Ninon de l'Enclos: Premiere Siren of Two Centuries
BY
Albert Payson Terhune
An excerpt from
SUPERWOMEN
1916
Introduction
Ninon de l'Enclos was a French courtesan and intellectual who lived during the 17th century. Known for her wit, beauty, and intelligence, she was a prominent figure in the literary and social circles of her time, and her legacy has endured throughout history.
Born in Paris in 1620, Ninon was known for her unconventional views on love, sexuality, and relationships. She was an outspoken critic of the traditional roles assigned to women in society and advocated for women's rights and freedoms. Despite the social stigma attached to her profession, Ninon's charm and intelligence earned her the respect and admiration of many prominent figures of her time, including writers, poets, and artists.
Ninon de l'Enclos was also an accomplished musician and composer, and she was known to have written and performed her own songs. In addition to her artistic pursuits, Ninon was an avid reader and scholar. She owned an extensive library and was known for her erudition and intellectual curiosity.
Ninon de l'Enclos: Premiere Siren of Two Centuries
This story opens with the account of a deathbed scene; somewhat different from any other you may have read. It is brought in to throw a light on what heredity and careful instruction can do in molding a young mind. But don't necessarily skip it for that reason.
One day in 1630, the Sieur de L'Enclos lay dying in his great, dreary bedroom in his great, dreary Touraine castle. There was no especial tragedy about the closing of his life. He was elderly, very rich, and possessed of a record for having used, to the full, every minute of a long and exciting life.
Beside his bed stood a fifteen-year-old girl, his only daughter, Anne; affectionately nicknamed by him—and later by all Europe and still later by all history—"Ninon." She was something below medium height, plump, with a peachblow complexion, huge dark eyes, and a crown of red-gold hair. Ninon and her father had been chums, kindred spirits, from the girl's babyhood.
The dying noble opened his eyes. They rested lovingly on the daughter who had bent down to hear the whispered sounds his white lips were striving to frame. Then, with a mighty effort, De L'Enclos breathed his solemn last words of counsel to the girl—counsel intended to guide her through the future that he knew must lie before so rich and so beautiful a damsel. This was his message to her:
"Ninon—little girl of mine—in dying I have but one single regret. I regret that I did not—get more fun out of life. I warn you—daughter—do not make the terrible mistake that I have made. Live—live so that at the last you will not have the same cause for sorrow!"
So saying, the Sieur de L'Enclos bade an exemplary farewell to earth and to its lost opportunities of fun. To judge from his career as well as from his last words, one may venture the optimistic belief that he had not thrown away as many such priceless chances as he had led his daughter to believe.
Ninon, then, at fifteen, was left alone in the world. And her actions in this sad state conformed to those of the customary helpless orphan—about as closely as had her father's death speech to the customary "last words." With a shrewdness miraculous in so young a girl, she juggled her Touraine property in a series of deals that resulted in its sale at a little more than double its actual value. Rich beyond all fear of want, she settled in Paris.
It was not there or then that her love life set in. That had begun long before. As a mere child she had flashed upon her little world of Touraine as a wonder girl. The superwoman charm was hers from the first. And she retained it in all its mysterious power through the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth; men vying for her love when she was ninety.
A full year before her father died, she had met the youthful Prince de Marsillac, and had, at a glance, wholly captivated his semi-royal fancy. It was Ninon's first love affair—with a prince. She was dazzled by it just a little, she whom monarchs later could not dazzle. She was only fourteen. And in Touraine a princely admirer was a novelty.
At Marsillac's boyish supplication, Ninon consented to elope with him. Off they started. And back to their respective homes they were brought in dire disgrace. There was all sorts of a scandal in the neighborhood. The princeling was soundly spanked and packed off to school. The Sieur de L'Enclos came in for grave popular disapproval by laughingly refusing to mete out the same stern penalties to Ninon.
To Paris, then, at sixteen, went the orphaned Ninon. Laughing at convention and at the threats of her shocked relatives, she set up housekeeping on her own account, managing the affairs of her Rive Gauche mansion with the ease of a fifty-year-old grande dame.
On Paris burst the new star. In a month the city was crazy over her. Not her beauty alone, nor her wit, nor her peculiar elegance, nor her incredibly high spirits.—Not any or all of these, but an all-compelling magnetism drew men to her in shoals and swarms.
