At seventeen years of age, she was perfectly equipped. Beautiful and highly accomplished, amiable and winning, and though always well dressed, troubling vastly little over the petty fripperies and vanities ordinarily engrossing the female mind, she appears to have gained the commendation and affection of her aunt, who parted from her with great regret, when the failing health of Madame de L’Enclos necessitated Ninon’s departure from Loches, to go to Paris, where the invalid was residing. Monsieur de L’Enclos fetched Ninon himself from Loches, and in a day or two she was by her mother’s couch. Madame de L’Enclos received her with affection, and affectionately Ninon tended her, going unmurmuringly through the old courses of religious reading and observance, even to renewing acquaintance with the gouty canon in Notre-Dame; but the invalid’s chamber was _triste_ and monotonous, and now and again Ninon effected a few hours’ escape from it, ostensibly for the purpose of attending Mass or Benediction, or some service at one or other of the neighbouring churches. One of them, St Germain l’Auxerrois, was of special interest to Ninon, by reason of neighbouring the hotel of Madame de la Rochefoucauld; and she one day interrogated the guardian of the _porte cochère_, in the hope of learning some news of Marsillac, whom Time’s chances and changes had entirely removed from her ken; but whose memory endured in her heart; for she had been very sincerely attached to him. The Suisse informing her that he very rarely came to Paris, the philosophical mind of Ninon soon turned for consolation elsewhere. On this plea of devout attendance at church, Ninon was freely permitted leave of absence from the sick room, duennaed by her old nurse, Madeleine, who, however, frequently permitted herself to be dropped by the way, at a small house of public entertainment, above whose door ran the following invitation to step inside:— “If of dyspepsia you’ve a touch, Ache of tooth, or head, or such, There’s nothing like a nip, you see, Of my delicious Eau de Vie.”