A Fashionable Water-cure Resort—M. de Roquelaure and his
Friends—Louis le Grand—“A Favourite with the Ladies”—The Broken
Sword—A _Billet-doux_—La Vallière and la Montespan—The Rebukes
from the Pulpit—Putting to the Test—_Le Tartufe_—The Triumphs of
Molière—The Story of Clotilde.
By the advice of Guy Patin, Ninon’s constant friend and medical
adviser, she went to drink the chalybeate waters of Forges les Eaux,
in Picardy. Not that there was the least thing the matter with her;
only, as the wise doctor said, “Prevention was better than cure.”
Besides, well or ailing, everybody of any consequence went there; it
was the thing to do, ever since Anne of Austria had taken a course
of the waters, and a short time after had given birth to the child
Louis, the heir to the throne of France, whose coming had been so
long hoped for.
Time had brought its sorrows to Ninon. It had treated many of the
friends of earlier years with a hand less sparing than its touch on
her. Among those passed away into the sleep of death, was Madame de
Choisy. A great mutual affection had existed between the two women
ever since they had first met, and the severance saddened Ninon. At
Forges, she knew there would be many of her friends and acquaintance,
old and new, and instead of going to spend the spring days at
the Picpus cottage, she yielded to the persuasions of Madame de
Montausier and of Madame de la Fayette, and went to drink the waters,
mingle in its comparatively mild dissipations, and join in the gay
school for scandal for which Forges was as noted as are the run of
hydropathic resorts. It lies some half-way between Paris and the
coast by Dieppe. One of the three springs it contains is named after
the queen, presumably the one which brought Louis the Dieudonné, and
the other two are called respectively _La Royale_ and _Le Cardinal_.
Something neglected now, the place was thronged in Ninon’s day, every
season with a motley crowd of varied nationalities and conditions of
men and woman. “Parisians and provincials, nobles and citizen-folk,
monks and nuns, English, Flemish, Spaniards, Christians—Catholics
and Huguenots—Jews, Mohammedans, every one drinks in company the
waters, whose detestable flavour brings your heart into your mouth.
This debauch takes place at six o’clock a.m.”
Then began a promenade in the avenue of the Capucin garden, thrown
open to the public, and tongues, let loose, fell to work upon the
passing events and topics and reputations and no reputations. At
nine, breakfast drew the hungry ones to table, and Mass the devout.
All the morning was spent in doing nothing, or the business of the
toilette; then came a copious dinner, then visiting and more chatter.
At five began the theatre, supplied from the Rouen companies. At
seven was supper, then more promenading, concluding with litanies
sung in the monks’ chapel.
The Duchesse of Montpensier was among the company—her period of
mourning just ended for her father, who had died at Blois in the
preceding summer. The Grande Mademoiselle had been seized with the
_cacoëthes scribendi_, and treated her circle with readings from
her romances, _La Princesse de Paphlagonie_, _L’Ile Imaginaire_,
and a series of _Portraits_, for which style of composition there
was a rage just then. Ninon considered their excellence fell very
short of Mademoiselle’s martial talents. In a day or two arrived
the Duc de Roquelaure, with his cousin the chevalier, a personage
of terror-striking mien, followed everywhere by a Monsieur de
Romainville, a gouty, objectionable individual, as, indeed, not
much more could be said of his two friends. Instead of the waters,
he drank such a quantity of cider, that it aggravated his malady to
the extent of sending for one of the Capucin confessors; but on his
appearance the chevalier flourished his sword at him. “Be off with
you, my father!” he cried. “He has lived like a heathen: let him die
like one”; and so violently did the invalid laugh at this sally, that
it cured him.
One day the chevalier was hectoring over the number of the victims
of his doughty sword-blade. “And I have,” he added, “fought at least
fifty duels, and never received a single wound.”
“Parbleu! my dear cousin,” calmly said the Duc de Roquelaure, “I have
fought only one duel in all my life, and then I was killed.”
The end of the dog-days closed the season of Forges, and then Ninon
returned to rue des Tournelles.
The death of the dowager-queen, after her long illness and suffering,
brought a temporary lull in the dissipations and rush of frivolity
at the Court. Moreover, the breaking-out of the war with Spain, on
account of Louis XIV.’s claim on Flanders in right of his wife, left
the king no time for the usual Court routine. And then it was that he
showed himself a king indeed, leading his troops to victory. In three
weeks, with Condé—once again completely in favour, all his revolts
no longer remembered—and Turenne, whom Louis told that it was his
wish to learn from him the art of war, Franche Comté was conquered.
