister was upon the helm. Richelieu, who never stayed in resistance to the encroaching efforts of Spain—in his policy of crushing the feudal strength of the nobility of the provinces—or in annihilating Huguenot power as a political element in the State—saw in every man and woman not his violent partisan, an enemy to France and to the Crown. How far he was justified, how far he could have demanded “Is there not a cause?” stands an open question; but the effect was terrible. The relentless hounding down of the suspected, forms a page of history stained with the blood of noble and gallant men. Richelieu’s crafty playing with his marked victims, chills the soul. They were as ninepins in his hands, lured to their destruction, sprung upon, crushed often when most they believed themselves secure.

Sending de Thou to the scaffold for his supposed complicity in the crime Richelieu fixed on Cinq-Mars, the handsome, insouciant, brilliant young fellow he had himself provided for the king’s amusement, and when the time was ripe, having done him to death by the Lyons headsman upon a superficially-based accusation. Richelieu was dying then. The consciousness of Death’s hand upon his harassed, worn-out frame was fully with him; but no pity was in his heart for Cinq-Mars. It might have been the old rankling jealousy that urged him on, for the stern, inflexible Armand de Richelieu was a poor, weak tool of a creature where women were concerned. “There is no such word as fail,” he was wont to say; yet in his relations with women, and in his gallantries he failed egregiously. No fear of him held back Marion Delorme from the arms of Cinq-Mars, when she yielded to his persuasions to fly with him; and self-love must have been bitterly wounded, when Anne of Austria laughed his advances to scorn. Richelieu was not a lady’s man. Nature had given him a brain rarely equalled, a stupendous capacity and penetration, but she had neglected him personally—meagre, sharp-featured, cadaverous, scantily furnished as to beard and moustache, and lean as to those red-stockinged legs. True, or the mere fruit of cruel scandal, that saraband pas seul he was said to have been duped into performing for the delectation of the queen, will hang ever by the memory of the great Lord Cardinal.

CHAPTER III

A Life-long Friend—St Evrémond’s Courtly Mot—Rabelais v. Petronius—Society and the Salons—The Golden Days—The Man in Black.

Scarcely was acquaintance renewed with her still quite youthful old friend, Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld, than Ninon met for the first time St Evrémond—Charles de St Denys, born 1613, at St Denys le Guast near Coutances in Normandy—the man with whom her name is so indissolubly connected, traversing nearly all the decades of the seventeenth century into the early years of the eighteenth, his span of life about equalling her own, and though for half of it absent from her and from his country, maintaining the links of their intimacy in their world-famed correspondence.

Like Ninon’s, his individuality was exceptional. A born wit, for even in his childhood, the soubriquet of “Esprit” was bestowed upon him, his three brothers being severally styled—“The Honest Man,” “The Soldier,” and “The Abbé.” Charles de St Evrémond was distinguished by a brilliant and singularly amiable intelligence. As a man of letters he was rarely gifted; though he evaded, more than sought, the celebrity attaching to the profession of literature, writing only, it may be truly said of him—

“... in numbers

For the numbers came.”

He never put forward his own works for publication, and it was only towards the close of his life that his consent was obtained for such publication. During his lifetime, many of his pieces in prose and in verse were printed and circulated in Paris and in London, where, at the Courts of Charles II. and of William III., forty years of his life were spent; but these were pirated productions, surreptitiously issued by his “friends,” to whom he occasionally confided his compositions, and they, for their own gain, sold them to the booksellers, who eagerly sought them. These pieces were altogether unfaithful to their originals, being altered to suit the particular sentiments of readers, and added to, in order to increase the bulk of the volumes. The style of St Evrémond’s writings has been the subject of encomium and warm appreciation from numerous learned critics and litterateurs, notably St Beuve and Dryden.

One contemporary editor, withholding his name, content with styling himself merely “A Person of Honour,” has, at all events, yielded due homage to St Evrémond’s character and genius. Commenting on the essays which have come within his ken, he writes—

“Their fineness of expression, delicacy of thought are united with the ease of a gentleman, the exactness of a scholar, and the good sense of a man of business. It is certain,” he adds, “that the author is thoroughly acquainted with the world, and has conversed with the best sort of men to be found in it.”

To this may be added the praise of Dryden—

“There is not only a justness in his conceptions, which is the foundation of good writing, but also a purity of language, and a beautiful turn of words, so little understood by modern writers.”

Agreeable, witty, an excellent conversationalist, and of real amiability of character and disposition, St Evrémond’s aim in life was to enjoy it. Indolently inclined, he accepted the ills and contrarieties of existence, finding even in them some soul of good. Always fond of animals, he surrounded himself in later years with cats and dogs, holding them eminently sympathetic and amusing; and he was wont to say that in order to divert the uneasinesses of old age, it was desirable to have before one’s eyes something alive and animated.

He possessed enough money for comfortable maintenance from several sources. Both Charles II. and William III. settled “gratifications” on him. His creed was a formless one, but he was no atheist, for all the charge of it laid to him. He was, on the contrary, quick to rebuke the profanity and laxity of mockers. He himself sums up his religion in these lines—

“Justice and Charity supply the place

Of rigid penance and a formal face.

His piety without inflicted pains

Flows easy, and austerity disdains.

God only is the object of his care,

Whose goodness leaves no room for black despair.

Within the bosom of His providence

He places his repose, his bliss and sure defence.”

His writings were voluminous, flowing from his pen as a labour he delighted in. Their themes were varied, brought from the rich stores of his mind, his most enduring and favourite subjects being classical Latin lore, and the drama of his own day, lustrous with great names in France, as in the country of his adoption.

Such, and much more, was St Evrémond the man of letters, and besides, he was a skilful and gallant soldier, distinguished for his brilliant sword-play, when he entered upon the exercises preparatory for his military career. In that capacity he won the approval and friendship of the Duke d’Enghien, fighting by the prince’s side at Rocroi and Nordlingen; though later a breach occurred in their relations, when St Evrémond indulged in some raillery at his expense. The great man vastly enjoyed persiflage of the sort where the shafts were levelled at others; but he brooked none of them aimed at himself, and St Evrémond was deprived of his lieutenancy.

Sometimes the wit carried a more flattering note, and once when disgrace shadowed him at Court for having appeared in the Sun-King’s presence in a pourpoint of a fashion not quite up to latest date, he said to His Majesty—“Sire, away from you, one is not merely unhappy: one also becomes ridiculous.” The conceit wiped away St Evrémond’s disfavour. He was a friend of several of the other renowned soldiers of his time, Turenne among them. It was one of Condé’s great delights to be read to by St Evrémond. The duke took pleasure in the lighter classics. Petronius had its attractions for him, as it had for the society generally of the time; but he would have none of Rabelais, finding the grossness of the Curé of Meudon intensely distasteful, and refusing to listen to the adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel and Grandgousier, and all their tribe, he insisted on the book being thrown aside. The merry romances of Petronius, or, at least, attributed to that “Elegantiæ Arbiter” of a pagan court, while ill adapted as milk for babes, as perhaps even for the more advanced in years, were not soiled with the lowermost grossness of the Christian man’s pen, and they were not without appeal to the students of the classic literature opened up by the Renaissance, even as the milder licence of Boccaccio charmed.

Truly, if the times were peculiar, it cannot be said of them that they were stagnant; and in movement and activity, the present century bears them some sort of comparison; though beyond this the parallel fails, to the winning of the days of Ninon. Autres temps, autres mœurs, and while there may be more veneer of morality in these present years of grace than then, the question remains whether the sense of it is deeper and more widely observed. It is one, however, outside the limits of these pages. Only that the aroma and delicacy of educated social intercourse do not permeate society as in that time is undoubted. Of course the impression existing in some minds of the widespread canker of profligacy and licentiousness then openly prevailing, is perverting of facts, since punctilio and the Court etiquette of the most punctilious of monarchs would not, and could not, have countenanced it. Such licence was indulged in by, and confined, as it is now, to a certain section of the “smart” community, and this possibly no such narrow one; but at least it was veiled then by certain elements of good taste, and some womanly graces now far to seek. Not then, as now, the motor craze made existence uglier; then as not now, the bold, inane stares and painted faces of many of the gentler sex frequenting the highways and byways, were mostly screened by masks, and an awkward gait was mantled. Some cultivation of expression, and a little more sense, if not wit, graced the tongues now devoted to slang and the misuse of words which hang about the higher education; while the clamour of ill-advised women without doors was unknown. The comments of a recent French writer on the charm of life in those past days, are too valuable to be laid aside unrecorded. “The keen intellects of the time,” he writes, “caught a glimpse of everything, desired everything, and grasped eagerly at every new idea. Only those,” he goes on to say, quoting Talleyrand, “could realise the joy of being alive. The childish present-day philosophy of optimism and effort fails to lend life a charm it never knew before. The most insignificant gallant of the Court of Louis experienced more varied sensations than any rough-rider or industrial king has ever been able to procure for himself.” Admittedly, the evils of the time cried aloud for redress of wrongs which were all to be washed away later by the river of blood; but these had been more ameliorated than aggravated by the scholarship of thoughtful writers. Wit, and the sense of beauty and delicacy of expression, carried, not unfrequently it is true, to affectations and absurdity, was the order of the day, binding men and women in links of an intellectual sympathy, whose pure gold was unalloyed by baser metal. Those réunions in the salons of the great ladies, must have been delightful, thronged as they were with distinguished men, and with women, many of them beautiful, spirituelle, or both. But for the sparkle of true wit, the music of sweet voices, the ripple of verse and epigram, the popularity of those gatherings would not have been so long maintained. The atmosphere of them was sweet with the lighter learning of old Rome and Greece, and the gaiety of graceful modern rhymes, or the sentiment of the latest sonnet. The passing of centuries had now left far behind the barbaric clash of warfare, and widened the old limitations of mediævalism and Scholasticism. From the hour the cruel knife of Ravaillac stilled the noble heart of the great Henri, the times had ripened to the harvest of a literature resplendent with promise of illustrious names.

Ever zealous for the glory of France, Richelieu founded the Académie Française; and later the college of the Sorbonne, where now he lies magnificently entombed, was rebuilt by him, and devoted to its old purpose of a centre of learning; and as of old, and as ever, men thronged from near and from afar to Paris for the study of art and learning, and to pay such homage to the modern Muses and enjoy their smiles, as good fortune might allow.

Amid such environment it was, that Ninon embarked upon the stream of the life she had elected to follow, hoping to pass, as indeed she did, through the years serenely and in fair content. If now and again some minor questions of spirit troubled her—conscience it could scarcely be called, since by the lights she had chosen to guide her, conscience could hardly be reproachful—it was but passingly. Yet the tale goes of the visits of a Man in Black, a most mysterious personage, who at his first interview, when she was about eighteen years old, brought her a phial containing a rose-coloured liquid, of which a little, a mere drop, went a very long way. It was the recipe for prolonged youthfulness, and certainly must have been very efficacious. It was, he said, to be mixed with a great deal of pure water, quite as much as a good-sized bath would contain—and a bath of pure water is, of course, in itself a very healthful sort of thing. Many a year went by before the Man in Black—or one so like him as to be his very double—came again, and Ninon was prone to shrink at the remembrance of him. When he did come, it was to inform her that some years of this life still lay before her; and then for the third time that Man in Black presented himself, and—But the cry is a far one to seventy years hence, and during that time, as far as Ninon was concerned, he remained in his own place, wherever that might be; and if, after all, he had been but a dream, in any case the shadow of his sable garb does not appear to have been very constantly cast upon the mirror of her existence. That was bright with love and friendship, the love and friendship of both sexes, and truly if in love she was frankly fickle à merveille, in friendship she was constant and unchanging. Ever following the dying parental counsel, she was fastidious in the choice of the aspirants to her favours. In her relations with women and men alike, honest and honourable and full of a kindly charm which made her exceptionally bonne camarade. It was small wonder that the salon of Mademoiselle Ninon de L’Enclos was a centre of foregathering greatly sought after.