By reason of her birth and breeding she took at once her place in the court society of the day. Before she was twenty, she was setting the fashions for feminine Paris, and was receiving in her salon the stateliest ladies of the court, in equal numbers with their far less stately husbands.
Frankly, she declared herself a votary, not of love, but of loves. For constancy she had no use whatsoever. One admirer who had won a temporary lease of her gay heart swore he would kill himself unless Ninon would swear to love him to eternity.
And as she loved him ardently, she made the rash vow. When at the end of ninety days she gave him his dismissal, he reproached her wildly and bitterly for her broken pledge.
"You swore you would love me to eternity!" he raged. "And now——"
"And now," she explained, as one might soothe a cranky child, "I have kept my vow. I have loved you for three endless months. That is an eternity—for love!"
And three months remained, to the end, Ninon's record for fidelity to any one man; which was, perhaps, as well, for the waiting list was as long as that of a hyper-fashionable club.
And now we come to a story that I do not ask you to believe, although all France unquestionably and unquestioningly believed it. Whether Ninon herself at first coined it as a joke, or whether it was a hoax that she herself credited, it is certain that she grew at last to have firm faith in it.
One night—so Ninon always declared—when she was about twenty, she returned home late from a ball at the Hotel St. Evremond. As she stood before the mirror of her boudoir, after her maid had left her for the night, she became aware of a shadowy reflection behind her.
Turning, she saw a man clad all in black, his face hidden by the low brim of his hat and by his cloak's folds. What little was visible of his countenance was ghastly pale. Ninon, ever fearless, did not cry out for help. Instead, she approached the black-shrouded stranger and demanded to know his business and how he had penetrated to her close-barred room.
The man in black, by way of answer, drew one sable-gloved hand from beneath his cloak. In his fingers he grasped a large phial, wherein sparkled and glowed a strange, pinkish liquid.
"Life is short," said the visitor, as Ninon still looked in amazed inquiry from his half-hidden face to the rose-colored phial he carried. "Life is short, but youth is far shorter. When youth is gone, love is gone. Love is the goal of life. Without youth, there is no love. Without love, life is a desert. The gifts of youth and beauty are yours. Would you make them long-lasting, instead of transient blessings that shall too soon become mere memories?"
As Ninon, dumb with wonder, hesitated to reply, he continued:
"The admiration of men melts like summer snow at the first touch of age in a woman. Their admiration is now yours. Would you hold it? One drop a day from this phial, in your bath, will keep you young, will keep you beautiful, will retain for you the love of men."
He set the flask on her dressing table and turned to go.
"You will see me again," he said very slowly and distinctly, "just three days before your death."
And he vanished.
To a generation that has substituted science for superstition, this tale of the Man in Black reads like stark nonsense. Perhaps it is. But no one in the seventeenth century thought so. It was an age rife with demon legends; legends of favors granted to mortals in return for a residuary mortgage on their souls; and all that sort of thing. The tale of Faust was still almost brand-new. Compared with many of the traditions that then passed for solid fact, the incident of Ninon and the Man in Black was almost commonplace.
We laugh at such things; probably with due justification. Yet was Ninon's adventure more inexplicable than some of the absolutely authenticated cases of Cagliostro's magic? As, for a single example, when on a certain date Cagliostro announced in Paris: "The Empress Maria Theresa of Austria died this morning." This was long before the time of telegraphy or even of railroads. It was a journey of several days from Paris to Vienna. Dispatches, reaching the French court a week later, announced the unforeseen death of Maria Theresa at the very hour named by Cagliostro.
Ninon may have invented the Man in Black. Or he may have been one of the many quacks who hung on the fringes of courts and made capital out of the superstitious folly of the rich. Or perhaps——
At all events, seventy years later, Ninon had either a most remarkable encounter with the same man, or else, in her dying moments, she took odd trouble to substantiate a silly lie that was nearly three-quarters of a century old. Finish the story and then form your own theories.
Paris was alive in those days with titled women whose antecedents were doubtful and about whose characters there could unluckily be no doubt. They moved in the best society—or, rather, in the highest. Most of them made a living by one form or another of graft. And always there was an exclusive class of women who would not receive them.