It was the dawn of a brilliant series of victories, and of the glory
and power of the France of Louis’s earlier years.
And now came a strange wooing, begun undeniably on the part of the
lady—no less a personage than the Grande Mademoiselle, now arrived
at the discreet age of forty-two—when she fell in love with Monsieur
de Lauzun, colonel of the just created first regiment of dragoons,
one of the many distinctions conferred on him by Louis. Youngest son
of a noble Gascon family—described by Bussy Rabutin as “one of the
least men in mind as well as body that God ever created”—elsewhere
he is pictured to us as one having a sort of talent, which, however,
consisted in turning everything and everybody into ridicule, worming
out their secrets, and playing upon their foibles. He was noble
in his carriage, and lived in splendid style. He loved high play,
and played like a gentleman. His figure was very diminutive, and
it is incomprehensible how he could ever become a favourite with
the ladies; but that he was in a notable degree. The Duchesse de
Montpensier conceived a passionate admiration for this little
gentleman; she who had aspired to be queen of France, or empress of
Germany, and had refused the crown of England, went _folle_ for love
of Antoninus de Caumont, Count de Lauzun.
This, however, was not the beginning of his career at Court, where he
had been introduced by his relation, the Maréchal de Grammont. Small
as Lauzun was, he bore himself splendidly; he had the grand air which
Louis so greatly admired, and it helped to win him almost boundless
consideration from the king. When the mastership of the Ordnance
became vacant, Louis promised it to him; on condition, however,
that for the present Lauzun should keep the matter a secret. This
was seeking too much of his vanity and boastfulness, and the secret
being one no longer, reached the ears of the minister Louvois, who at
once went to the king, and with much good sense and grave reasoning
over the unwisdom of such an appointment, persuaded His Majesty
to withdraw his promise. Lauzun thereupon burst into the king’s
presence, wild with rage, hurled a storm of reproaches on him, and
taking his own sword, he snapped it across his knee, vowing that he
would never again serve a prince who broke his word in such shameful
fashion.
“I should be sorry,” said Louis, crossing with dignified steps to the
open window, and throwing his cane out of it, “to have struck a man
of rank”; but the next morning Lauzun was lodged in the Bastille.
Only for a short time however. Louis, in a sense, had broken his
word; but Lauzun, on his part, had violated conditions, and the young
man was forgiven, and by way of indemnity was offered the captaincy
of the Royal Guards, which he at first insolently refused, and only
accepted under entreaty.
It was after his release from the Bastille that this most Gascon
of Gascon gentlemen became the object of the Grande Mademoiselle’s
ardent admiration. At first it was he who coquetted, affecting not
to understand, observing only the airs of profoundest respect, just
touched with melancholy, and permitting himself a very occasional
sigh. Then one day Mademoiselle murmured to the handsome dragoon
captain—“I do not dare, in your presence, to utter the name of him I
love; but I consent to writing it.”
And the next night, during the performance of a ballet at the Louvre,
she glided near to Lauzun, and slipped a paper into his hand. It bore
only these words—“_It is you_.”
Then it was a very different affair. Who so ardent, and passionately
in love as Lauzun? Carried away by his feelings, he broke into the
bedchamber of Mademoiselle unannounced, and falling at her feet where
she sat before a mirror, in the scantiest of _déshabillé_, eloquently
gave way to expressions of rapture, and the good fortune which
had impelled him to seek her at such a delightful moment, when her
charms lay revealed in all the fulness of their beauty. The Grande
Mademoiselle was thin to scragginess—but _qu’importe_?
She believed his protestations, loved Lauzun ever more and more, and
passed her time in devising the way for obtaining the king’s consent
to their union.
Meanwhile the king’s conduct, in publicly taking about with him his
two mistresses, was beginning to create such gross scandal, that
it called down forcible rebuke from the pulpits. In regard to la
Montespan, while her husband must have been dense indeed not to be
aware of the true state of the case, he was allowed to be credited
with the ignorance of it. Among the preachers most severe in their
rebuke, was the Père Bourdaloue, the eloquent Jesuit. He spared no
word in endeavouring to bring Louis to some sense of decent living,
and it was not without effect—before all, on Louise de la Vallière,
whose weeping was audible from where she sat in a dark corner of the
Jesuit church of St Louis.