CHAPTER IV

A “Delicious Person”—Voiture’s Jealousy—A Tardy Recognition—Coward Conscience—A Protestant Pope—The Hôtel de Rambouillet—St Evrémond—The Duel—Nurse Madeleine—Cloistral Seclusion and Jacques Callot—“Merry Companions Every One”—and One in Particular.

Six years had passed since as girl and boy Ninon and Marsillac had parted at Loches. At sixteen years old he had entered the army, and was now Monsieur le Capitaine de la Rochefoucauld, returned to Paris invalided by a serious wound received in the Valtellina warfare. Handsome, with somewhat pensive, intellectual features, chivalrous and amiable, he was “a very parfite gentle knight,” devoted to the service of the queen, which sorely interfered with his military promotion: devotion to Anne of Austria was ever to meet the hatred of the cardinal, and to live therefore in peril of life.

The daring young hoyden of Loches was now a graceful, greatly admired woman of the world, welcomed and courted in the ranks of the society to which her birth entitled her.

It was quite possible that the change in her appearance was sufficiently great to warrant de la Rochefoucauld’s failure to recognise her in the salon of Madame de Rambouillet when he passed her, seated beside her chaperon, the Duchesse de la Ferté—not, however, without marking her beauty; and he inquired of the man with whom he was walking who the “delicious person” was. The gentleman did not know. It was the first time, he believed, that the lady had been seen in the brilliant company. The impressionable young prince lost little time in securing himself an introduction, further economising it by expressing his sentiments of admiration so ardently, that they touched on a passionate and tender declaration. Ninon accepted this with the equanimity distinguishing her; she was already accustomed to a pronounced homage very thinly veiled. It was to her as the sunshine is to the birds of the air, almost indispensable; but she found the avowals of his sentiments slightly disturbing in the reflection that Marsillac had altogether forgotten his Ninon. That, in fact, he had done long since. The fidelity of de la Rochefoucauld in those days, was scarcely to be reckoned on even by hours. Already he was in the toils of Ninon’s beautiful rival, Marion Delorme, a woman Ninon herself describes as “adorably lovely.” Beauty apart, the very antithesis of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos, weaker of will, more pliably moulded, warm-hearted, impulsive, romantically natured, apt to be drawn into scrapes and mistakes which Ninon was astute enough rarely to encounter. The two women lived within a stone’s throw of each other, and it needed hardly the gossip of the place for Ninon to observe that Marsillac was but one more of the vast company of arch-deceivers. It was Voiture, the poet and renowned reformer of the French tongue, who hinted the fact to Ninon with, no doubt, all his wonted grace of expression, further inspired by jealousy of the handsome young captain, that at the very moment he was speaking, de la Rochefoucauld was spending the afternoon in Marion’s company, en tête-à-tête.

Thereupon, linking her arm in Voiture’s, Ninon begged him to conduct her to Number 6, rue des Tournelles. The poet, vastly enjoying the excitement his words had evoked, readily complied, and arrived at Marion’s apartments where the Capitaine de la Rochefoucauld was duly discovered. Then broke the storm, ending in Marsillac’s amazement when Ninon demanded how it was that he had not discovered in her his old friend Ninon de L’Enclos. Then, in the joy and delight of recognition, Marsillac, forgetting the very presence of her rival, sprang to her side, and offering her his arm, sallied forth back to Ninon’s abode, spending the rest of the day in recalling old times at Loches, and in transports of happiness. Only late into the night, long after Marsillac had left her presence and she was lost in dreamful sleep, it brought the faces of her mother and of St Vincent de Paul vividly before her, gazing with sad reproachful eyes; and with her facile pen she recorded the memory of that day, fraught with its conflict of spirit and desire.

“O sweet emotions of love! blessed fusion of souls! ineffable joys that descend upon us from Heaven! Why is it that you are united to the troubles of the senses, and that at the bottom of the cup of such delight remorse is found?”

Whether through the silence of the small hours any echoes touched her vivid imagination of the Man in Black’s mocking laughter, no record tells; but in any case, with the fading of the visions, the disturbing reflections were quickly lost in the joy of Marsillac’s society, as also in that of St Evrémond—the very soul of gaiety and wit and every delightful characteristic.

“How happy could I be with either,

Were t’other dear charmer away,”

says Captain MacHeath, and there were days together that Marsillac did absent himself. The grand passion of his life was not with either of the two women, or with any of the fair dames then immediately around. They were merely the toys of his gallant and amiable nature, and at that time he was deeply absorbed in the duties of his profession, and his ardent devotion to the queen’s cause. It was, indeed, one most difficult and dangerous, ever facing, as it did, the opposition of Richelieu, who saw in every friend and partisan of Anne of Austria Spanish aggression and a foe to France.

Some cause there surely was. Political and religious strife raged fast and hotly. From the outset—that is, at least, as far back as the time when the Calvinists banded together to resist the Catholics—it was not a question alone of reform or of change in religious conviction. It could not have remained at that: the whole framework of government would have been shaken to its foundation had the Reformed party ultimately triumphed; but the passing of a century had wrought startling changes. There were many of the Catholic nobility whose policy was as much to side with the Huguenot party, as it had been the wisdom of the Protestant Henri IV. to adopt the Catholic creed. Richelieu, in conquering Rochelle, showed the vanquished Huguenots so much leniency, that public clamour nicknamed him “the Cardinal of Rochelle,” and “the Protestant Pope,” and he laughed, and said that there was more such scandal ahead; since he intended to achieve a marriage between the king’s sister, Henrietta Maria, and the non-Roman Catholic king, Charles I. of England.

To hedge his country from the encroachment of Spain was the life-long aim and endeavour of Richelieu, and he was ruthless in the means. The eastern and northern frontiers of France were constantly menaced and invaded by Austria and Spain and their allies, and to and fro to Paris came the great captains and soldiers engaged in the constant warfare against the enemy—men of long lineage, brave, skilful in arms, dauntless in action, and certainly no laggards in love when opportunity afforded; and they returned loaded with honour, covered with glory, and often seriously wounded, to be welcomed and made much of in the salons of noble and titled women, like the Duchesse de Rambouillet, and other réunions scarcely less celebrated and brilliant, where the fine art of wit, and the culte of poetry and belles-lettres, mingled with a vast amount of love-making, and at least as much exquisite imitation of it, were assiduously conducted. It was the hall-mark of good society, a virtue indispensable, and to be assumed if it did not really exist, and too greatly valued for other virtues to be set great store by. So that the line of demarcation between women of unimpeachable repute, and those following a wider primrose path grew to be so very thinly defined as sometimes to be invisible and disregarded. Notably in the refined and elegant salon of Ninon de L’Enclos were to be counted many ladies of distinction and modes of life untouched by the faintest breath of scandal, who loved her and sought her friendship, as there were men who were quite content to worship from afar, and to hold themselves her friends pure and simple to life’s end.

Who of her admirers was the first winner of the smiles of a more tender intimacy, is not more than surmise, remaining recorded only in invisible ink in a lettre de cachet whose seal is intact. If the friend of her early girlhood at Loches is indicated, it may be intentionally misleading. Count Coligny was an acquaintance at whose coming Ninon’s bright eyes acquired yet greater lustre, and de la Rouchefoucauld’s reappearance had not yet taken place—“ce cher Marsillac,” whose devotion, even while it lasted, was tinctured with divided homage, and was to dissolve altogether, in the way of love sentiments, in the sunshine of his deep undying attachment to Madame de Longueville. There was, however, no rupture in this connection; the burden of the old song was simply reversed, and if first Marsillac came for love, it was in friendship that he and Ninon parted, giving place to the adoration of St Evrémond—bonds which were never broken, and whose warm sentiments the waters of the English Channel, flowing between for forty years, could not efface. The effect might have been even the contrary one, and absence made the heart grow fonder, though the temperaments of Ninon and of St Evrémond were undoubtedly generously free of any petty malignance and small jealousies.

Monsieur de L’Enclos had survived his wife only by one year. He died of a wound received in an encounter arising from a private quarrel. Had he recovered, it would probably have been to lose his head by the axe, paying the penalty of the law for some years past rigorously enforced against duelling. The scene of such encounter being most frequently the open space of the Place Royale, the locality of the cardinal’s own house—as it was of Ninon and of Marion Delorme—so that his stern eyes were constantly reminded of the murderous conflicts. The law, having been enacted by Henri IV., had fallen into abeyance, until the specially sanguinary duel between the Comte de Bussy and the Comte de Bouteville, in 1622, when de Bouteville mortally wounded de Bussy, and Richelieu inflicted the penalty of decapitation on de Bouteville and on Rosmadec his second, as he did on others who disobeyed; so that the evil was scotched almost to stamping out. It was in this fashion that Richelieu made his power felt among the nobility and wealthier classes, and let it be understood that the law was the law for all.

Almost immediately following on the death of Monsieur de L’Enclos, came that of Ninon’s old nurse, Madeleine—whose kind soul and devoted attachment were in no wise ill-affected by the small nips of eau de vie she inclined to—and just about the same time died Madame de Montaigu, her aunt at Loches; and thus within six months she had lost the few of her nearest and dearest from childhood, and she felt so saddened and desolate and heart-broken, that she formed the resolution of giving up the world and being a nun after all—yearning for the consolation which religion promises of reunion, and a fulness of sympathy not to be found in ordinary and everyday environments! Scarcely as yet with her foot on womanhood’s bank of the river of life, the warm kindly nature of Ninon was chilled and dulled by sorrow and regret; and one evening, at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, in her ardent desire to find some peace and rest of spirit, she entered into conversation with the Père d’Orléans, a renowned Jesuit, on the subject of religious belief—but his best eloquence failed in convincing her of its efficacy.

The right of private judgment, ever one of her strongest characteristics, asserted itself, and she declared herself unconvinced. “Then, mademoiselle,” said the ecclesiastic, “until you find conviction, offer Heaven your incredulity.”

But while words failed, her heart still impelled her to the idea of the cloistered life, and she went to seek it in Lorraine, at a convent of Recollettes sisters near Nancy. There were many houses of this Order in the duchy. The one sought entrance to by Ninon, was under the patronage of St Francis, and she was received with effusion by the Reverend Mother, a charming lady, herself still youthful. She had not, however, been there many days, relegated to a small cell, whose diminutive casement looked upon some immediately-facing houses, before she became impressed with the idea that, great as the desire might be to snatch in her a brand from the consuming of the wicked world, it was greater still for the little fortune she was known to possess; and with the passing of time, the gentle assuager of more poignant grief, she was beginning to feel less attracted towards the conventual mode of existence, and to wonder whether she really had the vocation for it. Meantime, the old spirit of adventure was strongly stirring her to defer the recital of a formidable list of Aves and penitential psalms, in favour of watching a window facing her loophole of a lattice, through which she could see a man busily engaged with burin and etching implements. While this in itself was not uninteresting, the interest was increased tenfold, when she contrived to discover that he was the already famous Jacques Callot, the engraver; and very little time was lost before the two had established means of communication by the aid of a long pole, to which they tied their manuscript interchange of messages and ideas—which culminated in Ninon’s descent by a ladder of ropes from the lattice, and flight from the convent.