Ninon quickly proved she had neither lot nor parcel with these titled adventuresses. From first to last she accepted not a sou, not a jewel, not a favor—political or otherwise—from the grands seigneurs who delighted to do her honor. From first to last, too, she accepted as her due the friendship of the most respectable and respected members of her own sex.
She was never an adventuress, never a grafter, never a climber. She loved for love's own sake. And if the men to whom in lightning succession she gave her resilient heart chanced often to be among the foremost of the realm, it was only because the qualities that made them what they were made them also the type of man Ninon preferred.
She never benefited in any material way from their adoration. The nearest approach was when Richelieu, the grim old iron cardinal, bent his ecclesiastical and consumptive body before her altar. She used her power over Richelieu freely, but never for herself; always to soften the punishment of some luckless man or woman who had fallen under the rod of his eminence's displeasure.
Thereby, and through Richelieu's love for her, Ninon clashed with no less a personage than the Queen of France herself.
When Anne of Austria came from Spain to be the bride of Louis XIII of France, Richelieu fell in love with the pretty young queen. Anne had not wit enough to appreciate the cardinal's genius or to fear his possible hate. So—seeing in him only a homely and emaciated little man, whose pretensions she considered laughable—the queen hit on a scheme of ridding herself forever of Richelieu's love sighs.
She pretended to listen to his courtship, then told him coyly that his austerity and lack of human weakness and of humor made her afraid of him. The enamored Richelieu insisted that he could be as human and as fun loving as any other man. Anne bade him prove it by dressing as a circus clown and dancing a saraband for her. She said she would hide behind the curtains of a room in the palace and watch him do it. Then, were she convinced that he could really unbend and could she overcome her fear of his lofty dignity, she would come forth and tell him so.
The all-powerful Richelieu—the man of blood, whom even the haughtiest nobles feared—so far lost every remnant of sanity as to do as the queen bade him. As a harlequin, he capered and leaped about the empty room, his eyes ever on the curtain at its far end.
Suddenly, in the midst of his idiotic performance, the curtain was dashed aside; a howl of laughter swept the room; and the queen stood revealed to his gaze. Clustered around her and reeling with mirth were a score of courtiers; men and women both.
From that day Richelieu was Anne's sworn foe. He wrecked her repute with the king, and for a long time managed to have her kept a prisoner in the palace. In a thousand ways he made her life a torment.
And now, through the grim cardinal's love for Ninon de L'Enclos, Anne thought she saw a way of striking back at her enemy. She sent for Ninon, chided her for her mode of living, and ended by ordering her sharply to retire at once to a convent. Ninon simply smiled at the command, curtsied to the queen, and said demurely:
"I will gladly go to any convent your majesty may designate—just as soon as I become as unattractive to men as is the woman who wants to send me there."
She left the royal presence. And so great was the power of the girl's beauty in the hearts of those in France's high places, Anne did not dare put her command into effect. The tale of the conversation spread like the prehistorically bromidic "wildfire," and Ninon won new laurels thereby.
The Duke of St. Evremond, at that time one of the greatest men in Europe, offered her his heart and his princely fortune. She replied that his heart was a precious gift which she would prize forever—or for a month or two at the very least; but that she had no use whatever for his fortune, as she had all the money she needed and more would be only a burden.
And the duke—veteran of many a love affair where fortunes had counted for far more than hearts—made the quaint, historic reply:
"Mademoiselle, tu es un honnete homme!" ("Mademoiselle, you are an honest man!")
Three generations of Sevignes—father, son, and grandson—in turn loved Ninon during her seventy-five years of heartbreaking. Love for her seemed a hereditary trait in the Sevigne family.
But it was the old Duke of St. Evremond, of all her numberless wooers, for whom Ninon cared most. Though their love was soon dead, they remained loyal and devoted friends to the day of the duke's death. Their correspondence—prettily formal, yet with an undercurrent of true affection—is still extant. And through life Ninon ran always to the duke with every sorrow or perplexity; notably when, at the age of sixty, she discovered her first wrinkle, an all but invisible crease between her brows. In horror she related to St. Evremond the fearful tragedy. With a laugh he banished her dread.
