A Disastrous Wooing—Fénelon—“Mademoiselle de L’Enclos”—The Pride
that had a Fall—The Death of the Duchesse d’Orléans—Intrigue—The
Sun-King and the Shadows—The Clermont Scholar’s Crime—Monsieur
de Montespan—Tardy Indignation—The Encounter—The _Filles
Répenties_—What the Cards Foretold.
The episode of Clotilde could but forcibly remind Ninon of the son
whom his father, Monsieur de Gersay, had taken away so shortly after
his birth, to rear as his own exclusively, but of whom, unlike
Clotilde, she had not entirely lost traces. On the contrary, she
knew that the Marquis de Gersay lived the most of his time on his
own estates in Brittany, and that therefore Charles, as the child
had been named, was likely to be with him; and Ninon wrote to the
marquis, begging for some intelligence of the young man—for he was
now two-and-twenty. De Gersay informed her that he had taken the
necessary steps for legitimatising him, and that he was called the
Chevalier de Villiers. He added that the secret of his birth was
entirely unknown to the young man, who was a fine, handsome fellow,
and very amiable and intelligent, only needing to rub off the little
corners of his provincial rearing to be perfection. The marquis
added that it would please him very well to bring him to Paris and
introduce him into the circle of Ninon’s friends, so famous for its
refinement and elegance; but it was on the condition that the origin
of his birth should be religiously concealed.
And when young de Villiers arrived in Paris, Ninon received him in
her salon, as she received other young people who sought entry there,
or for whom it was sought, that they might acquire the tone of good
society and _le bon goût_. Ninon was then over sixty years of age.
Whether, as it is said, she absolutely retained all the beauty and
freshness of her youth, may perhaps be taken _cum grano salis_; but
that much of it clung about her with all the charm of her manner,
seems indisputable, since she fascinated the young man of twenty-two.
He fell passionately in love with her; but for a long time he
maintained silence, until he could conceal his love no longer, and
Ninon could no longer remain blind to the true state of the case. She
was deeply distressed and perplexed. She assumed a sort of maternal
tenderness towards him, which had simply the effect of heating the
young man’s ardour to frenzy, and she was forced to forbid him her
house. Fear of never seeing her again, drove him to say that he would
cease to love her. Love forced him to do this, and to this promise
love made him false. The excess of his passion would not permit him
to exist longer in a state of doubt. He sought a last interview of
her. Ninon had gone to her country-house, and thither he followed.
He found her alone, and spoke like a man driven, as indeed he was,
to desperation. Ninon, overcome with pity, overwhelmed with grief
at being the cause of her son’s misery, could no longer maintain
her firmness, and young de Villiers, believing that the moment of
his happiness had arrived, approached her with passionate gestures.
Seized with horror, she shrank from him and told him the truth. “I
am your mother!” she cried in her distress. One instant de Villiers
stood as if thunderstruck; then he turned and rushed into the garden,
hurrying blindly on till he reached the little thicket at the end of
it. There, in his despair, he drew his sword and stabbed himself to
the death.
Ninon waited, and when he did not return, she went in search of him,
to find him weltering in his own blood. He was still breathing, and
strove to speak; but his words were undistinguishable. The passionate
love he felt for her still burned in his eyes; but the agitation her
tenderness and despair occasioned him, only hastened the end, and he
died in her arms.
The horror of this tragedy nearly drove Ninon to take away her own
life. Her pitying friends strove to bring some assuagement to her
sufferings, and Madame Scarron nursed her in the long illness which
ensued, and her gentle, tender ways and words, and her manner of
winning Ninon to speak of the unhappy lost one, at last brought tears
to her eyes, parched with her mental agony, and so relief came, and
Françoise Scarron, weeping with her, was then her best friend. It
was she who ordered a mausoleum tomb for the dead. It was placed
where Charles de Villiers had been interred, a monument of black
marble. Night and day the tapers burned around it, and many an hour
in prayer Ninon knelt beside the last resting-place of Charles de
Villiers.
At this time, Madame Scarron, hitherto very far from a devotee,
introduced to her a young priest of St Sulpice. His name was de
la Mothe Fénelon. His touching words and sincere, gentle sympathy
brought healing as time passed; but the shadow of sorrow and
suffering never fully lifted—the gay, frivolous Ninon was known
no more. Henceforth, till death, she was Mademoiselle de L’Enclos,
bearing herself with dignity, self-restrained, and esteemed by most.