More sober chronicles relate of Jacques Callot, that through all the curious vicissitudes and adventures of his earlier life, he remained blameless and of uncorrupted morality. It appears certain that his real inclination was ever for such paths, and the romantic love-affair which ended in his union with the woman he adored, was calculated to keep him in them; in which case the attributed version of his liaison with Ninon must be accepted with something over and above its grain of salt, and allowed to lie by. That he was a fearless, high-minded man, as well as a great artist, stands by his honoured name in a golden record; for when the imbroglio occurred between Louis XIII. and the Duke of Lorraine—in which, under the all-conquering cardinal prime-minister, France was the victor—Callot was commanded to commemorate the siege with his pencil—he refused. Callot was a Lorrainer, and the duke was his patron and liege-lord, and Callot refused to turn traitor, and prostitute his gift by recording the defeat of the duke, preferring to run the very close chance of death for high treason sooner than comply. If, as it is asserted, Ninon obtained for him the pardon of Richelieu, by virtue of some former favour or service she had done the cardinal, leaving him as yet in her debt for it, all was well that so well ended; and it adds one more to the list of Ninon’s generous acts, never neglected where she had the power to perform them for those she loved.

Whether it is an undoubted fact that the fascination of Ninon—so absolutely all-potent as she herself claims for it—did tempt Callot temporarily even from his allegiance to the love of the woman he won under such romantic circumstances, it is certain that she mercifully decided to leave him in tranquillity with his wife in Lorraine, returning to Paris in company with a little contingent of her old friends and admirers who had been engaged in fighting for their king along the north-eastern borderlands. Paris was so rich in convents, that the question irresistibly suggests itself why she should have travelled that hundred or so of miles to Nancy to take the veil. Possibly, knowing that Coligny, Scarron, Gondi, de la Rochefoucauld, St Evrémond, and other bons camarades were all in that direction, she was prompted to go thither to take final farewells of them before she stepped over the threshold masculine foot must not desecrate; but in this instance it was the propositions of man that triumphed in the face of every spiritual consideration, and all idea of the contemplative life was flung to the four winds in the delight of the old companionships and renewal of the joie de vivre. The reunion was celebrated in an impromptu feast, of reason and recherché dishes, and flow of sparkling wine, and unrestrained merriment and sallies of wit; for where Scarron and St Evrémond and de la Rochefoucauld were, wit could but abound. Next day they all started for Paris, transported thither by matchlessly swift-footed post-horses, Ninon choosing for her travelling companion en tête-à-tête, Coligny; and when the two arrived at rue des Tournelles, they did not part company; but arranged to retire to the rus in urbe of her Picpus dwelling, away by Charenton, where they established ménage in the small but beautiful old house, once the dwelling of Henri Quatre and the fair Gabrielle, with one maid-servant, and one man servitor Ninon called Perrote, who had been the faithful valet of Monsieur de L’Enclos. Here the two passed an idyllic life, where more material enjoyments were diversified by intellectual conversation, sometimes profane, but more often taking a turn so far sacred, as to include the points of doctrine upon which Catholic and Protestant differed. Coligny, as a descendant of the great murdered Huguenot leader, was a Protestant; and while Richelieu treated the Huguenots socially with indulgence, he would not tolerate them as a political party, and to be of the Reformed, was utterly to lose chance of advancement—and Ninon was ambitious for her lover, and hence the religious discussions and her endeavours to inoculate him with clear conceptions of Catholic teaching. Coligny, however, was apt to show signs of boredom on these occasions, and to yawn so portentously, that she had to desist, leaving him heretical still, when one morning the Picpus maisonette was invaded by messengers from Richelieu, accompanied by halberdiers from the Bastille, who demanded the delivering up of the young man’s sword, and bore him off a prisoner to the horrible old prison, on the charge of neglect of military duty. Once again Ninon’s intercessions with Richelieu procured release and restoration; but Coligny was ungrateful and jealous of the red-robed priest, and would-be galant homme, and passing away from Ninon’s presence, he never entered it again, and in a very few weeks was married to the sister of the Duc de Luxembourg, an alliance possibly already entered upon at an earlier date, and the real ground of his rupture with Ninon.

She soon found balm for the inflicted wounds of Coligny’s ingratitude, in the ardent admiration of the son of the Marquise de Rambouillet, seeing in him only the one absurd defect of desiring unchanging constancy, and on this point he was so tiresome that she was driven to promise fidelity for three months—“An eternity,” said Ninon, ever mocking at love, which she ranked far below friendship.

FRANÇOIS VIDUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Né en M·DC·XIII M en M·DC·LXXX

Peint en émail par Petitot

Gravé en 1770 par PP Choffard.
Desel Grav. de L. M. Imp. et du Roi d’Espagne.

To face page 48.

The greatest apologist of the society of the seventeenth century could hardly describe it as strait-laced; except by comparison with the first half of the one succeeding; and if some of the grandes dames of the circle in which she moved held aloof and deprecated the unconventionalities of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos, for the most part they accepted them, more or less silently, and treated her with cordiality, delighting in her friendship, and fascinated by the elegance and dignity with which she conducted the hospitalities of her crowded salons. The prevailing charm of one graced with the refinement of no surface education, and accomplishments never unduly self-asserted, shone through the gentle gaiety of her demeanour. She was absolutely innocent of any shadow of self-interest; taste alone guided her inclinations, her competence protected her from greed, and natural generosity was ever prompting her to kindly actions. Once, at a later day, when Anne of Austria was beginning to settle into the calm austerities of maturer years, and urged by some prudes about her, she sent orders for the temporary retirement of Ninon into a convent, leaving her to select the one she preferred—the tale goes that she expressed her gratitude to the exempt of the guards who delivered the message, for the choice so left her, and that she would choose the convent of the Grands Cordeliers, an establishment about to be suppressed for the scandals attaching to it; but it is far more probable that the jest originated with some acquaintance; for to make light of orders from the Court was in no wise according with Ninon’s code.

That command, however, again reached her at a yet later time, and then was enforced. In Louis XIII.’s days, Ninon was often a guest at the Louvre, and on the occasion of one of the State balls given there, she was present with Rambouillet for her cavalier in chief. As she was entering her carriage to return home, she felt a pull at her mantle, and turning, she saw beside her “a little man, clad entirely in black velvet, whose smile was mocking and full of sarcasm, and his eyes shone like carbuncles. Rambouillet, seeing my terror,” she wrote later, “demanded of the man what he wanted; but the Man in Black silenced him with an imperious gesture, and said to me, in a tone of profound melancholy—‘You are proud of your beauty, mademoiselle, and you are right, for it is marvellous. But alas! all these charms will one day fade. The rosy hues of your skin will die out, age will come, and bring its wrinkles. Ah, believe me! Beware! Endeavour to hinder this misfortune, for afterwards there will be nothing left to you.’ So saying, he gravely saluted me, and disappeared among the arches of the colonnade.”[1]

CHAPTER V

An Excursion to Gentilly—“Uraniæ Sacrum”—César and Ruggieri—The rue d’Enfer and the Capucins—Perditor—The Love-philtre—Seeing the Devil—“Now You are Mine!”

Ninon’s pledge of eternal fidelity to Rambouillet did not hinder other friendships; and about this time she one day made an excursion to Gentilly with the Comte de Lude, intent on visiting the great magician, Perditor, who conducted there his famous incantations. She chose de Lude for her companion on this occasion, because he was an utter disbeliever. The adventure was prompted by the craze, ever latent in society, and then recently kindled to fever-heat, for magic and occultism. The theme, as old almost as the ages, is ever new, and likely to remain so until the mysteries of life and death are revealed. And some short time previously, the rumour had circulated that a man named Febroni, intensely hated by Richelieu, was endeavouring to compass the cardinal’s destruction, by causing a wax image of him to be made and exposed to a slow fire, and as the image melted, so the minister’s life would dwindle to the death. This was, of course, no new device of witchcraft and diablerie; but it served to arouse intense interest and curiosity, and the air was as full of sorcery and demonology as when the first Ruggieri practised his arts for Catherine de Médicis, and watched the stars from the old tower-top of Blois, the observatory of the terrible queen, “Uraniæ Sacrum.”

Some half-dozen years before Ninon was born, a man named César and another Ruggieri, probably taking the old magician for sponsor, had been notorious as potent masters of the “Black Art.” That they were credited with possessing unlimited command over the elements, and to produce thunder and lightning at will, was but a small part of his power. He could manufacture love-potions to render the indifferent one enamoured of the wooer, and insidious poisons to destroy a hated human obstacle, and perform many services of the like nature for a price, but the fees were startlingly high.

An indiscretion, only in a measure connected with his profession, brought César inside the walls of the Bastille. He had, it appeared, been accustomed to attend the Witches’ Sabbath, and meeting there a great Court lady, he had, he said, induced her to listen too graciously to his soft speeches. The boasts, after his release from the old fortress, brought him condign punishment at the hands, it was said, of his Satanic chief, furious with jealousy it might be. It was on a wild March night that he came and went again with hideous din and clatter, leaving César strangled in his bed; and then making his way to the abode of Ruggieri, he despatched him in the same manner. There were some ready to contend that less supernatural agency might be answerable for these acts. On the other hand it was well known that the devil was no stranger in Paris, having once resided in a street on the left bank of the Seine, which was named after him, the rue d’Enfer. From here he was at last ejected, thanks to a happy thought on the part of the city authorities, who handed the ground over to the Capucin brothers, and the foul fiend was heard of no more in that quarter. César extenuated his offence of magic by the assertion that he “was pestered to death by young courtiers and other young Parisians to show him the devil,” and not seeing why he should have the trouble of doing so for nothing, he set his price at forty and fifty pistoles, leaving it a matter of choice whether they would face the terrible ordeal to its ending, or take flight, leaving the pistoles of course behind them. It was this latter course which had been mostly adopted.

And now, at Gentilly, dwelt one magician named Perditor, whose power was reported to be greater than that of any of his predecessors; since he possessed the secret of concocting a philtre capable of maintaining a woman’s beauty and freshness to extreme age. It was the idea of obtaining this inestimable thing, which determined Ninon to pay a visit to the mighty Perditor. The chronicles of the time confirm the facts related by Ninon of her adventure, which are best told in the fashion of her own experiences:

“On entering the village, we inquired for the dwelling of the celebrated necromancer, and a guide presented himself to conduct us thither. We soon arrived in front of a yawning cavern which was surrounded by large deep ditches. Our guide made a signal, and immediately a man dressed in red appeared on the opposite side of the ditches, and asked us what we wanted.

“‘I wish for a philtre,’ I replied, ‘which will make my beauty last the length of my life.’

“‘And I,’ said the count, ‘wish to see the devil.’

“‘You shall both be satisfied,’ replied the red man, as calmly as if we had asked the most natural thing in the world. Then he lowered a sort of drawbridge across the ditch, and, this crossed, he admitted us into the cavern, where we soon found ourselves in complete darkness. I felt not a little nervous.

