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