The widow of Molière subsequently married again; but his memory must have remained warm in her heart; for some years later, during a bitter cold winter, she had a hundred loads of wood conveyed to the cemetery, and burned on the tomb of her husband, to warm all the poor people of the quarter. “The great heat split in two the stone, which was still to be seen cracked across the middle in the early part of the eighteenth century.”[6] The Fontaine Molière, in the rue de Richelieu, now commemorates the poet, and in the green-room of the Comédie Française are the bust, and the portrait, by the painter Coypel, of him who was practically the founder of the world-famous institution. There were countless epitaphs on Molière, generated for the most part, by the injustices done him in life as in death. The following is accounted the most noteworthy:— “Tu réformas et la ville et la cour; Mais quelle en fut la récompense? Les Français rougiront un jour De leur peu de reconnaissance, Il leur fallut un comédien Qui mit à les polir, sa gloire et son étude. Mais Molière, a ta gloire il ne manquerait rien, Si, parmi les défauts que tu peignis si bien, Tu les avais repris de leur ingratitude.” P. BONHOURS. And so the journey of her life, shadowed more and more by the dropping away into the mists of death of so many of the well-loved ones, Ninon’s own years fled on, still finding content in the society of the many friends, young and old, not gone before. Among these was Madame de la Sablière, with la Fontaine ever in attendance; Marsillac, the comrade of Ninon’s youth—now the Duc de la Rochefoucauld—with his _Maxims_, which she keenly criticised, as based on the philosophy of self-love: that self only was the motive power of human thought and action; Corneille, growing old, and preferring his latest tragedy of _Surène_ to the immortal _Cid_, a preference shared by few; with him came his nephew, Fontenelle, the brilliant scholar and centenarian to be, short of a few weeks, who on his deathbed said—“My friends, I do not suffer; only I find existence a little difficult,” and who followed the _viâ media_ philosophy so closely, that he was wont to boast he never either laughed or wept. Then Ninon would tune her lute, and play the airs of the new musical conductor of the king’s orchestra, Lulli, the miller’s son, a scullion once, risen to be master of French dramatic music, who met his death so disastrously from the bungling treatment of a quack doctor. The priest who attended his last hours refused to give him the consolations of religion until he had consented to have the score of his latest opera destroyed. He consented, to the indignation of a friend who was with him. “Hush, hush!” said Lulli; “there is a fair copy of it in my drawer.”