"That is no wrinkle, ma petite," he reassured her. "Love placed it there to nestle in."
The mighty Prince de Conde, the left-handedly royal D'Estrees, La Rochefoucauld (the Machiavelli of France,) and many another of like rank and attainment were proud to count themselves Ninon's worshipers. To no one did she show more favor than to another. King of France or Scarron, the humpback poet—so long as they could amuse her, Ninon gave no thought to their titles or wealth or name. To her, one was as good as another. To none did she give fidelity. Nearly all of them she treated outrageously. Yet of them all, only one was ever driven away by her caprices before she was fully ready to dismiss him.
That sole exception was the gallant Comte de Fiesque, who, for a brief space of time, held her wandering heart and thoughts. Ninon as a rule was not quarrelsome. But she and De Fiesque were as flint and steel. Their affair was one fierce series of spats and disputes that blazed out at last in a pyrotechnic row.
As a result of this climax quarrel, De Fiesque scuttled away in red wrath, vowing that he was forever and ever done with so ill-tempered and cranky a woman as Ninon de L'Enclos.
Ninon was aghast. Paris was aghast. France was aghast. The love world at large was aghast. For the first time in her whole hectic life, Ninon de L'Enclos had been deserted—actually deserted! And by a nobody like De Fiesque! She who had snubbed a king, had tired of Condez, had yawned daintily in the half-monarchical face of D'Estrees himself!
It was unbelievable. For an instant her fame as a peerless and all-conquering Wonder Woman threatened to go into partial eclipse. But only for an instant.
De Fiesque, placed during a little hour on a pinnacle of flaring originality, began to receive tenderly reproachful letters from Ninon, beseeching him to come back to her, saying she had been wrong in their dispute, begging his forgiveness—Ninon, to whom princes had knelt trembling!—promising all sorts of meek, womanly behavior if only he would cure her heartbreak by a word of love.
These letters of hers to her deserter would have moved an equestrian statute to maudlin tears. But De Fiesque's pride had been too deeply cut by that last quarrel, to let him relent. Besides, he was vastly enjoying his novel position as the only man on earth to whom Ninon de L'Enclos had made such an appeal. So while his fellow courtiers alternately envied him and longed to kick him, they wondered what might be the secret of his fascination over Ninon.
Thus, for a few days, matters stood. Then Ninon hit on a master stroke. The thing that had first attracted De Fiesque to her had been the glory of her red-gold hair. He had loved to bury his face in its shimmering, soft masses, to run its silk strands through his fingers. Incidentally, in the course of their epoch-marking quarrel, he had called Ninon supremely vain and selfish.
Now she cut off all her wonderful hair; cut it off, wrapped it up, and sent it, without a word of explanation, to De Fiesque. He understood. She had made this supreme sacrifice for him—for the man who had deserted her. To him she was offering this chief beauty of hers.
De Fiesque's pride vanished. Through the streets he ran, bareheaded, to Ninon's house. Into her presence he dashed and flung himself at her feet, imploring forgiveness for his brutality and vowing that he loved her alone in all the world.
But the rest of the dialogue did not at all work out along any recognized lines of lovers' reconciliations. Ninon patiently heard to an end De Fiesque's blubbered protestations of devotion. Then, very calmly and triumphantly, she pointed to the door.
The interview was over. So was the affair. Ninon de L'Enclos was vindicated. No lover had ever permanently deserted her. There was no man so stubborn that she could not lure him back to her. The De Fiesque incident was closed. All that remained for Ninon to do was to introduce among Paris women a temporary fashion of wearing the hair short. Which she promptly did. And thus she suffered not at all by her ruse.
Some two centuries later, George Sand, who had read of the incident, tried the same trick to win back Alfred de Musset. In her case, it was a right dismal failure. De Musset, too, was entirely cognizant of the story of Ninon's shorn hair. And even without her hair, Ninon was lovely; while, even with hers, George Sand was hideous.
Queen Christina of Sweden came to France. Ninon delighted the eccentric Swede. Christina made a confidante and familiar friend of her. She begged Ninon to return with her to Sweden, promising her a title and estates and a high place at court.