Ninon, whose orthodoxy was not rigid, and had found herself only too
often sufficiently well justified in the small faith she placed in
the religious professions coming within her experience, determined
on the bold amusement of testing the sincerity of Bourdaloue. She
pretended to be seriously ill, and sent to him to visit her, in,
of course, his spiritual capacity. Dressed in the most becoming of
invalid _négligés_, she received the priest with all her winning
smiles and words and fascinating glances. They were absolutely
ineffective. Bourdaloue having completed his exhortations and pious
counsels, rose to take his leave, observing, as he departed, that he
perceived the malady afflicting Ninon was not of the body, but of the
spirit, and that he would beseech the great Healer of souls to cure
her.
The tale of this interview got wind, and brought down some satirical
verses on Ninon’s defeat—which she frankly acknowledged, not even
without considerable content; for it taught her that the religious
profession was not one vast fraud, but that the Church might have
many true shepherds of its fold, cumbered as it might be with the
false and venal.
Among these last she had signalised Monseigneur d’Autun, apparently
with reason enough. He was a mild-mannered, smiling prelate, with a
paternal, beneficent air, one who had several times changed sides in
the days of the Fronde. Ninon had first met him at that time at the
house of Madame de Longueville, and thenceforward he was one of the
circle of rue des Tournelles. Frequently he had begged or borrowed,
“for the poor,” considerable sums of money from his open-handed
hostess; but Ninon entertained doubts of the bishop’s saintliness,
and one day they were set at rest beyond all question by the
conclusions he drew from certain arguments he had propounded to her.
Then throwing off the mask of the virtuous living he professed, he
boldly declared his passionate admiration for her. That a man of the
world would have been repulsed by Ninon is not very probable; but
she felt the instinctive aversion for the touch of some insidious,
poisonous reptile, and she shrank from him, and ordered him from her
presence; and departing, Monseigneur d’Autun looked the vengeance his
muttered words threatened.
In discussing with Molière her experiences of more than one
distinguished prelate, Richelieu and Mazarin not forgotten, she asked
him how it was possible to discern the true from the false?
Molière replied that there was nothing more easy, and with Ninon’s
permission to introduce her latest clerical admirer, he would put
the answer to her question before her in less than six weeks. He had
her joyous consent, and the answer within the given time. It was _Le
Tartufe_.
Molière’s recent plays had raised him to the height of his fame.
He suffered from the usual gnat-bites and little stings of
jealousy inseparable from literary success. The critics did their
spitefullest. The critics, said Molière, were like the children who
can whip horses, but cannot drive them.
Molière’s life, apart from its work, was more than incomplete; it was
a cruel one. The wife he had chosen, Madeleine Béjârt, the daughter
of an actress of his company, was a silly, ignorant little coquette,
in no way worthy of him, and constantly giving him cause for jealousy.
On the production of _Tartufe_, the plaudits rang again and again
from floor to ceiling. _Veluti in speculum._ The cap fitted many
heads so admirably, so entirely, that the comedy created the author
a host of enemies among the bigots and the hypocrites whom his satire
so vigorously lashed. Orgon, who has seen at church a young man who
conducts himself with such a devout air that he believes in its
genuineness, and receives him into his own family, which he neglects
in his great admiration for Tartufe. He is on the point even of
proposing to give him his daughter in marriage, when, hidden under
a table, concealed by a deep, trailing tablecloth, he overhears his
protégé’s declaration of passion for Elmire, his own wife. “_Mais,
madame, après tout, je ne suis pas un ange_,” says Tartufe. The
scene is inimitable, with its crowning picture of Orgon’s face of
mingled rage and smiling satisfaction, peering up from the folds
of the tablecloth at the discomfited scoundrel, whom he forthwith
turns out of the house. Tartufe’s endeavour to circumvent Orgon
only brings condign punishment on the impostor, who is sent to
expiate his misdeeds in prison. Shallow pretence and profession of
piety, shibboleths the world has always with it; and the truth of
the picture struck home with such a shock, that the piece ran in
perilous risk of being condemned. The king, however, commanded a
representation of it at Versailles. “_Le roi le veut_, and unfading
laurels crown _Tartufe_.”
