So in the salons of Versailles, and in the world, where Ninon reigned, by the Court ladies, while they loitered in the new-made gardens of Marly, among other similar things jested of was this new amour of Madame de la Rivière for the young Père de Launay. "She was always eccentric, and he _was_ very handsome, and would have charming manners if he were not so grave and so silent," the women averred; while the young nobles swore that these meddling churchmen had always the best luck, whether in amatory conquest, or on fat lands and rich revenues. What the Priest of Languedoc thought a love that would outlast life, and repay him for peace of conscience and heaven both lost, was only one of the passing bubbles of gossip and scandal floating for an hour, amidst myriads like it, on the glittering, fast-rushing, diamond-bright waters of life at Versailles! A new existence had dawned for him; far away in the dim dusky vista of forgotten things, though in reality barely distant a few short months, lay the old life in Languedoc, vague and unremembered as a passed dream; with its calm routine, its monastic silence, its unvarying alternations of study and prayer, its iron-bound thoughts, its rigid creed. It had sunk away as the peaceful gray twilight of a summer's night sinks away before the fiery burst of an artificial illumination, and a new life had dawned for him, radiant, tumultuous, conflicting, delicious--that dazzled his eyes with the magnificence of boundless riches and unrestricted extravagance; that charmed his intellect with the witty coruscations, the polished esprit, of an age unsurpassed for genius, grace, and wit; and that swayed alike his heart, his imagination, and his passions with the subtle intoxication of this syren of Love, whose forbidden song had never before, in faintest echo, fallen on his ear. Far away in the dim, lifeless, pulseless past, sank the memory of the old Dominican abbey, of all it had taught him, of all it had exacted, in its iron, stoical, merciless creed. A new life had arisen for him, and Gaston de Launay, waking from the semi-slumber of the living death he had endured in Languedoc, and liked because he knew no other, was happy--happy as a prisoner is in the wild delight with which he welcomes the sunlight after lengthened imprisonment, happy as an opium-eater is in the delicious delirium that succeeds the lulling softness of the opiate.