Now and again Madame de Maintenon would come to the rue des Tournelles, and Ninon concedes that she had the good taste not to unduly assert herself on these occasions; though the air of strict and devout propriety seemed ever more and more to enfold her. At that time she showed considerable favour to the theories of Madame Guyon and of Fénelon; but the Jesuit Père la Chaise had small appreciation of anything savouring of liberty of conscience, and the Edict of Nantes was imminent, the evil thing engendered in the brain of the trio ruling him whose proud mottoes, “_Nec pluribus impor_,” “_Vires acquiret eundo_,” so belied the weak, superstitious shadow into which the Grand Monarque had faded. Louis’s liking for his Huguenot subjects had always been so entirely of the smallest, that it verged on hatred. Thanks to Mazarin’s plan of mental cultivation for him, his understanding of the doctrinal questions at issue between Catholic and Calvinist was so infinitesimal as to be of no account. It was his arrogant claim of authority over the minds and bodies of his subjects, far more than any spiritual convictions, which needed but the representations of Madame de Maintenon, of the egotistical, vain and unsympathetic minister Louvois, and of the Jesuit intolerance of Père la Chaise, to fire the smouldering flame of extermination of the “reformed” Christianity of France; and on the 22nd of October, 1685, was re-enacted the new version of the tragedy of St Bartholomew, the chief _rôle_ in it played by the descendant of the murdered Coligny’s friend, who had been the progenitor of Françoise d’Aubigné, the ambitious Madame Louis Quatorze. Gentle and patient in adversity, as Scarron’s wife, admirable, and perhaps really lovable, in that far-off day when she did not even then scruple, and successfully, to win her friend Ninon’s lover away from her—a fact by no means forgotten, nor likely to be, recorded as Monsieur de Villarceaux had recorded it at the time on a window of “the Yellow Room” in the rue des Tournelles. There, diamond-graven on the pane of glass, that erotic quatrain proclaimed the charms of Françoise as unmistakably as ever; and though Ninon had no part in it, somehow the lines found their way into Monsieur Loret’s journal, and forthwith it created other couplets, which commemorated more than one incident in the life of Madame Louis Quatorze. The precious rhyming ran into several verses, varied only by the several names of Madame’s former admirers, starting gaily with Monsieur de Villarceaux: “On est ravi que le roi notre sire, Aime la d’Aubigné Moi, Villarceaux, je mén créve de rire, Hi! hé! hi! hi! hi! hé! Puis je dirai, sans être plus lestes, Tu n’as que mes restes, Toi! Tu n’as que nos restes,” etc. etc.