Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de LEnclos, the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventee | Page 7

pleasures, or the purely
sensual enjoyments. It is certain that Ninon's father did not construe
any of these canons according to the religious idea, but followed the
commonly accepted version, and impressed them upon his young
daughter's mind in all their various lights and shades.
Imbibing such philosophy from her earliest infancy, the father taking
good care to press them deep into her plastic mind, it is not astonishing
that Ninon should discard the more distasteful fruits to be painfully
harvested by following her mother's tuition, and accept the easily
gathered luscious golden fruit offered her by her father. Like all
children and many adults, the glitter and the tinsel of the present
enjoyment were too powerful and seductive to be resisted, or to be
postponed for a problematic pleasure.
The very atmosphere which surrounded the young girl, and which she
soon learned to breathe in deep, pleasurable draughts, was surcharged
with the intoxicating oxygen of freedom of action, liberality, and
unrestrained enjoyment. While still very young she was introduced into
a select society of the choicest spirits of the age and speedily became
their idol, a position she continued to occupy without diminution for

over sixty years. No one of all these men of the world had ever seen so
many personal graces united to so much intellectuality and good taste.
Ninon's form was as symmetrical, elegant and yielding as a willow; her
complexion of a dazzling white, with large sparkling eyes as black as
midnight, and in which reigned modesty and love, and reason and
voluptuousness. Her teeth were like pearls, her mouth mobile and her
smile most captivating, resistless and adorable. She was the
personification of majesty without pride or haughtiness, and possessed
an open, tender and touching countenance upon which shone friendship
and affection. Her voice was soft and silvery, her arms and hands
superb models for a sculptor, and all her movements and gestures
manifested an exquisite, natural grace which made her conspicuous in
the most crowded drawing-room. As she was in her youth, so she
continued to be until her death at the age of ninety years, an incredible
fact but so well attested by the gravest and most reliable writers, who
testify to the truth of it, that there is no room for doubt. Ninon
attributed it not to any miracle, but to her philosophy, and declared that
any one might exhibit the same peculiarities by following the same
precepts. We have it on the most undoubted testimony of
contemporaneous writers, who were intimate with him, that one of her
dearest friends and followers, Saint-Evremond, at the age of
eighty-nine years, inspired one of the famous beauties of the English
Court with an ardent attachment.
The beauties of her person were so far developed at the age of twelve
years, that she was the object of the most immoderate admiration on the
part of men of the greatest renown, and her beauty is embalmed in their
works either as a model for the world, or she is enshrined in song,
poetry, and romance as the heroine.
In fact Ninon had as tutors the most distinguished men of the age, who
vied with one another in embellishing her young mind with all the
graces, learning and accomplishments possible for the human mind to
contain. Her native brightness and active mind absorbed everything
with an almost supernatural rapidity and tact, and it was not long before
she became their peer, and her qualities of mind reached out so far
beyond theirs in its insatiable longing, that she, in her turn, became

their tutor, adviser and consoler, as well as their tender friend.

CHAPTER IV
The Morals of the Period
Examples of the precocious talents displayed by Mademoiselle de
l'Enclos are not uncommon in the twentieth century, but the application
she made of them was remarkable and uncommon. Accomplished in
music, learned and proficient in the languages, a philosopher of no
small degree, and of a personal beauty sometimes called "beauté de
diable," she appeared upon the social stage at a time when a new idol
was an imperative necessity for the salvation of moral sanity, and the
preservation of some remnants of personal decency in the sexual
relations.
Cardinal Richelieu had just succeeded in consolidating the usurpations
of the royal prerogatives on the rights of the nobility and the people,
which had been silently advancing during the preceding reigns, and was
followed by the long period of unexampled misgovernment, which
oppressed and impoverished as well as degraded every rank and every
order of men in the French kingdom, ceasing only with the Revolution.
The great Cardinal minister had built worse than he had intended, it is
to be hoped; for his clerico-political system had practically destroyed
French manhood, and left society without a guiding star to