Ninon called unexpectedly at Christina's Paris apartments one morning to talk over the plan. She entered the queen's drawing-room unannounced. There on the floor lay a man, one of the Swedish officials in Christina's suite. He was dead—murdered—and was lying as he had fallen when he had been stricken down.
Above him stood Christina, at her side the assassin who had struck the blow. The queen turned to Ninon and explained. The official had displeased her majesty by some undiplomatic act; and taking justice into her own hands, Christina had ordered another member of her suite to murder the offender. She was as unconcerned over the killing as if she had ordered a rabid dog to be shot.
Ninon fled in panic fear from the apartment. Nor ever again could she be induced to come into the presence of the royal murderess. Thus ended the Swedish project.
Though the confidential friendship of one queen was thus taken forcibly from Ninon, she had later the satisfaction of helping on the cause of another and uncrowned queen. It is her one recorded experience in dabbling with politics, and the role she played therein is interesting.
King Louis XIV.—son of that Anne of Austria who had hated Ninon—had reached the age when life began at times to drag. The "Grand Monarque" had still fewer reasons than those of Ninon's father to deplore the missing of any good times. But youth had fled from him at last. He found himself, in middle age, a sour-faced, undersized man, with a huge periwig, a huger outjutting beak of a nose, and wearing egregiously high boot heels to eke out his height. People—a very few of them and at a safe distance—were beginning to laugh at his pretensions as a lady-killer. Nature, too, was proving herself less a tender mother than a Gorgonlike stepmother, by racking him with dyspepsia, bad nerves, and gout.
These causes led him to turn temporarily to what he termed "the higher life." In other words, by his whim, the court took to wearing somber garments, changing its scandalous conversation for pious reflections and its unprintable novels for works on philosophy. Whereat, yawns of boredom assailed high Heaven.
In the course of his brief penitence, Louis frowned majestically upon his tempest-tempered favorite, Madame de Montespan. And she—tactless or over-sure of her position—scowled back, harshly derided the new order of affairs, and waxed more evil-tempered than ever.
In Madame de Montespan's household was a certain Madame de Maintenon, widow of the humpbacked little Scarron, who had once sued for Ninon de L'Enclos' favor. Strangely enough, his widow and Ninon were close friends. And at this court crisis. Ninon made the term "friendship" mean something.
She herself had plainly shown that she had no interest in the king. Now she set to work to make the king feel an interest in Madame de Maintenon, whom Louis in his long period of gayety had always disliked. Ninon taught the widow how and when to throw herself in the king's way, and how to treat him. She coached her friend as a stage director coaches a promising but raw actor.
As a result, when Louis came, smarting, from a squabble with the fiery De Montespan, he would find himself, by the merest chance, in the presence of De Maintenon, whose grave gentleness and attitude of awed devotion served as balm to his quarrel-jarred nerves.
He took to seeking out the wise and gentle widow—of his own accord, as he thought—and spending more and more time in her company. And De Maintenon, carefully coached by Ninon, the queen of heart students, managed to awaken in the deadened royal brain a flicker of admiration that slowly warmed into love.
At that point Ninon's genius achieved its most brilliant stroke. Under her instructions the widow gave the king's advances just the right sort of treatment. She made it clear to Louis that she scorned to be a royal favorite.
As a result, one midnight, there was a secret wedding in the palace chapel; King Louis XIV. becoming the legal, if unacknowledged, husband of the penniless humpback's meek widow; Ninon, it is said, being one of the ceremony's few witnesses.
Ninon had "played politics" just once—and with far-reaching results to history; as De Maintenon's future influence over her husband was to prove. Among the results, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes is laid at De Maintenon's door, an act that partly depopulated France and partly populated America.
By this time Ninon had become something more than a winner of hearts and a setter of fashions. She found herself a social arbiter as well. Without an introduction to the illustrious Ninon de L'Enclos and a word of indorsement from her, no young man could hope to make his way in Paris society. Noblemen in the country, sending their sons to Paris for a career, moved heaven and earth to obtain for them letters of introduction to Ninon.
Her lightest expression of opinion was everywhere quoted as inspired. With a smile or a frown she could make or unmake men's futures at court. Had she so chosen, she might have become, with this amazing amount of power, a most unbearable tyrant. Instead, she used her power wisely and kindly. Charitable to a fault, her tact and her money and her boundless influence were always making the way easy for some one or other.
