their embarrassment, making them understand that she desired nothing
so much as their happiness. Both the Marquis and his mistress made
Ninon their confidante, and thereafter lived in perfect amity until
the lovers grew tired of each other, Madame Scarron aiming higher than
an ordinary Marquis, now that she saw her way clear to mounting the
social ladder.

It was perhaps due to Ninon's kindness in the Villarceaux episode,
that enabled her to retain the friendship of Madame de Maintenon when
the latter had reached the steps of the throne. The mistress of
royalty endeavored to persuade Ninon to appear at court but there was
too great a difference in temper and constitution between the two
celebrated women to admit of any close relations. Ninon made use of
the passion of love for the purpose of pleasure only, while her more
exalted rival made it subservient to her ambitious projects, and did
not hesitate with that view to cloak her licentious habits beneath the
mantle of religion, and add hypocrisy to frailty. The income of Ninon
de l'Enclos was agreeably and judiciously spent in the society of men
of wit and letters, but the revenues of the Marchioness de Maintenon
were squandered on the useless decoration of her own person, or
hoarded for the purpose of elevating into rank and notice an
insignificant family, who had no other claim to such distinction than
that derived from the easy honesty of a female relation, and the
dissolute extravagance of a vain and licentious sovereign.

While Ninon de l'Enclos was receiving and encouraging the attentions
of the most distinguished men of her time, literati, nobles, warriors,
statesmen, and sages, in her house in the Rue des Tournelles, the
mistress of the sovereign, the dear friend who had betrayed her to the
Marquis de Villarceaux, was swallowing, at Versailles, the adulations