“‘Do not be afraid,’ said the count to me; ‘I have my sword with me, a dagger, and two pistols; with them I think I can defy all the sorcerers in the world.’

“After proceeding for quite five minutes along underground galleries and passages, we found ourselves in a sort of large circular chamber hewn out of the solid rock. Some resin torches cast a fitful and gloomy glare up into its vaulted roof. At one end of this hall, upon a platform draped entirely in black, was seated a personage in the garb of a magician, who appeared to be waiting for us.

“‘That is the Master!’ solemnly said the man in red to us.

“And he left us alone in the presence of the great sorcerer himself.

“‘Approach!’ cried Perditor, addressing us in a terrible voice. ‘What do you wish?’

“‘I wish,’ murmured I, in a trembling voice, ‘a philtre to preserve to me my youth and beauty all my life.’

“‘Forty crowns. Pay first.’

“Taking out my purse, I laid down five louis, appalled by the defiant fierceness of his tones. The count did not wait for the questioning of the man on the platform.

“‘For my part, Sir Necromancer,’ he said, ‘I feel greatly curious to see the devil. How much do you want for showing him to me?’

“‘One hundred livres.’

“‘Peste! At that price what fine benefices you must be able to bestow.’

“The lord of the cavern vouchsafed no reply. He took the money from the count, which he put into a big purse hanging at his side, along with my louis. That done, he laid his hand upon a huge bell, which sounded as loud as the bourdon strokes of Notre-Dame tower-bell. At this signal, which nearly deafened us, two nymph-like young women, fairly pretty, dressed in white and crowned with flowers, rose from the ground near. Perditor pointed me out to them, handed them an empty crystal phial, and then again struck his fearful bell. The nymphs disappeared. I gathered that they had gone to mix my philtre.

“‘And now,’ continued the necromancer, turning to us, ‘you are both decided that you will see the devil?’

“‘Very decided,’ said the count.

“‘Your name?’

“‘But is it necessary to give it to you, sir?’ stammered I.

“‘It is indispensable.’

“‘It is Anne de L’Enclos.’

“‘And I,’ hastened to add my companion, ‘I am called George de Sandrelles, Comte de Lude.’

“‘You swear never to reveal that which is about to take place before your eyes?’

“‘We swear it.’

“‘You promise not to be afraid, and not to invoke heaven or the saints?’

“‘We promise.’

“The magician rose; he took a long wand of ebony, approached us, and traced a large circle with it in the dust, inscribed with a number of cabalistic figures. Then he said to us—

“‘You can still go away—are you afraid?’

“I wanted to answer in the affirmative, but the count cried in resolute tones—

“‘Afraid of the devil? For shame! What do you take us for? Get on with you.’

“And at the same instant we heard thunderous peals—the voice of the magician sounding above the tumult. He gesticulated, shouted, and broke, in some unknown tongue, into a torrent of diabolic invocations. It made one’s hair stand on end. Terror seized me. I clung convulsively to the count’s arm, and implored him to leave the frightful place.

“‘The time is past for it,’ cried the sorcerer; ‘do not cross the circle, or you are dead.’

“Suddenly, to the noise of the thunder, succeeded a sound like the rattling of chains that were being dragged along the depths of the cavern. Then we heard dismal howlings. The necromancer’s contortions continued, and his cries redoubled. He uttered barbaric words, and appeared to be in fits of frenzy. In the twinkling of an eye, we were enveloped in flames.

“‘Look!’ cried Perditor.

“A cry of terror broke from me, as I saw in the midst of this wild whirlwind of fire a huge black goat, loaded with glowing red chains. The howlings grew more fearful, the flames burst into frightful intensity, and a troop of hideous demons, also loaded with chains, began to dance round the goat, waving their torches, and uttering furious shouts and yells. The goat reared on to his hind legs, butted with his horns, and appeared to be the very genius of the infernal scene.

“‘Ah! pardieu!’ cried de Lude, ‘the comedy is well played, I own; but I am curious to see the coulisses, and to examine the costumes of the actors closer.’

“He grasped his pistols, and made as if he was going to step over the circle; but at a sign from the magician, all the flames were extinguished, the goat and the demons disappeared. We were plunged once more into profound darkness. At the same moment strong arms seized us, we were dragged hurriedly along the passages, and flung outside the cavern.

“I was only too glad of this unlooked-for ending up, and did not ask to go back and get my philtre, and I willingly left the magician in possession of my five louis.

“The count was not at all of the same mind. He insisted on penetrating to the solving of the enigma. We had been the victims of a hateful and odious charlatanism. I did not feel so convinced of that as he was, and the abominable spectacle would not quit my imagination. For the rest of that day, and the following night, I saw nothing but devils dancing and howling amid the flames.”

And then it was just before break of dawn, between her sleeping and waking, came once again the Man in Black. He smilingly asserted himself to Ninon, to be, beyond all doubt and juggling hocus-pocus, his Satanic Majesty, the real “Simon Pure.” In calm, grave tones he offered her the choice of the three great gifts this world has to bestow—riches, grandeur, beauty—enduring beauty till all-destroying Death should claim her, and with only a momentary hesitation, Ninon chose beauty. Then in two crystal phials, like the one the charlatans had yesterday cheated her out of in the Gentilly cavern, he handed her the wondrous liquid—limpid, delicately rose-tinted; enough to last the longest lifetime, since one drop only in a wine-glass of water, to be taken after her morning bath, was all that was needed. First, however, he produced his tablets, and writing a few words on one of the pages, he bade her set her signature beneath. “Very good,” he said, when she had done this. As he placed the phials in her hands, “Now you are mine,” and he added, as he laid his hand on her shoulder, that her health would remain almost unbroken through all the coming years, troops of friends and love would be ever with her, and after death the memory of her would be unfading. Once more she would see him—years hence. “Then beware and tremble; you will not have three more days to live.”

And so he disappeared.[2]

In the course of their brief conversation, the Man in Black disclosed to Ninon the manner in which his impudent imitator produced his Mumbo-Jumbo terrors. Like the Comte de Lude, he did not deny them effect; but he held them so essentially vulgar, that it seemed marvellous to him how the fellow succeeded in imposing on refined and educated clients. Moreover, they had not even the recommendation of novelty. Perditor had, he explained, contrived merely to get knowledge and possession of the tricks and traps of the long since strangled César, who during his incarceration in the Bastille had entertained his gaolers with an account of the way he played his tricks, performed apparently at Gentilly also at that time and therefore rendering the way the easier to his successor, since the old quarry he had utilised and patterned about with ditches still remained. Perditor’s ceremonial was identically the same with César’s. The frightful cries he uttered were the signal for six men hideously masked and garbed, he kept concealed in the cavern, to spring forward, flinging out flashes of flame, and waving torches of burning resin. Amid the flames was to be seen the monstrous goat, loaded with thick iron chains painted vermilion, to give the appearance of being red-hot. On each side, in the obscurity of the cavern, were placed two huge mastiffs, their heads fastened into wooden cases, wide at one end, and narrow at the other. Two men goaded and prodded these two poor animals, which caused them to utter the most dismal howling, filling the cavern with the appalling noise, while the goat, a most intelligent beast, and thoroughly understanding his part, played it to admiration, rattling his chains and butting his huge horns.

The devil having thus shown himself, two of the men now rush upon the unfortunate individual, and belabour him black and blue with long bags of cloth filled full of sand, and then fling him, half-dead, outside the cavern. “Then the parting advice is given him not to wish to see the devil again, and he never does, concluded César.”

CHAPTER VI

Nemesis—Ninon’s Theories—Wits and Beaux of the Salons—Found at Last—“The Smart Set”—A Domestic Ménage—Scarron—The Fatal Carnival—The Bond of Ninon—Corneille and The Cid—The Cardinal’s Jealousy—Enlarging the Borders—Monsieur l’Abbé and the Capon Leg—The Grey Cardinal—A Faithful Servant.

Ninon’s intrigue with the young Marquis de Rambouillet gave great offence to Madame de Rambouillet. It sheds a curious light on the manner of the great world of the time, that the doors of the marquise’s house remained still open to her, yet so they did remain. The justly incensed lady contented herself with soliciting an order from the Court for the young man to rejoin his regiment in Auvergne without delay; and Ninon was left to console herself elsewhere, and to avenge as she might her annoyance at the epigrams showered upon her, not to speak of the severe blame cast upon women of society who were undeterred by any sense of propriety and the convenable—which she was well aware was mainly levelled at herself. All moral considerations aside, the breach of good taste is inconceivable in one who so prided herself, and generally with justice, on the observation of the general laws governing the people of her class. The hospitality of the famous mansion in the rue St Thomas du Louvre, however, was still accorded her, and if it was more chilly than formerly, Ninon consoled herself by enlisting many who frequented the brilliant gatherings, on the side of her easy-going philosophy, and discussing its tenets with amazing frankness.

The women were not many who upheld her arguments; but the men vastly applauded and seconded her sallies against the theory of Platonic love. In her opinion, it was an impossible doctrine, and on such themes she was Madame Oracle, and her beautiful mouth opened to expound, what dog dare bark? Unless indeed it might be the cardinal. “Mademoiselle,” he said, one evening when he was present, as he frequently was, in the Rambouillet salon, and Ninon ventured an observation not quite to his taste, “I never accept lessons, even when they issue from such pretty lips as yours.”

The stately mansion of Rambouillet, with its magnificent grand salon, and blue chamber, the special haunt of the poets, its daintily furnished smaller chambers, and richly-draped alcoves and cosy corners, was only one among many houses entertaining the society of the world which was devoted, or assumed devotion, to art and literature. There were the Saturdays of Madame de Sablé, and notably also the receptions of Mademoiselle Scudéri. Mademoiselle de L’Enclos’ own apartments were thronged on her reception nights with the company of talented and famous men and women, though that genial admirer of hers, St Evrémond, once had the temerity to criticise the beauty, or the lack of it, in the ladies of the côtérie. It might, of course, as he said, arise from mere chance; but otherwise it was a mistake; since it suggested the idea that Ninon could not sufficiently prize her own beauty; and on the score of the hidden compliment the audacity was condoned. After the coolness that followed upon Ninon’s liaison with the Marquis de Rambouillet, the society of the salon of the marquise somewhat thinned for awhile; while the salon of the rue des Tournelles was more thronged than ever. The cachet that admitted to all these various assemblies would appear to have been that only of fair breeding and connexions, and some intellectual pretension, though the supply of that was not necessarily very great, since the leaven of would-be wits and of absolute stupidity—the “mostly fools” Carlyle says the world is peopled with—would seem to have been even curiously large. One and all, however, were full of ambition to air the rhymes, and often senseless epigrams and dreary sonnets and conceits, generated in their miserable brains.

Perhaps the only one of this crowd of triflers who is worth recording is the Baron de Miranges. In addition to the fact that he was never known to sit still two consecutive minutes, he was supremely ugly; marked with the smallpox, he squinted, his chin was awry, his nose twisted to one side. He was the first to jest at all these defects. One day he met a man on the Pont Neuf, an entire stranger to him, and halting before him, Miranges, in a sort of transport of satisfaction, gave a joyous cry and threw himself upon the individual’s neck, saying: “Oh, sir! how charmed I am at this meeting, and for what a number of years I have been looking for you!”

