The Duchesse de Montpensier, who had inherited the palace of the Luxembourg from her father, was now spending some months in it, chiefly occupied in endeavouring to bring the king to consent to her marriage with Monsieur de Lauzun. She invited Ninon to go and stay with her, and in all good faith, and unsuspicious of any special significance attaching to the visit, Ninon went; and as far as Mademoiselle was concerned, no treachery was intended. Nevertheless, the duchesse had been drawn into a deep-laid scheme for humbling Ninon to the dust, by trying to make her the means of bringing her to draw her own daughter into the ways of life which she herself had followed, but from which, more and more as time passed, the sense of its evil revolted her. Sixteen years had flown since she had lost sight of the child; after making but a half-hearted endeavour to find it. The whirl of gaiety and excitement in which she was then living, had quickly dragged her back into its vortex; but Madame de Fiesque, though she had affected ignorance, knew where the young girl was, and artfully cultivating herself into the graces of La Grande Mademoiselle, she had now contrived to introduce her into the palace, in the guise of a young female dependant, of whom she made a sort of humble companion or waiting-maid. The girl was evidently as unhappy as she certainly was very beautiful; and Ninon, interested and touched with pity for her, entered into conversation with her, which elicited the fact that she had a lover—one, however, so far above her in station, that any honourable alliance was not to be dreamed of, for all the young girl’s heart was pure, and young Monsieur de Perceval was no profligate. Finding that it was intended, or rather said to be intended, that a marriage was to be effected between Clotilde and one of the palace cooks, Ninon took her under her protection and shelter to the rue des Tournelles. This was precisely falling in with the designs of Madame de Fiesque, whose idea was that Ninon would lead Clotilde, ignorant of who she was, into the free courses of living she herself had followed, and indeed still followed; but herein lay the mistake of Madame de Fiesque. Little by little, suspicion that Clotilde was no other than her own daughter grew to certainty; and that the girl should be exposed to, or made the victim of, the many miseries and evils underlying the glitter of her own career, was the one thing the bitterly-repenting mother determined should never be. And she devised a counterplot, which she confided to the Duchesse de Montpensier, who warmly lent her countenance to its carrying out. Monsieur de Perceval was a relative of Madame de Montausier, whose sincere friendship for Ninon, her sympathy with her in the distress of mind she was suffering, and lastly, and perhaps not least, the splendid _dot_ of the Loches estate, worth 300,000 livres, which Ninon was prepared to bestow on Clotilde, smoothed the way to the marriage of the two lovers. They