Ninon and Count de Coligny
It was impossible for a maiden trained in the philosophy of Epicurus,
and surrounded by a brilliant society who assiduously followed its
precepts to avoid being caught in the meshes of the same net spread
for other women. Beloved and even idolized on all sides, as an object
that could be worshiped without incurring the displeasure of
Richelieu, who preferred his courtiers to amuse themselves with women
and gallantries rather than meddle with state affairs, and being
disposed both through inclination and training to accept the
situation, Ninon felt the sentiments of the tender passion, but
philosophically waited for a worthy object.
That object appeared in the person of the young Gaspard, Count de
Coligny, afterwards Duc de Chatillon, who paid her assiduous court.
The result was that Ninon conceived a violent passion for the Count,
which she could not resist, in fact did not care to resist, and she
therefore yielded to the young man of distinguished family, charming
manners, and a physically perfect specimen of manhood.
It is alleged by Voltaire and repeated by Cardinal de Retz, that the
early bloom of Ninon's charms was enjoyed by Richelieu, but if this be
true, it is more than likely that Ninon submitted through policy and
not from any affection for the great Cardinal. It is certain, however,
that the great statesman's attention had been called to her growing
influence among the French nobility, and that he desired to control
her actions if not to possess her charms. She was a tool that he
imagined he could utilize to keep his rebellious nobles in his leash.
Abbé Raconis, Ninon's uncle, and the Abbé Boisrobert, her friend, who
stood close to the Cardinal, had suggested to His Eminence that the
charms of the new beauty could be used to advantage in state affairs,
and he accordingly sent for her at first through curiosity, but when
he had seen her he hoped to control her for his personal benefit.
Although occupied in vast projects which his great genius and activity
always conducted to a happy issue, the great man had not renounced the
affections of his human nature, nor his intellectual gratifications.
He aimed at everything, and did not consider anything beneath his
dignity. Every day saw him engaged in cultivating a taste for
literature and art, and some moments of every day were set apart for
social gallantries. When it came to the art of pleasing and attracting
women, we have the word of Cardinal de Retz for it, that he was not
always successful. Perhaps it is only inferior minds who possess the
art and the genius of seduction.
The intriguing Abbé, in order to bring Ninon under the influence of
his master, and to charm her with the great honor done her by a man
upon whom were fixed the eyes of all Europe, prepared a series of
gorgeous fêtes, banquets and entertainments at the palace at Rueil.
But Ninon was not in the least overwhelmed, and refused to hear the
sighs of the great man. Hoping to inspire jealousy, he affected to
love Marion de Lormes, a proceeding which gave Ninon great pleasure as
it relieved her from the importunities of the Cardinal. The end of it
was, that Richelieu gave up the chase and left Ninon in peace to
follow her own devices in her own way.
Whatever may have been the relations between Ninon and Cardinal
Richelieu, it is certain that the Count de Coligny was her first
sentimental attachment, and the two lovers, in the first intoxication
of their love, swore eternal constancy, a process common to all new
lovers and believed possible to maintain. It was not long, however,
before Ninon perceived that the first immoderate transports of love
gradually lost their activity, and by applying the precepts of her
philosophy to explain the phenomenon, came to regard love by its
effects, as a blind mechanical movement, which it was the policy of
men to ennoble according to the conventional rules of decency and
honor, to the exclusion of its original meaning.
After coldly reasoning the matter out to its only legitimate
conclusion, she tore off the mask covering a metaphysical love, which
could not reach or satisfy the light of intelligence or the sentiments
and emotions of the heart, and which appeared to her to possess as
little reality as the enchanted castles, marvels of magic, and
monsters depicted in poetry and romance. To her, love finally became a
mere thirst, and a desire for pleasure to be gratified by indulgence
like all other pleasure. The germ of philosophy already growing in her
soul, found nothing in this discovery that was essentially unnatural;
on the contrary, it was essentially natural. It was clear to her
logical mind, that a passion like love produced among men different
effects according to different dispositions, humors, temperament,
education, interest, vanity, principles, or circumstances, without
being, at the same time, founded upon anything more substantial than a
disguised, though ardent desire of possession, the essential of its
existence, after which it vanished as fire disappears through lack of
fuel. Dryden, the celebrated English poetic and literary genius,
reaches the same opinion in his Letters to Clarissa.
Having reached this point in her reasoning, she advanced a step
further, and considered the unequal division of qualities distributed
between the two sexes. She perceived the injustice of it and refused
to abide by it. "I perceive," she declared, "that women are charged
with everything that is frivolous, and that men reserve to themselves
the right to essential qualities. From this moment I shall be a man."
All this growing out of the ardour of a first love, which is always
followed by the lassitude of satiety, so far from causing Ninon any
tears of regret, nerved her up to a philosophy different from that of
other women, and makes it impossible to judge her by the same
standard. She can not be considered a woman subject to a thousand
fantasies and whims, a thousand trifling concealed proprieties of
position and custom. Her morals became the same as those of the wisest
and noblest men of the period in which she lived, and raised her to
their rank instead of maintaining her in the category of the
intriguing coquettes of her age.
It is not improbable that her experience of the suffering attendant
upon the decay of such attachments, a suffering alluded to by those
who contemplate only the intercourse of the sexes through the medium
of poetry and sentiment, had considerable influence in determining her
future conduct. At an early age, following upon her liaison with Count
Coligny, she adopted the determination she adhered to during the rest
of her life, of retaining so much only of the female character as was
forced upon her by nature and the insuperable laws of society. Acting
on this principle, her society was chiefly composed of persons of her
adopted sex, of whom the most celebrated of their time made her house
a constant place of meeting.
A curious incident in her relations with Count de Coligny was her
success in persuading him to adjure the errors of the Huguenots and
return to the Roman Catholic Church. She had no religious
predilections, feeling herself spiritually secure in her philosophic
principles, but sought only his welfare and advancement. His obstinacy
was depriving him of the advantages due his birth and personal merit.
Considering that Ninon was scarcely sixteen years of age, respiring
nothing but love and pleasure, to effect by tenderness and the
persuasive strength of her reasoning powers, such a change in a man
so obstinate as the Count de Coligny, in an obstinate and excessively
bigoted age, was something unique in the history of lovers of that
period. Women then cared very little for religious principles, and
rarely exerted themselves in advancing the cause of the dominant
religion, much less thought of the spiritual needs of their favorites.
The reverse is the rule in these modern times, when women are the most
ardent and persistent proselytizers of the various sects, a custom
which recalls the remark of a distinguished lawyer who failed to
recover any assets from a notorious bankrupt he was pursuing for the
defrauded creditors: "This man has everything in his wife's name--even
his religion."
Ninon's disinterested counsel prevailed, and the Count afterward
abjured his errors, becoming the Duc de Chatillon, Marquis d'Andelot,
and died a lieutenant general, bravely fighting for his country, at
Charenton.