As for la Fontanges, she is best known to posterity by the extraordinary head-dress she adopted. Ugly as it was, it remained in fashion for half a score of years. It was a structural arrangement of eight divisions, in wire, covered with pieces of muslin, bows of ribbon, interlaced with curls. These divisions were severally called: la Duchesse, le Solitaire, le Chou, le Mousquetaire, le Croissant, le Firmament, le Septième Ciel, and la Souris. (The Duchess, the Solitary, the Cabbage, the Musketeer, the Crescent, the Firmament, the Seventh Heaven and the Mouse.) The king now bought for Madame Scarron the château and estate of Maintenon, in Brittany, on the banks of the Gave near Chartres, and by his desire she was henceforth called “Madame de Maintenon.” Perhaps hardly so much at his desire, there were some about who made a slight change in the orthography of the last syllable, and called her “Madame de _Maintenant_.” Her marriage with Louis is believed to have been celebrated in the chapel of the château[7] in 1683—she being fifty and the king forty-seven years old—in the presence of Harlay and Louvois, the nuptial knot being tied by the confessor of the marquise, Père la Chaise. She further obtained his appointment to the office of the king’s confessor. Père la Chaise was a priest of the Company of Jesus, a man, if “neither fanatical nor fawning,” intolerant of all religious creeds outside his own; and now, holding the conscience of Louis XIV. and of Madame Louis XIV., Père la Chaise soon became a power in the land. One by one death was bearing away the friends of Ninon’s earlier years. The death of Madame de Chevreuse, at Port Royal, was followed close by that of Madame de Longueville. Madame de Maintenon’s prediction that de la Rochefoucauld would quickly follow her to whom his heart had been unchangingly given, was verified. A few months, and Marsillac, the friend of Ninon’s merry days at Loches, was no more. A deep melancholy darkened in upon Ninon as she thought of all those gone hence, and the many missing now from the circle in the rue des Tournelles, although new faces were not wanting there, and she maintained the old hospitalities. She was not sorry, however, to put an end to these for a while, in order to fall in with the proposition of Monsieur le Nôtre, that she, with Madame de la Fayette, should accompany him to Rome, whither he was bound with his friend, the poet Santeuil, a canon of St Victor, who was making the journey in order to try and obtain the sanction of the pope to the use of a certain collection of Latin hymns he had composed—in all the churches of Christendom; while the pope was anxious to consult the royal gardener upon the laying out of the parterres of the Vatican.