“Indeed?” said the other, in a tone of astonishment. “I do not think I have the honour of knowing you.”

“No. Unluckily I have met you much too late; but I look at you, I contemplate you, and I am happy.”

“But why?”

“Yes, yes, indeed,” replied Monsieur de Miranges; “let us embrace each other again. I have always despaired of ever finding a man uglier than myself, but now—yes, you are that man.”

Not without justice, Ninon, who about this time had in more ways than one drawn unfavourable public criticism upon herself, complains that she was really less culpable, infinitely more decorously behaved in society, than many of the titled and fashionable dames, whose behaviour, scandalous as it was, passed unchallenged. They were constantly promenading in the Place Royale, chattering at the top of their voices, ogling, smoking, taking snuff, adorning their mantles and hats with knots of ribbon of various colours, each conveying a different significance, and generally comporting themselves after the manner of the lowest of their sex. Ninon de L’Enclos had made a law unto herself, a law of liberty, and she made no pretence of not abiding by it; but she rarely sinned in outward decorum, or forgot the good breeding of her station.

In the matter of de Rambouillet, if she did not acknowledge the false step, it was probable she was made to feel conscious of it, and decided soon after to divert public attention to some other topics of scandal, by absenting herself from Paris for a while and rusticating at Loches, the estate which her aunt had left her. On reaching le Mans, she was met by the Marquis de la Châtre—an amiable man for whom Ninon had sufficient attachment and constancy to allow the good provincials to imagine they were man and wife, and the two were widely welcomed and courted.

One evening, at a supper party to which they were invited, she met Scarron. He arrived in company with some canons from the cathedral, and to her great surprise she learned from him that he now held a canonry in le Mans cathedral, bestowed upon him for the assistance of his pen, than which few were more able than his in Lorraine, in drawing up a history of the duchy of Lorraine.

To Paul Scarron, the brilliant wit, comic poet, rhymester—so admired of another erratic genius, Oliver Goldsmith, who translated his Roman Comique—the sunny-natured, in earlier years scandalously debauched, and always bon vivant—brimming with the overflow of humour that wells from the depths of a sympathetic temperament—generous, kind-hearted—to:

“Nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice,”

are words hardly to be more aptly applied. The sufferings of his childhood, due to the avarice of his artful stepmother, who contrived to separate him from his father and get possession of his fortune, cast him nearly penniless upon the world, when scarcely more than a child. It was one more instance of the game, ever new, which relatives intellectually inferior, incited by envy and greed, love to play upon the unfortunate talented one, and render life one long misery and struggle at the best, provided sufficient bread is somehow come upon to retain breath. So much the brave heart and exercise of his gifts enabled the lad to acquire, and he managed to enter ecclesiastical ranks; but only to the outermost degree—not, it may be, aspiring to the priesthood, which hardly could have lost anything from one whose character and mode of life were so glaringly ill adapted for the calling. Scarron’s vocation that way was worse than nil; nevertheless, in that lax time of ecclesiastical law and order, he obtained the canonry of le Mans cathedral, and thus dignified, Monsieur l’Abbé Scarron met Ninon again at the supper-table of the local receiver-general of taxes, and was more ready than ever for any lengths of wild uproariousness the chance brought him. It came just then with the Carnival, and Scarron, with one or two companions, conceived the notion of spreading a big mattress all over with goose’s feathers and down; then, smearing themselves from head to foot in honey, they rolled upon the mattress until they were encased in the feathers so thickly, that the disguise was impenetrable, and they looked like some hideous monstrosities of the bird-tribe, face and all covered in the plumage. Passing up the street, followed by a huge concourse, they made their way to Ninon’s château, and forced entrance, greatly to the anger of Monsieur de la Châtre, who quickly discovered who they were, and at once denounced them. The mob, furious at the thought of a churchman of their own cathedral indulging in such wild licence, set upon the feathered monsters, and flinging them down, pommelled and beat the unprotected bodies of the unfortunate masqueraders, and plucked off every feather, pursuing them without mercy, until they were compelled to jump into the rushes of the river for protection. There they were forced to remain for hours, and two of Scarron’s three companions died from the effects of the cold immersion, and the violence dealt them. Scarron himself escaped with breath, but little more. The chill and exposure brought on an illness from which he never recovered. It crippled him in every limb, and rendered him, as he himself says, an abridgment of human suffering—tied to his chair by the contraction of every muscle, in never-ending pain for all the years to come; yet never losing his gaiety, and for all the misery he had created for himself, winning the pity and the money gifts from the Court and from wealthy friends which enabled him to live in fair affluence.

A short time later the domestic felicity being enjoyed at the Loches château by Ninon and Monsieur de la Châtre was rudely broken up by a summons from Monsieur de la Châtre’s family, at Besançon, to repair to the deathbed of his father. The two parted with real regret, and so much devotion on the Marquis de la Châtre’s side, that nothing would content him short of a written and signed promise from Ninon of eternal fidelity to him. She accordingly wrote on a leaf of his tablets these words—

“I swear to love you always.—Ninon.”

Carefully bestowing this precious bond in black and white in an innermost pocket of his vest, de la Châtre conducted Ninon back to Paris. He would have preferred to leave her in Touraine, to pass the time of his absence in the rural tranquillity of her beautiful little domain; but if Ninon desired to ruralise, was there not her charming country residence at Picpus?—and Picpus is much nearer Paris than Loches; and just then the Maréchal de Sévigné had arrived in Paris, a man of noble presence, distinguished for his recent successes in the king’s service, and the young Vicomte de Turenne, already entered upon the paths of his renown, by his splendid service in Lorraine and Italy, and both, eagerly seeking introduction to Ninon, came, saw, and were conquered by her charm.

De Sévigné’s rendered homage was, however, on somewhat unconventional lines, the honeyed words of his admiration being tempered with just enough fault-finding as to render it unusually piquant; but Ninon’s favours, and just now especially, were in no wise exclusively bestowed on the heroes of the battlefield. She was no more précieuse than she was Platonicienne; but she was genuinely gifted with a love of letters, which had been fostered by the excellent education her father had given her, and she entered ardently into the great intellectual movement of the time, in which the drama figured so prominently. Richelieu himself was so warm a devotee, that his ambition to excel as a dramatist equalled, if it did not surpass, his political ambition; and while jealous to the mean extent envy can reach, he did not withhold his patronage from the great genius of him who has been styled the father of the French dramatists, Pierre Corneille. Even had Richelieu not desired as he did, to make use of the brilliant talent of Corneille for his own ends, it would not have been possible for him to hold aloof amid the enthusiasm of the world of letters, and of society generally, which hailed in 1636 the production of The Cid.

As every time “doth boast itself above better gone,” so must Corneille’s name yield place in a degree to what has since been seen. Still, ever remembering his fathering of it—for his predecessors in dramatic work worthy of any name were dull and lacked artistic knowledge of their craft, and Godelet, Gamier, and others are but names now and no more—Corneille’s masterpiece would challenge criticism in plenty now, placed before the delicate discrimination of the daily press of this time, or the judgment of the gallery, alike in his native country or elsewhere. It is but recently that the tragedy of a great French poet, not yet two generations passed away, revived at the Comédie Française, though reverently and finely acted, was derided and mocked at without mercy behind the scenes by those taking part in it. Exactly what will be the opinions of critics of future generations on the dramatic productions of the early years of the twentieth century, fortunately the means will probably be lacking to know; the fact remains that the fame of Pierre Corneille is a living force and a memory for all time.

It was the fashion of that day to model plays and novels on Spanish and Italian patterns; and advised to follow this ruling, Corneille selected the subject of The Cid—Rodriguez—on which to base a drama, not his first by several; but while the preceding ones were held in great esteem, The Cid was regarded as attaining to the highest excellence, and its fame as his crowning work has ever remained by it. Some of his dramas of a later date were unsuccessful; one of his comedies, Le Menteur—the only one which had popularity—is best known in this country by Steele’s translation of it, The Lying Lover.

Richelieu, stirred to dramatic ambition—finding probably that it was an art less easy than it seemed—sought the assistance of five dramatists to write up and give more effect to his tragedies; at least any other reason for such collaboration is not easy to be imagined. One of the five chosen was Corneille, who, naturally somewhat curt and abrupt in speech, did not spare to find fault with some of the details of the cardinal’s work, and the concatenation of The Cid’s success and of Corneille’s frankness over Euterpe and Mirame, stirred such offence in the cardinal’s jealous mind, that he endeavoured to drive a spoke in the wheel of Corneille’s car of triumph; and one of the earliest achievements of the recently constituted Académie Française was a critique on The Cid commanded of its members by its founder. It had no effect at all in lessening the enthusiasm of the world of letters, or of the general public for the drama. The poison did not act, in spite of the endeavours of several of the poetasters to second the pronouncements. One defect, that it was not original in plot and construction, but based on a Spanish dramatic model, was to be conceded; if defect that was which at the time was held to be almost indispensable in a play. There is nothing new under the sun. Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies alike—the English historical plays excepted—are one and all based on old legends and classic stories which he drew from Italian, and Spanish and French, and other sources that had, in their turn, sprung from tradition no longer traceable, hidden in origins lost in the lapse of centuries. Richelieu’s own dramatic effusions were reproductions of classical themes. It was the grandeur of the verse of Corneille, its lofty thought, its dignity and moral conception, its depicting of conflicting passions—this it was that won the admiration, and struck home to heartfelt sympathies, in its power of presenting character, under other names, of living men and women, the contemporaries of Ninon’s time, contending, suffering, striving in the stormy political atmosphere, darkening in now with the shadows of the Thirty Years’ War.

In the delight of Corneille’s presence in Paris, Ninon sacrificed all the ordinary routine of her life. It was in her salon, if the chronicling of the fact is to be trusted, that Corneille read to the assembled company his manuscript of The Cid, all the principal members being present of the Hôtel Bourgogne, and the few other talented “rogues and vagabonds” proscribed of the Church, though ill to be spared by it, if the cardinal’s plays were to have any sort of success. The Comédie Française was yet an institution of the future; and the stage of the Hôtel Bourgogne, with the two or three other theatres were not much more than glorified fair platforms, while the theatre in the rue Guénégaud ordinarily confined itself to the presentment of Chinese shadows. The drawing-room of the Louvre and of the Palais Cardinal were utilised for masques and such plays as there were, called in request for the Court and the more exalted circles of society. Richelieu’s own pieces were thus performed. The drama was in transition. It was a far cry now from Clement Marot and the antics of the clerks of the Basoche upon the huge marble table of the Hall of Lost Footsteps, to the Académie Française and the Hôtel de Rambouillet; and the language of the country was undergoing changes, even as the aspect of the city itself was no longer that of a few years earlier, when Ninon first came to Paris. Then Notre-Dame was nearly surrounded by green spaces of meadowland and field and hedgerow, stretching between the streets and the grassy banks of the Isle de la Cité. Now here, and away to the Palais de Justice; and northwards of the Louvre, streets were gathering, and houses began to crowd about the old towers of the Conciérgerie; while on the banks of the Seine, right and left, the old walls of Philip Augustus were laid low or broken up to afford room for new buildings. Behind the Louvre, far extending to the gardens and palace of the Tuileries, Richelieu’s magnificent residence dominated the rue de Rivoli—the Palais Cardinal, so soon to pass as a gift to the king and take the name of the Palais Royal, till the Revolution of 1793 changed it to the Palais Égalité, and the lordly “pleasure-house” of the great upholder of kingly power was cut up into gaudy shops and gaming-houses.

