The little Louis, who was in his fifth year at the time of the king’s death, does not seem greatly to have interested him or afforded him any satisfaction; while the child rather shrank from him, notably when he saw him in his night-cap. Then he broke into piercing screams of terror. This the king laid, with all her other misdeeds, at the queen’s door. He declared that she prompted the little boy to his objections. It was a pitiable ending to a melancholy existence—inexpressibly lonely, for in those last months, Anne left him entirely to himself. Less desolate than the king, finding distraction for ennui in the society of her ladies, and the gentlemen of her own little Court, among whom Monsignor Giulio Mazarini figured ever more and more prominently. Previously to Richelieu’s death, the handsome, fascinating Mazarin had been a constant frequenter of Ninon’s _réunions_; but from these he soon withdrew almost entirely, in favour of the dazzling metal to be found in the Louvre, for there it rang of ambitions, which there was every chance of finding fully satisfied. His first master-stroke was to set aside the late king’s will—which constituted a counsel of regency, himself being chief of the counsel, which he had himself recommended to Louis—making Anne regent, with himself for prime-minister. The king was dead, Louis XIV. but a small child, and for Mazarin it was “Long live the Queen!” while Ninon found ample consolation in the devotion of her splendid hero, Louis de Bourbon, the great Condé, Duc d’Enghien. Hitherto love had been a fragile toy for her, hanging about her by the lightest of chains made to be broken. For Condé, the sentiment lay deeper, nourished by the breath of adulation surrounding him when he returned, victorious over the Spaniards, from the field of Rocroi; and she was fired to flames of admiration and of delight in his distinguished presence. Handsome, amiable, gallant, to Ninon and to France he was as a demigod. CHAPTER VIII “Loving like a Madman”—A Great Transformation—The Unjust Tax—Parted Lovers—A Gay Court, and A School for Scandal and Mazarin’s Policy—The Regent’s Caprices—The King’s Upholsterer’s Young Son—The Théâtre Illustre—The Company of Monsieur and Molière. “A man of sense may love like a madman, but never like a fool.” It is the dictum of François de la Rochefoucauld, and must have been framed from his deep attachment to Condé’s sister, Madame de Longueville, one of the most charming of the women of the great world at that time, and bound by ties of close friendship with Ninon. It was no one-sided love, no case of the one who loves, and the one who merely consents to it; but mutual, and as passionate, as certainly for a time the flame was pure, shining with a clear, unflecked radiance.