This life, sedentary or spent in hunting, began to weary them, when overruling Providence was pleased to send them a diversion of the highest importance.  M. le Prince de Conti was seized suddenly with that burning fever which announces the smallpox.  Every imaginable care was useless; he died of it and bequeathed, in spite of himself, a most premature and afflicting widowhood to his young and charming spouse, who was not, till long afterwards, let into the secret of his scandalous excesses.

M. de la Roche-sur-Yon, his only brother, was as distressed at his death as though he had nothing to gain by it; he took immediately the name of Conti, and doffed the other, which he had hitherto borne as a borrowed title.  The domain and county of La Roche-sur-Yon belongs to the Grande Mademoiselle.  She had been asked to make this condescension when the young Prince was born.  She agreed with a good grace, for the child, born prematurely, did not seem likely to live.

CHAPTER XXXV.

Ninon at Court.—­The King behind the Glass.—­Anxiety of the Marquise on the Subject of This Interview.—­Visit to Madame de Maintenon.—­Her Reply and Her Ambiguous Promise.

Mademoiselle de l’Enclos is universally known in the world for the agreeableness of her superior wit and her charms of face and person.  When Madame de Maintenon, after the loss of her father, arrived from Martinique, she had occasion to make her acquaintance; and it seems that it was Ninon who, seeing her debating between the offers of M. Scarron and the cloister, succeeded in persuading her to marry the rich poet, though he was a cripple, rather than to bury herself, so young, in a convent of Ursulines or Bernardines, even were the convent in Paris.

At the death of the poet Scarron (who when he married, and when he died, possessed only a life annuity), Mademoiselle d’Aubigne, once more in poverty, found in Mademoiselle de l’Enclos a generous and persevering friend, who at once offered her her house and table.  Mademoiselle d’Aubigne passed eight or ten months in the intimate society of this philosophical woman.  But her conscience, or her prudery, not permitting her to tolerate longer a manner of life in which she seemed to detect license, she quitted Ninon, advising her to renounce coquetry, whilst the other was advising her to abandon herself to it.

There, where Madame Scarron found the tune of good society with wit, she looked upon herself as in her proper sphere, as long as no open scandal was brought to her notice.  She consented still to remain her friend; but the fear of passing for an approver or an accomplice prevented her from remaining if there were any publicity.  It was not exactly through her scruples, it was through her vanity.  I have had proof of this on various occasions, and I have made no error.