After the performance of The Cid, which took place before the king and queen, and Court, and a vast company of illustrious persons, Corneille returned home to Rouen, to pursue the great career he was now launched upon. The fulminations of the cardinal through the Académie Française far from proving destructive to his fame, had probably cast a brighter lustre on it. “I never undertake anything without well first considering, but once I have resolved, I go straight to my aim; I throw all down that is in my path; I mow down all, and I cover all with my red robes,” he once said, and it was no empty boast. Yet the ruling found its exception; his rancour and jealousy did its worst, but it could not crush Corneille. It did not at all events do so. Even for Richelieu it might have been dangerous and impolitic. Gaston d’Orléans, the king’s brother, who belonged to the party of the queen, threw in his influence to support anything he dared in opposition to the cardinal—and at this time Gaston was a frequent visitor at Ninon’s house. He invited himself one evening to dinner with her, attended by several gentlemen, and Ninon, who was kept in countenance by her friend, Marion Delorme, and another lady, entertained her royal guest with an elegant repast of fish, flesh and fowl, although she had ventured to remind “Monseigneur” that, being the season of Lent, it was a questionable proceeding to have anything but dishes of the first served up. Gaston, however, had insisted, especially in the matter of roast capon, and good wine—cela va sans dire. Whether the wine was partly answerable, or it was merely the manners of the time that prompted one of the guests—Monsieur de Boisrobert, my lord cardinal’s secretary—who was fingering the leg-bone of a fowl, to fling it out of window at the head of Monsieur l’Abbé Dufaure, the venerable dean of St Sulpice, that was what he did. The abbé was a Jesuit priest, and the scandal of insult to him was doubled by the sin of eating meat in Lent. Monseigneur and his companions finished the evening by adjourning to the house of Monsieur la Navarre, a neighbour of Ninon’s, and breaking up the furniture. Then the prince himself sent for the magistrate, and the functionary arriving, demanded to be informed which was the culprit. The unfortunate neighbour, who did not know who Gaston was, pointed him out, and forthwith six archers were sent for, who laid hands on the prince, and he was threatened with handcuffing if he did not immediately go quietly to prison. Upon this the gentlemen in attendance, hearing the uproar, entered, and with profoundest respect proceeded to inquire what had happened, addressing Monseigneur by name. Terrified out of his senses at what he had done, the magistrate besought pardon, which the prince gravely granted, not without commanding him to make amende honorable by holding a lighted wax taper in his hand, and, on bended knees, confessing his crime before all and individually of the women of the household, who were summoned to attend for the purpose.

So much for Monseigneur’s little amusement: it was Ninon who was the sufferer. The insulted abbé complained to his Superior, who complained to the magistrate of the district, and from mouth to mouth the story flew. Not one man in black, but constant contingents of the black-soutaned fraternity haunted the rue des Tournelles, and invaded Ninon’s apartments, subjecting her to such severe inquisition about her affairs generally, that it became unendurable, and she wrote to the prince in severe reproach for allowing the blame of his folly to burden and annoy her. Whereupon Gaston sent two of his friends to mollify the wrath of the magistrate, who tore up the Jesuit Superior’s letter of complaint. But the scandal only aggravated the soreness and complications of the opposing parties of the Court, and it made an additional grievance for Richelieu against Gaston; though, on the other hand, it was Boisrobert, his own secretary, who was also his own jester-in-chief, who had been at the bottom of the offence, so that the affair cut both ways, and the cardinal may have preferred to see it hushed up.

It was about this time that Richelieu lost by death the man he called his right hand—Père Joseph, the Capucin friar—in other words, “The Grey Cardinal,” as he was nicknamed; but in fact and deed the poor man never even received the bishopric long promised, never bestowed. Richelieu himself was already in failing health, worn by stress and anxiety for the care of the vast structure of kingly power he had built up and sustained, as it were, by his own hand, that was against so many, and Louis himself was almost as much a nonentity as any of the rois fainéants of old days. It is almost impossible to realise that he and his false-hearted, selfish brother should have been the sons of the dauntless Henry of Navarre.

Louis was not vicious; it was his valetudinarian melancholy temperament which appears to have rendered him indifferent to ordinary human interests. He made less than no pretence of affection for his Spanish wife, for whose bright glances other men would have staked existence. For her, Buckingham forgot honour and duty to his own royal master, and did not spare compromising her repute. That is a page of history that remains sealed. How far it affected Louis’s feelings towards her through the rest of his life, remains an open question, or whether from the beginning, love and mutual inclination were at fault. “The wind bloweth where it listeth,” and the beauty and attractions of Anne of Austria may never have struck a responsive chord in the king’s heart. He was not destitute of sentiment. More than once he strove to fill the dreary void with the sympathy of other women of repute about the Court, and, in one instance at all events, not unsuccessfully; but he was not one to win love and friendship generally; and the consciousness of this chilled his manner still more, and threw him back upon himself. Gaston d’Orléans, with all his grave faults, had at least quicker outward intelligence and sufficient animation to win some extensive suffrages of the gentler sex, notably of Anne herself, who tolerated his attentions and coquetted with him up to a certain point; though how far this was policy, or from real sentiment, Court intrigues veil too entirely to attempt to determine, and the jealousy of Richelieu, himself enamoured of the queen, had soon put an end to all the aspirations of the two dukes. “There is no such word as fail,” Richelieu was often heard to say, and he did not fail to put his foot down very decisively when a league was formed, which the queen herself was said to favour, whose end and aim was to depose Louis the Just, crown Gaston, and give him Anne of Austria to wife.

“I should not have sufficiently gained by the change,” was, however, Anne’s reply, when the accusation of her desire for this was made against her in the course of the rigorous inquiry and treatment to which she and her friends were subjected. If on account alone of that time, years back now, when Gaston, to save himself, permitted one of his noblest adherents, Chalais, to perish on the scaffold at Richelieu’s command, Monsieur was not likely to be very favourably regarded by her. Nearly half a score of years had passed since the brave man had died in the flower of his life, tortured and hacked by countless bungling strokes of a creature found at last, among the dregs of the prison, to do the hideous task which the professional headsman managed to evade by absenting himself and remaining perdu. In the interval, the queen’s mother had been effectually, and for ever, banished from France. “The Day of Dupes” had come and gone, leaving Richelieu all-triumphant; but still the contest raged, and the virulence of the minister against the queen broke furiously on the pretext he found at last, of discovering that she was keeping up a private correspondence with the King of Spain, and the cardinal infant, her two brothers, and also with persons in Madrid and Brussels, whose friendship she valued—the more, doubtless, for the isolation and lack of affection and harshness surrounding her. It was a boast of Richelieu’s, that with only two lines of an innocent man’s writing he could ruin him. Naturally, therefore, however innocent the correspondence, Anne was anxious to hold her letters uninspected by the cardinal, and she kept them in her own private oratory chamber in the Benedictine convent of the Val de Grâce, in the rue St Jacques, which she had founded. The letters, on their arrival, were received by one of the nuns, who placed them away in a closet to await the queen’s coming, and her replies to them were forwarded from thence. But Richelieu’s spies were at work; they swarmed of course in Paris; and before long they scented out the secret correspondence, and Richelieu informed the king of it, holding up before His Majesty’s dreary imagination all the terrors of national peril it signified. The alarmed king hurried the queen out of Paris to the Château of Chantilly, where she was confined to her own rooms and compelled to listen to a string of rigid interrogation from the chancellor. She was in a cruelly forlorn situation; for, in fear of Richelieu’s anger and the activity of his spies, the courtiers and following of the royal pair did not venture so much as to lift their eyes to her window as they passed. For her own servants, they had been at once disposed of in various prisons; while the chancellor proceeded to ransack the convent of Val de Grâce for more papers and letters. But it was labour lost, which possibly was no more than he expected; since it is believed that the queen had warning from him of his intended visit, and the documents, for all they might be worth, were safe in the care of Madame de Sourdis. The alarm and suspicion intensified, when there was found upon the person of la Porte, the queen’s confidential servant, a letter from her to the Duchess of Chevreuse, long exiled. La Porte was thereupon, as a man of strict honesty and fidelity to his royal mistress, locked away in one of the towers of the Bastille, and all the efforts to draw from him anything incriminating the queen, were absolutely abortive; though Richelieu employed every art to shake him, from promises and emoluments, to threats of torture, which were rendered more real to his imagination, by his being taken to the torture-chamber for a sight of its equipments.

Fortunately for him, a great event was at hand, which marvellously changed the aspect of political affairs. The queen, after twenty-two years of childlessness, was in a situation of promise to give an heir to the throne. Then Richelieu relaxed la Porte’s durance so far as to permit his retiring to Saumur, where he remained till the queen recalled him, on the death of the cardinal, now shadowing in, bringing with it the terrible tragedy which was the last act and deed of his hand.

CHAPTER VII

Mélusine—Cinq-Mars—An Ill-advised Marriage—The Conspiracy—The Revenge—The Scaffold—A Cry from the Bastille—The Lady’s Man—“The Cardinal’s Hangman”—Finis—Louis’s Evensong—A Little Oversight—The King’s Nightcap—Mazarin—Ninon’s Hero.

Some few miles from Tours, along the banks of the Loire, at one of its most beautiful parts above Saumur, stands the little town of St Médard, better known as Cinq-Mars. A ruined castle crowns the heights above. It was the ancestral home of the d’Effiats, a noble family of long lineage; and before their coming, tradition told of its being the dwelling of Mélusine the fée, the beautiful snake-woman, who was the wife of Raymond, Count de Lusignan, placed under the terrible spell of transformation into a snake, from the waist downwards, every seventh night, for having immured her father in a rock-bound cavern, for cruelty to her mother. Disobeying Mélusine’s command, never to intrude upon her on those fatal Saturday nights, Raymond discovered the appalling reason for it, and in his rage cast her forth. The despairing cry that broke from her then, is still to be heard of stormy nights above the river; and it may be, mingles with the lamentations of the mourners over the deed of blood which was enacted in after centuries when Louis the Just was king.

The young lord of the castle then, was the son of the Maréchal Cinq-Mars. He was scarcely more than a youth; for he was but nineteen when Richelieu introduced him at Court, loading him with favours, causing him to be made the royal master of the horse, and otherwise specially recommending him to the notice of Louis, who conceived so vast a liking for him, that it was even touched with some real warmth; and Cinq-Mars, handsome, gallant, distinguished, brave, and not a little spoiled by the splendour of his existence, but amiable and generous-hearted, beloved by his friends—of whom a dear one was de Thou, the son of the great historian—basked in all the full sunshine of his young life. The pale, stern cardinal, attenuated by bodily suffering, and more than ever soured by care, was hardly likely to win much love from a gay butterfly of a creature like the young marquis, and before long Cinq-Mars came to know from Louis’s own lips, that he privately hated Richelieu, a hate nourished by his deadly fear of him.