The consent of the king to the marriage of Lauzun and the Grande
Mademoiselle having been at last wrung from him, Lauzun grew
insufferable. His pride was boundless. Except to the king, he would
not even doff his hat. He occupied himself exclusively in arranging
the details of the festivities and ceremonial of the marriage.
But his enemies were at work. His folly and vanity had created a host
of them, and among them were the powerful Louvois, and the vindictive
and ambitious favourite, Madame de Montespan, whom he had frequently
grossly insulted; while Louvois found himself constantly thwarted
and provoked by him. Madame de Montespan, thinking over the matter
of Mademoiselle’s marriage, decided that her vast property would
be much better disposed among the eight children she had brought
the king, than in the pockets of Lauzun, and finding a supporter in
Louvois, she represented the case to His Majesty, the result being
that he withdrew his consent to the marriage, and de Lauzun was
lodged in the Bastille, his character blackened—no such difficult
matter—by the two. The friends of the lovers had warned them of the
imminent possibility of this; and it was believed that they accepted
the advice, and contrived to be privately married. De Lauzun vented
his wrath for the promise—this time so undisputedly broken—by
denouncing Madame de Montespan for her wifely unfaithfulness to her
husband; but it did not hinder his imprisonment, which he spent for
five years in the fortress of Pignerol, that dreary stronghold of
deportation for offending, blue-blooded courtiers. He was conducted
thither by Monsieur d’Artagnan, lieutenant of the Guards. Five years’
further incarceration after this in Pignerol was allotted him; though
on conditions slightly ameliorated. The treatment had first been hard
in the extreme, and had rigidly condemned him to one cell.
Sympathy extended only to the disconsolate Mademoiselle, the victim
of an ambitious coxcomb, and of a venal, faithless woman.
Attention was, however, soon turned entirely from this affair, by
the terrible and sudden death of Henrietta, the Duchesse d’Orléans
of England—daughter of King Charles I.—the amiable and universally
beloved wife of the king’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans.
She was one evening enjoying the cool air on the great balcony of the
palace of St Cloud, in company with her ladies, and requested one
of them to fetch her a glass of chicory water from her apothecary.
The apothecary arrived in a few moments with an enamelled goblet
containing the drink, which he presented to her. Scarcely had she
drunk it, than she was seized with violent convulsive agony, and
cried out that she was poisoned.
They carried her to the nearest bedchamber, and laying her down,
loosened her clothes, and administered all the usual restoratives;
but in vain. Already her face and limbs were livid and distorted. “I
am poisoned—I have drunk poison!” was all she was able to utter.
The king came hurrying to the bedside, followed by his physicians,
whom he had hastily summoned. They examined the agonised woman, grew
themselves pale with dismay, and remained silent.
“Where are your senses?” demanded the king, in an access of
distressful alarm. “It is frightful to let a woman die like this, and
not be able to afford any help.”
The doctors only looked at each other, and still did not utter a word.
Madame herself entreated for an emetic, but Monsieur Valet,
physician-in-chief, declared that it would be dangerous. She had been
seized, he said, with the _miserere_—the term generally then used
for cholera morbus.
Against these silent impotent healers of the body, the physician of
the soul was sent for. He came. It was Monsieur l’Abbé Bossuet, and
amid his pious, gentle consolations Madame passed away. It was also
Bossuet who pronounced the funeral oration a day or two later.
“Madame is dead!—Madame is dead!” So the terrible words rang forth
in the presence of the king and the assembled half-stunned courtiers.
That Madame was universally beloved had an exception to its ruling.
He who should have best loved her, the duke himself, was indifferent
to her. Scandal, busy with his name, said worse—said so much that
was shameful, that it is not to be repeated here. It said so much,
that the king, who was aware of it, had already ordered the immediate
departure of the chevalier de Lorraine from Paris, a dismissal
that was to be final. This minion of the duke had been furious at
the command, and accused Madame as the cause of it, and she had
simply laughed at the accusation. The day following her death, the
chevalier de Lorraine, it was asserted, was seen, wrapped in a long
riding-cloak, and his face concealed by a hat whose broad brims were
drawn down low over his brows, riding hastily by the path of the
gate of St Cloud, and so by the roads to the frontier. He was known
to be a great friend of Monsieur de Luxembourg, and at a later day
more than suspicion implicated Monsieur de Luxembourg in the most
notorious poison _cause celébre_ of its century.