Louis was delighted with this comedy; although it had been Mazarin’s
deplorable policy to leave his higher intelligence and taste so
little cultivated, these were naturally capable of appreciating
the wit and humour of Molière’s work, and it formed a shield of
protection against the dramatist’s many bitter enemies. The king
gave him a pension from his own private purse, and Molière was an
honoured guest at his table. The money accruing from his own labour,
alone brought competence. He had a country house at Auteuil, where he
entertained many distinguished persons, and found a little rest from
the arduous demands of his profession. The Prince de Condé also took
great delight in his society. Many a munificent act to youthful or
struggling efforts of genius the popular and admired dramatist and
comedian performed in secret, and ever without ostentation. Perhaps
but for him Racine would never have been heard of. The poet was
nineteen when Molière encouraged him to carry through his _Thêagène
et Chariclée_, a piece too weak for stage production, but for which
Molière made him a present of a hundred louis, and further gave him
the scenario for _Les Frères Ennemis_.
The actor Baron was another star in the dramatic firmament owing
its brilliancy to Molière. Baron, like Garrick, excelled in both
tragedy and comedy; and Molière loved him as if he had been his own
son. One day Baron pleaded with him for a poor country actor, who
wanted enough money to take him to rejoin his troupe. He was an old
fellow-comedian of Molière’s; his name was Mondorge. “How much does
he require?” asked Molière. Baron thought four pistoles would meet
the case. “Give him four pistoles from me then,” said Molière, “and
here are twenty besides, which you can say are from you.” To this he
added a handsome suit of clothes; and in such ways shone the worth
of the actor-dramatist in a naughty world.
It was Molière who exclaimed—“_Où la vertu, va-t’-elle se nicher?_”
one day, when he gave alms to some poor creature, and the man,
finding it to be a louis d’or, thought that it had been given in
mistake, and ran after him to give it back.
The Duchesse de Montpensier, who had inherited the palace of the
Luxembourg from her father, was now spending some months in it,
chiefly occupied in endeavouring to bring the king to consent to her
marriage with Monsieur de Lauzun. She invited Ninon to go and stay
with her, and in all good faith, and unsuspicious of any special
significance attaching to the visit, Ninon went; and as far as
Mademoiselle was concerned, no treachery was intended. Nevertheless,
the duchesse had been drawn into a deep-laid scheme for humbling
Ninon to the dust, by trying to make her the means of bringing her
to draw her own daughter into the ways of life which she herself had
followed, but from which, more and more as time passed, the sense of
its evil revolted her. Sixteen years had flown since she had lost
sight of the child; after making but a half-hearted endeavour to
find it. The whirl of gaiety and excitement in which she was then
living, had quickly dragged her back into its vortex; but Madame de
Fiesque, though she had affected ignorance, knew where the young
girl was, and artfully cultivating herself into the graces of La
Grande Mademoiselle, she had now contrived to introduce her into the
palace, in the guise of a young female dependant, of whom she made a
sort of humble companion or waiting-maid. The girl was evidently as
unhappy as she certainly was very beautiful; and Ninon, interested
and touched with pity for her, entered into conversation with her,
which elicited the fact that she had a lover—one, however, so
far above her in station, that any honourable alliance was not to
be dreamed of, for all the young girl’s heart was pure, and young
Monsieur de Perceval was no profligate. Finding that it was intended,
or rather said to be intended, that a marriage was to be effected
between Clotilde and one of the palace cooks, Ninon took her under
her protection and shelter to the rue des Tournelles. This was
precisely falling in with the designs of Madame de Fiesque, whose
idea was that Ninon would lead Clotilde, ignorant of who she was,
into the free courses of living she herself had followed, and indeed
still followed; but herein lay the mistake of Madame de Fiesque.
Little by little, suspicion that Clotilde was no other than her own
daughter grew to certainty; and that the girl should be exposed to,
or made the victim of, the many miseries and evils underlying the
glitter of her own career, was the one thing the bitterly-repenting
mother determined should never be. And she devised a counterplot,
which she confided to the Duchesse de Montpensier, who warmly lent
her countenance to its carrying out. Monsieur de Perceval was a
relative of Madame de Montausier, whose sincere friendship for Ninon,
her sympathy with her in the distress of mind she was suffering,
and lastly, and perhaps not least, the splendid _dot_ of the Loches
estate, worth 300,000 livres, which Ninon was prepared to bestow on
Clotilde, smoothed the way to the marriage of the two lovers. They
were wedded quietly, and then travelled abroad for two years; so that
the plotters found no chance of interfering with their happiness. As
to who Clotilde really was, those interested were content with the
supposition that she was some connexion of an illustrious family,
about whom it was nobody’s affair to inquire more nearly. From time
to time in after years Ninon saw Clotilde again, but she put a strong
curb on her natural feelings, and never disclosed her identity.