Meanwhile, Cinq-Mars had cast amorous eyes upon Marion Delorme, the cardinal’s protégée. Marion, still beautiful, though no longer young—being in fact double the age of this her latest admirer—returned his passionate affection, and, dazzled by the prospect of being his wife—for his infatuation impelled him to seek her as such—she braved the consequences of her protector’s wrath, and the two were secretly married. Richelieu, from whom nothing could long be hidden, was furious; he had planned a brilliant alliance for the king’s young favourite, who had shortly before leagued himself with the queen’s party; Gaston d’Orléans, the Duc de Bouillon—burning to supplant the cardinal-minister—and others—and they entered into correspondence with Olivarez, the Spanish prime-minister, which resulted in a treaty of alliance between him and the conspiring enemies of the cardinal. Louis had for some time past treated Richelieu with coldness; and Richelieu, suspecting the cause of it, left Paris, and went to Tarascon, to lie in wait till his spies were able to place him in full possession of every detail of the plot, and of a copy of the treaty. Then, disabled by illness and infirmity, he desired to see the king, who travelled for the interview from Perpignan, where he was then staying, and all the thunder of the cardinal’s reproaches and wrath was flung upon him. Apparently with justice, Louis succeeded in justifying himself, on the plea of ignorance, and the king departed again, enjoining everybody to obedience to Richelieu as if he were himself.

After their marriage, Marion and Cinq-Mars went to the castle on the Loire, where they spent a brief period of delight. Only the servants of the household were there, and Cinq-Mars was their lord. They showed willing, even delighted, obedience to all his behests; but the marquise his mother returned home somewhat unexpectedly, and her anger at the stolen marriage equalled in its way that of Richelieu himself. Doubtless this fomented the affair to a yet speedier issue, and Cinq-Mars was arrested, and along with him, his friend de Thou, who was entirely innocent of complicity in the plot. The two were taken into the presence of Richelieu at Tarascon (a place old stories tell named after one Tarasque, “a fearful dragon who infested the borders of the Rhone, preying upon human flesh, to the universal terror and disturbance”), and hence his dying Eminence—for death was very near—commanded them to be placed, tied and bound, in a boat fastened behind his own, in which he was returning to Paris by the waterway of the Rhone, as far as Lyons. There, being disembarked, the two young victims were led immediately to a hastily-erected scaffold, and there bravely they met their fate by the headsman’s axe—de Thou guilty of refusing to betray his friend, and Cinq-Mars’ crime not proved, suffering mainly from the cowardly depositions laid against him by the Duke of Orléans. Then Richelieu continued his triumphal way to Paris, where in his magnificent palace he died; and during his last agonies, the king was seen to smile at what he called “Death’s master-stroke of policy.”

There was a letter, written three days before the cardinal’s death, found among his papers. It was dated from the Bastille, and it consisted of one bitter reproach of his injustice to the writer, in keeping him immured in the terrible place for eleven years. It was a letter of some length, and an eloquently written appeal for release. “There is a time, my lord,” it began, “when man ceases to be barbarous and unjust; it is when his approaching dissolution compels him to descend into the gloom of his conscience, and to deplore the cares, griefs, pains and misfortunes which he has caused to his fellow-creatures. Had I,” the unhappy man, whose name was Dessault, goes on to say, “performed your order, it would have condemned my soul to eternal torment, and made me pass into eternity with blood-stained hands.... I implore you, my lord, order my chains to be broken before your death-hour comes,—permit yourself to be moved by the most humble prayer of a man who has ever been a loyal subject to the king.”

This letter bore date of December 1st; on December 4th, the cardinal died. It is not known whether he ever saw it. After his death, it came into the hands of those on whom the power now devolved, and Dessault, far from gaining his release, was kept in the Bastille till the year of 1692, after being a prisoner for sixty-one years. Such remnant of life as may have remained to him, is one too forlorn and dreary to contemplate.

And to this piteous appeal were added the sobs and frenzied reproaches of Marion Delorme, who found access to the death-chamber, just as the cardinal was about to receive the Viaticum.

A gentleman named de Saucourt was a slave to Ninon’s charms at this time, causing a vast amount of envy among her friends. He was a man of refinement and brilliant wit, so raved about by the ladies, that Benserade composed this quatrain upon him—

“Contre se fier demon voyez vous aujourd’hui

Femme qui tienne?

Et toutes cependant sont contentes de lui,

Jusqu’ à la sienne.”

Ninon, however, was then suffering great distress of mind at the terrible fate of Cinq-Mars, reproaching herself not a little for the light, thoughtless way in which she had half encouraged Marion Delorme, half warned her off from accepting the young man’s rash proposition to make her his wife; for Marion had seriously consulted her in the matter. It came to light after Cinq-Mars’ death that it was Gaston d’Orléans himself who had in his possession the original of the treaty with Olivarez, and he had had the baseness to hand this to Laffemas, the infamous procureur-general and chief tool of Richelieu, when the cardinal was bent on a man’s destruction. Laffemas earned the distinction of being called the cardinal’s hangman-in-chief. No one stretched out a finger to help the Chevalier de Jars, whom Richelieu kept in the Bastille for two years, on the charge of being in the secrets of Anne of Austria’s connections with Spain. It was in vain that de Jars produced absolute proof of his innocence, and Laffemas added insults and threats to the interrogatory he subjected him to. Under a strong guard, de Jars one Sunday obtained leave to attend Mass at St Gervais, where he knew the wretched creature would be, and as he was about to kneel at the altar to receive the communion, de Jars, with a bound, sprang at him, seized him by his pourpoint, and dragging him down the nave of the church, flung him outside the door. “Away with thee!—away from here, cowardly hypocrite!” he cried. “Do not soil this holy place with thy foul presence,” and the poisonous reptile crawled away, while de Jars, turning to the officiating priest, said—“And you, my father, did you not know to whom you were about to give the Body of our Lord? To an iniquitous judge—another Judas—an abomination!”

Finally de Jars obtained his release, and spent his later life in peace and happiness, but not before he had been made to mount the scaffold itself. As he was about to lay his head upon the block, calmly defiant, Laffemas, who had got up the scene to terrify de Jars into a confession, approached and besought him, in consideration of the pardon he had brought him, to disclose all he knew; but he received scant satisfaction on the point, since de Jars, according to some authorities, persisted in his refusal and defiance of the monster. According to another account, the suffering and tension of mind he had endured temporarily deprived him of consciousness, and for some days he lay in a state of exhaustion, from which he only gradually recovered.

And those were but instances of the cardinal’s tyranny, and there was so little his red robe had not covered, sufficiently at all events for him to die in his bed. And the magnificent tomb, joint work of two great artists, that covers the spot where he was laid in the church of the Sorbonne, bears the recumbent statue of the cardinal, sustained by Religion and weeping angels.

Whether Louis, the king, shed any tears, is not specially recorded. They could hardly, in any case, have been more than of the crocodile kind; since he was so very visibly seen to smile more than once during the passing away of his great minister. In the days when Vitry relieved him of Concini by assassination, Louis thanked him warmly for the service. “Now I am king, Vitry,” he said. But it had not been for long, except in name; for he had only been free to become the slave of Richelieu, and now his own life was ebbing fast away, not, apparently, to his very great regret. Those last days were sorely troubled at the thought of his mother, who had died in exile at Cologne. He put the blame of this on Richelieu, and made all the reparation now possible, by ordering prayers throughout the kingdom for the repose of her soul. This seemed to bring him some tranquillity, of mind. He loved music, and he composed for himself a De Profundis to be chanted when his last hour should arrive. Seated one day at the window of the Château of St Germains, he pointed out the route which was best for the funeral cortège to follow, to reach St Denis, and reminded of a turn of the road which was awkward to pass, bidding care be taken to keep the hearse well in hand.

The death of Richelieu in no way softened the strained relations and conjugal coldness between the king and queen. On the day of the child’s birth, Louis was about to leave the queen without bestowing the embrace customary on such occasions, until he was reminded of his omission, which only a stretch of courtesy might call forgetfulness.

The little Louis, who was in his fifth year at the time of the king’s death, does not seem greatly to have interested him or afforded him any satisfaction; while the child rather shrank from him, notably when he saw him in his night-cap. Then he broke into piercing screams of terror. This the king laid, with all her other misdeeds, at the queen’s door. He declared that she prompted the little boy to his objections.

It was a pitiable ending to a melancholy existence—inexpressibly lonely, for in those last months, Anne left him entirely to himself. Less desolate than the king, finding distraction for ennui in the society of her ladies, and the gentlemen of her own little Court, among whom Monsignor Giulio Mazarini figured ever more and more prominently.

Previously to Richelieu’s death, the handsome, fascinating Mazarin had been a constant frequenter of Ninon’s réunions; but from these he soon withdrew almost entirely, in favour of the dazzling metal to be found in the Louvre, for there it rang of ambitions, which there was every chance of finding fully satisfied. His first master-stroke was to set aside the late king’s will—which constituted a counsel of regency, himself being chief of the counsel, which he had himself recommended to Louis—making Anne regent, with himself for prime-minister. The king was dead, Louis XIV. but a small child, and for Mazarin it was “Long live the Queen!” while Ninon found ample consolation in the devotion of her splendid hero, Louis de Bourbon, the great Condé, Duc d’Enghien.

Hitherto love had been a fragile toy for her, hanging about her by the lightest of chains made to be broken. For Condé, the sentiment lay deeper, nourished by the breath of adulation surrounding him when he returned, victorious over the Spaniards, from the field of Rocroi; and she was fired to flames of admiration and of delight in his distinguished presence. Handsome, amiable, gallant, to Ninon and to France he was as a demigod.

CHAPTER VIII

“Loving like a Madman”—A Great Transformation—The Unjust Tax—Parted Lovers—A Gay Court, and A School for Scandal and Mazarin’s Policy—The Regent’s Caprices—The King’s Upholsterer’s Young Son—The Théâtre Illustre—The Company of Monsieur and Molière.

“A man of sense may love like a madman, but never like a fool.” It is the dictum of François de la Rochefoucauld, and must have been framed from his deep attachment to Condé’s sister, Madame de Longueville, one of the most charming of the women of the great world at that time, and bound by ties of close friendship with Ninon.

It was no one-sided love, no case of the one who loves, and the one who merely consents to it; but mutual, and as passionate, as certainly for a time the flame was pure, shining with a clear, unflecked radiance.

Madame de Longueville, who was wedded to an old man, was singularly fascinating, from her gentle manners and amiability. Her face was not strictly beautiful, and bore traces of the smallpox, the cruel scourge then of so many beautiful faces; her eyes were full of a softened light, and she had the gift of a most sweet voice, while her smile was gentle and irresistibly winning. The dreamy, romantic, somewhat melancholy-natured de la Rochefoucauld’s heart was laid at her feet in whole and undivided adoration. For their conscious love, each strove against the temptation, she so earnestly, that she shut herself away from all chance of so much as seeing him for a little while. But Ninon slipped in with her philosophy. It was quite true, she argued to Madame de Longueville, that there were grave considerations to be respected—the indissoluble tie of marriage, convenances to be observed—all these; but to hide herself away, to refuse the unhappy prince the alleviation of gazing at her, of exchanging a few fleeting words—no, it was monstrously absurd. The very Platoniciens did not go such lengths. No, if complete happiness could not be theirs, at least a smile, a glance, was permitted; and Ninon’s counsel wound up with a suggestion to the disconsolate prince, that he should try what a little note to the woman he adored would effect, and he wrote—“Show yourself—be beautiful, and at least let me admire you.”