The Court of Louis XIV. was now one vast spider’s-web of intrigue,
woven from the lust and greed of so many of those surrounding him.
It was the Nemesis of his policy of drawing all the nobility and
provincial seigneurs from far and near to Versailles. If these
were not lured into the brilliance of the Sun-King’s presence, and
desired to live on their estates, it was next to an impossibility
to do so, under fear of being suspected of plotting against the
throne. They were required to group themselves all round the great
orb, gathering from it the lustre beyond which all was obscurity, and
this rarely enough to be done, even in Paris, but only at Versailles.
Louis did not love the Louvre. He had never forgotten that in the
days of the Fronde he had been driven thence to find refuge where it
could be had.
And so the castles and lands of fair France were left untenanted
and falling to ruin, and to lie untilled and neglected, for all the
good at least the people reaped; and this at a time when rougher
warfare had ceased, and religious strife had calmed down, and under
other ruling, the promise of prosperity dawned. Such profits and
incomings as did arise from these tenures and estates, by the toil
of the peasant dwellers on them, brought them only starvation wage;
for the money earned by the sweat of the brows of the peasantry was
needed for its overlords’ silks and velvets, and laces and jewelled
snuff-boxes, and solitaires, to add greater bedazzlement to the
salons and galleries where Louis le Grand lived his span of years.
And even when this was ended—the time was still yet afar off for the
breaking of the storm—but on, ever faster and heavier, the clouds
were lowering in. Neither Richelieu or Mazarin tolerated the spirit
which inspires to a man ruling, or striving to rule, with prudence
and protecting care in his own house. They feared it, and taxation
and gabelle, and rents and quit-rents, as they waxed on to their
hideous proportions, set minds working on the problem of why such
things should be, and how came about such “inequality among men.”
“Where is the wonder, is it not my college?” said the king, one day
when he had bestowed his magnificent presence on the representation,
by the pupils of the Jesuit College at Clermont, of a tragedy very
finely performed. “_Collegium Cleromonterum Societate Jesus_” was
originally graven upon the college gate, and the sycophant principal
had now caused this to be effaced, and “_Collegium Ludovici Magni_”
inscribed in gold letters in its place.
The next morning was to be seen, fastened on the gate beneath, a
Latin distich, whose meaning may be thus interpreted—
“Christ’s name expunged, the king’s now fills the stone;
Oh, impious race! by that is plainly shown
That Louis is the only god you own!”
The author of these lines was run to earth. He was found to be a
pupil of the college, and thirty-one years of the Bastille and of St
Marguérite were awarded his crime. The term might have ended only
with his years, had he not suddenly become sole heir to the estates
of his family, and it was then suggested by the governor of the
Bastille, a Jesuit, that setting him free might bring golden rewards.
Being released, probably the reward followed.
And ever the intricate machinery of corruption and intrigue in high
places worked on. Among other schemes of Madame de Montespan, was one
of marrying Louise de la Vallière to the Duc de Lauzun. It would be,
at all events, removing the two incommoding ones from her path; but
it was an arrangement not very likely to appeal to the Duchesse de
la Vallière, and moreover, the imprisoned Duc de Lauzun had not been
consulted. The great idea of the favourite was simply, by fair means
or foul, to get all she could of Mademoiselle’s possessions, and
knowing Mademoiselle’s infatuation for Lauzun, she set the strings to
the best of her power to tempt her to part with an immense portion
of her fortune by the promise of trying to win the king’s consent
to freeing the captive of Pignerol. To this end she flattered and
cajoled Mademoiselle’s ladies, among whom was Madame de Fiesque,
Ninon’s bitter enemy, none the less envenomed against her on account
of the triumphant carrying through of the marriage of Clotilde. And
as it happened one evening, Ninon, departing from her usual custom
of remaining indoors when she visited Madame Montausier at St Cloud,
went for a stroll in the gardens, and at a turn of the clipped hedges
she came face to face with la Montespan, leaning on the arm of Madame
de Fiesque.
