For all who list to read, her letter-writing powers stand perpetuated in her published correspondence, and while the theme is almost unvarying—the philosophy of love and friendship—her wit and fancy treat it in a thousand graceful ways. Fickle as she was in love, she was constant in friendship, and the heat of the first, often so startlingly transient, frequently settled down into life-long _camaraderie_ rarely destroyed. While not ungenerous to her rivals in the tender passion, she could be dangerously jealous; but gifted with the saving grace of humour, of which women are said to be destitute, the anger and malice were oftentimes allowed to die down into forgiveness, and perhaps also, forgetfulness. Rearing and temperament set Ninon de L’Enclos apart; even among those many notable women whose intimate she was. Essentially a product of her century, she lived her own life in its fulness. Following ever her father’s counsel, she was at once as boundlessly unrestricted in her observance of that perfect law of liberty to which she yielded obedience, as she was scrupulous in selection. Says Monsieur de St Evrémond of her—“Kindly and indulgent Nature has moulded the soul of Ninon from the voluptuousness of Epicurus and the virtue of Cato.” And at last, after an interval of six years, Ninon and Marsillac met again. It was in the salon of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Mademoiselle de L’Enclos, beautiful, sought after, already the centre of an admiring circle, the talk of Paris, and Monsieur le Capitaine de la Rochefoucauld, already for two or three years a gallant soldier, chivalrous, romantic, handsome with the beauty of intellect, interesting from his air of gentle, cynical pensiveness, ardent in the cause of the queen so mercilessly persecuted by Richelieu, and therefore lacking the advancement his qualities merited, still, however, finding opportunity to indulge in the gallantries of the society he so adorned. Someone has said that few ever less practically recognised the doctrines of Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld’s maxims, than did Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld himself, and the aphorisms have been criticised, and exception has again and again been taken to them, not perhaps altogether unreasonably; but in any case he justified himself of his dictum that “love is the smallest part of gallantry”; for when at last—and it took some time—Marsillac recognised his old scapegrace chum of the Loches château, homage and admiration he yielded her indeed; but it was far from undivided, and shared in conspicuously by her rival, Marion Delorme, a woman of very different mould from Ninon. Like her, beautiful exceedingly, but more impulsive, softer-natured, more easily apt to give herself away and to regret later on. Intellectually greatly Ninon’s inferior, she was yet often a thorn in the side of the jealous Mademoiselle de L’Enclos. [Illustration: ARMAND JEAN DU PLESSIS _Cardinal Duc de Richelieu_ _Né à Paris le 5^e 7^{bre} 1585. Mort le 4 Décembre 1642._