And Ninon delivered the billet, and its effect was marvellous. It conquered the young duchess’s natural timidity and retiring disposition. She took courage; she assumed her rightful place in the world; she appeared at the Louvre; she kept open house and gave brilliant receptions; she took her seat on the tabouret of the duchesses; her toilettes were magnificent; she shone brilliantly in conversation, and began to take part in Court intrigues; ere long very actively.

“With two lines of a man’s writing,” had said Mazarin’s great predecessor, “I could condemn him”; and with two lines of that magical pen of the Count de la Rochefoucauld, Madame de Longueville became another woman. As in the matter of her warm attachment to her lover, she was constant in her politics; while Louis de Condé, all-conquering at Rocroi, yielded himself captive to the charms of Ninon de L’Enclos—a veritable lion in love; not so blindly, however, that he was insensible to the wrongs of the people, upon whom a tax had been levied of a specially hateful kind. It was called the Toisé, and was a revival of an old edict long fallen into desuetude. To the Italian, d’Eméri, to whom Mazarin had entrusted the control of public finances, was due its discovery and resuscitation. This edict forbade the enlargement of the borders of Paris, and as recently new buildings had been, and were being, in course of construction far and wide, the owners of these were threatened with confiscation of their materials, unless they consented to pay for their newly-erected houses and other buildings, a rate regulated by measurement of the size of them. This pressed cruelly on the people. Loud murmurs were excited. The Parliament expostulated, and the Toisé was withdrawn. It was the first stone slung by the Fronde. Condé’s indignation was great; and one day, in the rue St Antoine, he laid flat with his sword the body of some wretched collector who had snatched away a child’s cradle from a poor woman. His act gave great offence to the queen, who saw in it defiance of Mazarin. Both at home and abroad, there was plenty stirring to keep existence from stagnating; but for a few brief delightful weeks the Duc d’Enghien sought retirement and tranquillity in his château of Petit Chantilly, in company with Ninon, who left the rue des Tournelles dwelling to take care of itself. It was the iniquitous Toisé which broke in upon their content; for the queen sent for the duke, to consult him in the emergency created by the cardinal favourite.

After the Toisé prologue, however, the opening scenes of the inglorious turmoil of the Fronde did not see Condé; for Austria once more took up arms, and he lost not a moment in hastening to the frontier. If it is indeed a fact that Ninon accompanied him thither in the guise of a young aide-de-camp, mounted on a fiery charger, it was but to re-enact her former exploits; and Ninon was nothing if not daring. That her presence on the field of Nordlingen could have been really anything but exceedingly encumbering, is more than imaginable. At all events Condé soon begged her to return to Paris, in order to go and console his sister, Madame de Longueville, who had been summoned to attend his father, the Duc de Condé, in an illness threatening to be fatal. Arrived at Paris, she found the sufferer very much better, and writing to inform the Duc d’Enghien of this pleasant intelligence, she begged to be allowed to return to him. The duke, however, replied that it was hardly worth while; as he should soon be back. To pass the tedium of his absence, Ninon resumed her réunions, finding pleasant distraction in the society of her friends, among which were two ladies distinguished for their birth and undoubted talents, scarcely less than notorious, even in those days, for their openly lax mode of life. One of these was Madame de la Sablière, a notable member of the Hôtel de Rambouillet côtérie. A really brilliant mathematician, she was at least equally skilful in the science of love—so ardent a student, that one day her uncle, a grave magistrate, scandalised out of all endurance at her ways, remonstrated severely, reminding her that the beasts of the field observed more order and seasonable regulation in their love-affairs.

“Ah, dear uncle,” said the gifted lady, “that is because they are beasts.”

Madame de Chevreuse was the other specially chosen spirit of her own sex Ninon now consorted with. After the death of Richelieu, who had exiled her at the time of the Val de Grâce affair, she was allowed to return to France, attended by the Abbé de Retz, Paul de Gondi, whom Louis XIII., on his deathbed, had appointed coadjutor to the new archbishopric of Paris. De Retz had himself aspired to the archbishopric, and swore that he would obtain a cardinalate.

The Court was now brilliantly gay. The gloomy and sombre atmosphere of Louis XIII. and of Richelieu’s day faded all in a succession of balls and fêtes and every sort of festivity. Anne of Austria enlarged the south side of the Louvre, and Grimaldi and Romanelli adorned the chambers and galleries with their exquisite skill. Poussin, whose friezes terminated the ends of the great gallery, had had apartments assigned him in the Louvre, in order to carry on his work with greater facility; but he had retired in displeasure at the criticisms of his brother-artists, and went to Rome, where he spent the rest of his life, leaving in Paris immortal memories of his genius, among them the altarpiece for the chapel of St Germain en Laye, and the mournful Arcadian Shepherd, “Et in Arcadia Ego.”

So the never-ending round of gaiety was set in motion by Mazarin, and Anne of Austria was the regent. Anne, still handsome, and by nature frivolous under her somewhat cold Spanish demeanour—surely a born coquette, delighting in show and magnificence, none the less that she had so long lived under repression. The queen, apparently, was the reigning power; but it was the crafty prime-minister who pulled the strings, and set the puppets dancing and fiddling, and amorously intriguing, so that they should leave him to carry on his politics, and mount to the heights of his ambition and power in his own unhindered way. Unlike his great predecessor, he was handsome, and good-natured in manner, and therefore an ornament in those brilliant assemblies. Wrote St Evrémond—

“J’ai vu le temps de la bonne régence,

Temps où régnait une heureuse abondance,

Temps où la ville aussi bien que la cour

Ne respirait que les jeux et l’amour.

Une politique indulgente

De notre nature innocente

Favorisait tous les désirs

Tout dégoût semblait légitime;

La douce erreur ne s’appélait point crime,

Les vices délicats se nommait des plaisirs.”

Very pleasant and entertaining the world of society was then; and seasoned as it was with even unusual spice of malice and spite, scandal was rife. Among others, the stepmother of Madame de Chevreuse, Madame de Montbazon, who was married to the old Duc de Rohan, was a past-mistress in the gentle art of making mischief; and where the material was insufficient, she manufactured it without scruple. In this way she nearly succeeded in bringing a rift into the love-harmonies of Henri de la Rochefoucauld and his adored Madame de Longueville, by means of sheer, brazen lying, alleging that certain letters of Madame de Longueville, which had been found, had dropped from the pocket of Coligny. It was a pitiful fabrication, and Madame de Montbazon—of whom de Retz, in his Memoirs, says “I never saw any person showing in her vices less respect for virtue”—did not come out of it with very flying colours, for all her best efforts at effrontery, and she received an order from Mazarin to retire to Tours. The letters, in effect, proved to be not those of Madame de Longueville at all; and the pocket they dropped out of, was not Coligny’s. It was altogether an affair of another pair of lovers.

The embellishments of the Louvre were still not completed, before the queen decided not to reside in it. She began to recall, rather tardily it would seem, all the lugubrious memories of her past life connected with the palace; and she established herself in the magnificent Palais Royal—originally the Palais Cardinal.

In all those festivities, Ninon took prominent part. Ever philosophical, she thus consoled herself for the prolonged absence of the Duc d’Enghien, an absence which had, moreover, not intensified the sentiments of adoration she at first conceived for him. It was but Ninon’s way. She had begun to see small defects in the case-armour of the perfection of her Mars. Her acquaintance with the dead languages supplied her with the Latin proverb, “vir pilosus, aut libidinum aut fortis.” “Now Esau was a hairy man,” and the Duc d’Enghien was also vir pilosus, and Ninon taxed him with being a greater warrior than an ardent wooer, and the passion cooled rapidly; but the friendship and mutual liking ever remained.

Ninon employed Poquelin, upholsterer to the king, in the furnishing of her elegant suite of apartments. His shop was in the rue St Honoré, and there was born his son, Jean Baptiste, an intelligent, rather delicate-looking little boy, whom he duly educated and trained for his own trade. Young Jean Baptiste, however, fairly submissive and obedient, was also very fond of reading and writing, the only two acquirements his father thought necessary for assisting the chair and table-making the boy’s future was destined for. Fortunately he had a very kind grandfather who loved the drama, and sometimes he would take little Jean Baptiste with him to see the performances at The Hôtel Bourgogne. Poquelin père looked with distrust on these excursions, thinking that he saw in the lad, as undoubtedly he did, growing aversion to the upholstery vocation, and a fast developing passion for tragedy and comedy—comedy very markedly—and the boy’s delight in study and books generally, created a disturbance in the good upholsterer’s mind, which culminated in distress, when it became certain beyond all question, that young Jean’s liking was as small for cabinet-making as it was unconquerable for literature. He was at that time about fourteen years old, and he carried about with him a small comedy he had composed called l’Amour Médecin, which Ninon one day, when he came to assist his father at her house, detected, rolled up under his arm. Won by her kind smiles, young Poquelin was induced to allow her to look at it, and she, no mean critic, saw such promise in it, that she showed it to Corneille—who was then staying with her, pending the representation of The Cid. Corneille warmly seconded her estimate of the boy’s promise of unusual dramatic gifts; and after great demur, Poquelin yielded to the good grandfather’s persuasions to send him to college. Several helping hands, Ninon among them, contributed to the necessary funds for this new career, and Jean Baptiste became a pupil of the Jesuits at Clermont. There he studied for five years, in the same class with Armand de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, the youngest brother of Madame de Longueville, who promised Ninon the special protection and friendship of Armand, and of the college preceptors, a promise that was ever faithfully held by; and the celebrated teacher Gassendi took him under his special care, with two other gifted lads confided to him.

At the end of the five years, Jean Baptiste was forced to resume his old occupation, on account of his father’s increasing infirmities. But it was not for long. Richelieu’s love of letters, and of the drama especially, brought him knowledge of young Poquelin’s talent, and made the difficult way of literature easier for him; for the theatre was beginning to flourish. There was no regular company of actors in Paris until the coming of Corneille. Only a few of the “rogue and vagabond” wearers of the sock and buskin came and went, selling their plays, when they could find buyers, for some ten crowns apiece. The comedies of Corneille caused the establishment of a dramatic troupe in the city, and then it was that young Poquelin, leaving the upholstery to the dogs, established a small company of young men—“stage-struck” as the mockers were pleased to say, in this instance guided however by the sterling judgment of Jean Baptiste, truly dramatically gifted, in the Faubourg St Germain. They called it the Illustrious Theatre—(l’Illustre Théâtre). So through the years of the ignoble strife of the Fronde, when times were arid for real literary talent, Poquelin acted and composed little comedies, mainly for the provinces. Travelling with his company to Languedoc, where the Prince de Conti happened to be staying on his estates, Poquelin produced before him several of his pieces, afterwards finding their world-wide renown, l’Étourdi, le Dépit Amoureux, and others. The Prince de Conti introduced him to Monsieur, the only brother of Louis XIV.; and in a short time there came a day of days when the command of their Majesties reached the actor-manager, to give a representation in the chamber of the Guards in the old Louvre. After the performance of this long five-act piece, Poquelin—who had followed the custom of the actors of his time, had taken another name, and selected Molière—stepped to the front, and begged His Majesty’s permission to play a short one-act piece. It was le Docteur Amoureux. This is possibly the origin of the custom, still so frequently observed, of the “Curtain-raiser.”

POQUELIN DE MOLIERE

Coypel pinc.

Ficquet Sculp.