Ninon, whose orthodoxy was not rigid, and had found herself only too often sufficiently well justified in the small faith she placed in the religious professions coming within her experience, determined on the bold amusement of testing the sincerity of Bourdaloue. She pretended to be seriously ill, and sent to him to visit her, in, of course, his spiritual capacity. Dressed in the most becoming of invalid _négligés_, she received the priest with all her winning smiles and words and fascinating glances. They were absolutely ineffective. Bourdaloue having completed his exhortations and pious counsels, rose to take his leave, observing, as he departed, that he perceived the malady afflicting Ninon was not of the body, but of the spirit, and that he would beseech the great Healer of souls to cure her. The tale of this interview got wind, and brought down some satirical verses on Ninon’s defeat—which she frankly acknowledged, not even without considerable content; for it taught her that the religious profession was not one vast fraud, but that the Church might have many true shepherds of its fold, cumbered as it might be with the false and venal. Among these last she had signalised Monseigneur d’Autun, apparently with reason enough. He was a mild-mannered, smiling prelate, with a paternal, beneficent air, one who had several times changed sides in the days of the Fronde. Ninon had first met him at that time at the house of Madame de Longueville, and thenceforward he was one of the circle of rue des Tournelles. Frequently he had begged or borrowed, “for the poor,” considerable sums of money from his open-handed hostess; but Ninon entertained doubts of the bishop’s saintliness, and one day they were set at rest beyond all question by the conclusions he drew from certain arguments he had propounded to her. Then throwing off the mask of the virtuous living he professed, he boldly declared his passionate admiration for her. That a man of the world would have been repulsed by Ninon is not very probable; but she felt the instinctive aversion for the touch of some insidious, poisonous reptile, and she shrank from him, and ordered him from her presence; and departing, Monseigneur d’Autun looked the vengeance his muttered words threatened. In discussing with Molière her experiences of more than one distinguished prelate, Richelieu and Mazarin not forgotten, she asked him how it was possible to discern the true from the false? Molière replied that there was nothing more easy, and with Ninon’s permission to introduce her latest clerical admirer, he would put the answer to her question before her in less than six weeks. He had her joyous consent, and the answer within the given time. It was _Le Tartufe_.