Then came the bursting of the thunderclap. Madame de Fiesque, pallid
with rage, whispered a word in the ear of la Montespan, who turned,
and in a tone of disdain indescribable, said—
“La Ninon! Who dares to permit this woman to walk here?”
“This woman!” The words stunned Ninon for the moment; while
indignation raged up into her heart, and angry tears blinded her.
Ninon was—no matter what she was, she had elected to follow her own
ways. These, at all events, were not soiled with the iniquities of
the woman before her. She had not been false to marriage-vows. She
had never betrayed trusts reposed in her and in friendship. She had
not craftily stolen the love of the king from the woman he professed
to be attached to. Blazing with indignation at the Montespan’s
insulting words and insolent stare, she made some excuse to Madame
Montausier for returning home, and sent a message to Monsieur de
Montespan to call on her in the morning. On his arrival, she taxed
him with the knowledge of his wife’s infidelity, and when he strove
to disavow it, she drove the nail home, until he had no choice but to
fall in with her suggestions—that he should find his way straight to
St Cloud and punish the royal favourite in the presence of the king
and all the Court. And this he did, bestowing a sounding box on the
lovely ear of his wife. And when Ninon asked what the king said, the
reply was, “Never a word.” But many a word, or rather epithet, de
Montespan bestowed then on his Athénais.
Ninon recounted this affair with great gusto to Madame Scarron.
Françoise still kept up great intimacy with her friend, Madame
Arnoul, a person for whom Mademoiselle de L’Enclos had an instinctive
dislike. She was a great fortune-teller with the cards, and an
arch-crafty intriguer, and by a series of manœuvres she wormed
herself into the notice of Madame de Montespan, whose husband
subsequently played a sorry part in the scandal occurring at St
Cloud; since he permitted himself to be bribed to continue to
countenance his wife’s connexion with the king.
Madame Arnoul however, was laying her scheme, and played her cards
so well for the amusement of Madame de Montespan, that she managed
to acquaint herself with many secrets of the royal favourite; and in
return, in order to do evil to gain what she considered good, she
whispered to Madame de Montespan the truth about de Montespan’s box
on the ear. The result was an order for Ninon’s conveyance to the
convent-home for the _Filles Répenties_; and the guard who arrested
her allowed her just twenty minutes for her preparations for leaving
the rue des Tournelles.
It was a terrible and humiliating blow for Ninon. All the
consolations and representations of Madame Arnoul, who was permitted
an interview with her, could not reconcile her. Yet they brought some
comfort; for Ninon could see that the woman’s machinations promised
to bring about the fall of the favourite, and in her place to set no
less, no greater, a person than Françoise, the Widow Scarron.
Rome was not, of course, built in a day; and Madame Arnoul, not
forgetful of her own interests, hastened slowly. Indications were not
wanting that the influence of Madame de Montespan was waning.
The favourite’s temper was not a mild one, and sometimes she gave
vent to it in rather startling fashion. Madame Arnoul’s first care
was to lead Madame Scarron into more devout ways than hitherto she
had followed, and the habitual calm, composed bearing of Françoise
was not out of the picture of this new _rôle_. Madame Arnoul, in her
card-telling visits to Madame de Montespan, was favoured by her with
many confidences, and among them the _Maîtresse en Titre_ mentioned
that she was seeking a governess for her children, a lady who was to
be pious and amiable, and of course accomplished, and intellectually
gifted, and rich in patience. Except for the piety, Madame Scarron
possessed all these qualifications, and for the piety, it would come
in time; and meanwhile it could be put on easily enough—it was a
virtue not difficult to assume. And Madame Arnoul, consulting her
cards, gravely informed Madame de Montespan that if she repaired
to the church of St Sulpice, on a certain day, at a certain hour,
she would see among the communicants of the early Mass, the very
person she was seeking for her children’s education. Then followed
a description of the comely, if no longer very youthful, Françoise
d’Aubigné, who was instructed to put in the necessary appearance
at St Sulpice. So the arrangement was brought about and concluded
very satisfactorily, and Madame Scarron found herself in charge
of the little Duc du Maine, and Louis XIV.’s other children, of
whom Athénais de Montespan was the mother, and more and more as
time passed, winning the admiration and liking of the king, who
found great charm in her conversation, which certainly went to show
that his faulty education and rearing had not totally stunted him
mentally, for the wife of Scarron, by nature and long association,
was a woman of no common attainments.