Thereupon, linking her arm in Voiture’s, Ninon begged him to conduct her to Number 6, rue des Tournelles. The poet, vastly enjoying the excitement his words had evoked, readily complied, and arrived at Marion’s apartments where the Capitaine de la Rochefoucauld was duly discovered. Then broke the storm, ending in Marsillac’s amazement when Ninon demanded how it was that he had not discovered in her his old friend Ninon de L’Enclos. Then, in the joy and delight of recognition, Marsillac, forgetting the very presence of her rival, sprang to her side, and offering her his arm, sallied forth back to Ninon’s abode, spending the rest of the day in recalling old times at Loches, and in transports of happiness. Only late into the night, long after Marsillac had left her presence and she was lost in dreamful sleep, it brought the faces of her mother and of St Vincent de Paul vividly before her, gazing with sad reproachful eyes; and with her facile pen she recorded the memory of that day, fraught with its conflict of spirit and desire. “O sweet emotions of love! blessed fusion of souls! ineffable joys that descend upon us from Heaven! Why is it that you are united to the troubles of the senses, and that at the bottom of the cup of such delight remorse is found?” Whether through the silence of the small hours any echoes touched her vivid imagination of the Man in Black’s mocking laughter, no record tells; but in any case, with the fading of the visions, the disturbing reflections were quickly lost in the joy of Marsillac’s society, as also in that of St Evrémond—the very soul of gaiety and wit and every delightful characteristic. “How happy could I be with either, Were t’other dear charmer away,” says Captain MacHeath, and there were days together that Marsillac did absent himself. The grand passion of his life was not with either of the two women, or with any of the fair dames then immediately around. They were merely the toys of his gallant and amiable nature, and at that time he was deeply absorbed in the duties of his profession, and his ardent devotion to the queen’s cause. It was, indeed, one most difficult and dangerous, ever facing, as it did, the opposition of Richelieu, who saw in every friend and partisan of Anne of Austria Spanish aggression and a foe to France.