Yet another pleasant acquaintance shared those twilight days for Mademoiselle de L’Enclos, never weary of kindly interest and well-doing where she could bestow it. Fortunately for posterity, Ninon was afflicted with an atrociously bad cook, and she was often obliged to go into her kitchen and attend personally to the sauces and the _rôtis_, and the rest. One day she was busily engaged in putting together a partridge pasty for the entertainment of her two friends, who were coming to _déjeuner_ with her. Suddenly the kitchen door opened, and a little boy of some seven to eight years old entered, with intelligent eyes, and a bright smile on his clean-cut features. Taking off his cap, he said in the politest of tones—“Will you please give me a few cinders, Madame, since your fire is alight? Our servant upstairs there has let our fire go out, and papa forbids me to go to school until I have eaten my soup.” Ninon wondered who this little son of a most wise papa might be. He was a small child for going to college, as he told her on further question, was that of the Jesuit College of Clermont. Then, putting facts together, she had scarcely need to ask his name; though on questioning him further still, he told her it was François Marie Arouet. “The son of the treasurer Arouet, of the Court of Accounts—and you live on the floor above mine, do you not?” “That is so, Madame,” nodded the boy, repeating his request, for he was in fear of the professor’s wrath if he should be late. “But you have nothing to put your fire in,” said Ninon. “Ah! how stupid of me,” said the child, as he stooped down, and gathered a handful of the cold ashes. “Please put the hot coals on this,” he went on, holding out the cinder-shielded palms. So that was the little lad of whom her friend, the Abbé de Châteauneuf had spoken as the unusually intelligent child of nobly-born, but poor parents, who were great friends of his. “Bravo!” Ninon had said to him, as he departed with the fire in his hands, “you will be a clever man one of these days,”—and the sparks of that fire kindled to a flame of celebrity which is not likely to die out while the French language or any modern tongue finds expression.