For instance, in her old age—or rather in what would have passed for old age in any other woman—she took an interest in a wizened, monkey-like boy of the people. She set him on the path to advancement and supplied him with the money for his education. To his dying day, the little man remembered her with a veneration most people would have bestowed on a saint; even though he used the education she had given him to help in tearing down the monarchy whose nobles had been his benefactress' slaves. He is known to fame as Voltaire.
Years came and went. They merged into decades and quarter centuries. The men who once had loved Ninon de L'Enclos grew old and died, and their places were taken by sons and then by grandsons. Dynasties changed. The world rolled on. New times brought new customs.
But Ninon remained unchanged. Still beautiful, still vibrant with all her early gay charm, she remained to outward appearances what she had been for the past fifty years. The grandsons of her girlhood suitors were as madly in love with her as had been their grandsires. In love, in society, in fashion, she was still the unquestioned sovereign.
Throughout Europe, there was now no one who doubted the unadorned truth of the story concerning the Man in Black; for it seemed that no mortal agency could have kept any woman so perennially young. As the years passed, folk fell to speculating on how many drops of the precious rose-colored liquid might still remain in the phial. And, in scared voices, they repeated the prophecy of the man in black:
"You shall see me once again three days before your death."
Perhaps, now that you know Ninon better, you may laugh less contemptuously at the tale of the Man in Black; or, at the least, credit her with believing it. Throughout her life, she never changed the story in any way; nor could the shrewdest cross-examining lead her to contradict herself about any of its most minute details. A haunting fear of the Man in Black's promised return was always in her mind, even during her gayest days and nights.
As late as her ninetieth year men made vehement love to her. At an age when most women are withered crones, she still broke hearts. Men fought duels by the dozen for her favor. In her old age a youth blew out his brains on her account.
During her later years a great sorrow came to her. Through no conscious fault of her own, she was enmeshed in what was probably the most horrible tragedy of its sort in history. This tragedy cannot even be touched on here. In no book written in the English language can you find its complete details. It is enough to say that the nameless horror of it wrecked Ninon's health and her mind, leaving her for the time a mental and physical wreck.
Slowly she recovered her health, her brain, and her unquenchable spirits. Her beauty had never been impaired. And once more she ruled as queen of hearts. Now, too, she blossomed forth into literature, becoming with ease a famous author. Her essays were quoted, imitated, lauded to the skies.
Nor is there the slightest reason to doubt that she was their author. Always bluntly honest to a fault, the woman who would not accept rank or money was not likely to accept the literary ideas of others and pass them off as her own. Also, the style of her published work was identical with her private letters.
It is odd, and possibly—or possibly not—significant, that of the world's superwomen, more have leaned toward literature than toward any other one pursuit. The gift of writing comes nearer to being their one common trait than do beauty and all the other hackneyed siren charms. The power that enables such women to win hearts appears to manifest itself by use of the pen.
To instance a very few of the hundreds of heart-breakers who were also authors, letter writers, and so forth, of greater or less note, one has but to recall George Sand, Adah Menken, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Ninon de L'Enclos, Lola Montez, Madame de Sevigne, Madame Recamier, Madame Roland, and Marie Stuart.
By 1706 there was scarce a man or woman left alive who remembered Ninon when, as a girl, she had come first to Paris. Youths who had worshiped her as a middle-aged woman were now aged men. She herself was ninety.
To say that she was still a girl in looks and actions is a gross exaggeration, of course; not the firmest believers in the Man in Black claimed that. But, at ninety, she was still beautiful, still alluring and adorable, as men continued to learn. Younger women—women young enough to be her grandchildren—were neglected for her sake. It is said that on her ninetieth birthday she received a fervent declaration of love from a noble who had met her but a few days earlier.
Then came the end. On one day, in 1706, Ninon de L'Enclos was in blooming health; on the next she was dying. She wrote a single line to one of her friends and dispatched it by a messenger.
The letter did not find the woman to whom it was addressed until nearly a week later. Three days from the time she wrote it, Ninon died. The friend, opening the letter, read, scrawled in a fear-shaken hand, this sentence:
"I have just seen the man in black again!"
