The intriguing Abbe, in order to bring Ninon under the influence of his master, and to charm her with the great honor done her by a man upon whom were fixed the eyes of all Europe, prepared a series of gorgeous fetes, banquets and entertainments at the palace at Rueil.  But Ninon was not in the least overwhelmed, and refused to hear the sighs of the great man.  Hoping to inspire jealousy, he affected to love Marion de Lormes, a proceeding which gave Ninon great pleasure as it relieved her from the importunities of the Cardinal.  The end of it was, that Richelieu gave up the chase and left Ninon in peace to follow her own devices in her own way.

Whatever may have been the relations between Ninon and Cardinal Richelieu, it is certain that the Count de Coligny was her first sentimental attachment, and the two lovers, in the first intoxication of their love, swore eternal constancy, a process common to all new lovers and believed possible to maintain.  It was not long, however, before Ninon perceived that the first immoderate transports of love gradually lost their activity, and by applying the precepts of her philosophy to explain the phenomenon, came to regard love by its effects, as a blind mechanical movement, which it was the policy of men to ennoble according to the conventional rules of decency and honor, to the exclusion of its original meaning.

After coldly reasoning the matter out to its only legitimate conclusion, she tore off the mask covering a metaphysical love, which could not reach or satisfy the light of intelligence or the sentiments and emotions of the heart, and which appeared to her to possess as little reality as the enchanted castles, marvels of magic, and monsters depicted in poetry and romance.  To her, love finally became a mere thirst, and a desire for pleasure to be gratified by indulgence like all other pleasure.  The germ of philosophy already growing in her soul, found nothing in this discovery that was essentially unnatural; on the contrary, it was essentially natural.  It was clear to her logical mind, that a passion like love produced among men different effects according to different dispositions, humors, temperament, education, interest, vanity, principles, or circumstances, without being, at the same time, founded upon anything more substantial than a disguised, though ardent desire of possession, the essential of its existence, after which it vanished as fire disappears through lack of fuel.  Dryden, the celebrated English poetic and literary genius, reaches the same opinion in his Letters to Clarissa.

Having reached this point in her reasoning, she advanced a step further, and considered the unequal division of qualities distributed between the two sexes.  She perceived the injustice of it and refused to abide by it.  “I perceive,” she declared, “that women are charged with everything that is frivolous, and that men reserve to themselves the right to essential qualities.  From this moment I shall be a man.”