A Fashionable Water-cure Resort—M. de Roquelaure and his Friends—Louis le Grand—“A Favourite with the Ladies”—The Broken Sword—ABillet-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 Picpuscottage, 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 respectivelyLa RoyaleandLe 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—Catholicsand 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, thenmore 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 thecacoëthes scribendi, and treated her circle with readings from her romances,La Princesse de Paphlagonie,L’Ile Imaginaire, and a series ofPortraits, 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, wentfollefor 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 ofdéshabillé, eloquently gave way toexpressions 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—butqu’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 invalidnégligés, she received the priest with all herwinning 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 havebeen 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 wasLe 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 ofTartufe, 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 crownTartufe.”
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 shieldof 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 hisThêagène 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 forLes 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 handsomesuit 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 ofa 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 splendiddotof 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.