In no very long time Monsieur de L’Enclos, noting the bent of his daughter’s nature, himself took over her training. He carried it on, it is scarcely necessary to say, upon a plane widely apart from the mother’s. A man of refined intellect, he had studied the books and philosophy of the renaissance of literature; and before Ninon was eleven years old, while imbuing her with the love of reading such books as the essays of Montaigne and the works of Charon, he accustomed her to think and to reason for herself, an art of which she very soon became a past-mistress, the result being an ardent recognition of the law of liberty, and the Franciscan counsel of perfection: “_Fay ce qu’et voudray._” Ninon possessed an excellent gift of tongues, cultivating it to the extent of acquiring fluently, Italian, Spanish, and English, rendered the more easy of mastery from her knowledge of Latin, which she so frequently quotes in her correspondence. Her love of music was great; she sang well, and was a proficient on the lute, in which her father himself, a fine player, instructed her. She conversed with facility, and doubtless took care to cultivate her natural gifts in those days when the arts of conversation and _causerie_ were indispensable for shining in society, and she loved to tell a good story; but she drew a distinct line at reciting. One day when Mignard, the painter, deplored his handsome daughter’s defective memory, she consoled him—“How fortunate you are,” she said, “she cannot recite.” The popular acceptation of Ninon de L’Enclos’ claims to celebrity would appear to be her beauty, which she retained to almost the end of her long life—a beauty that was notable; but it lay less in perfection of the contours of her face, than in the glorious freshness of her complexion, and the expression of her magnificent eyes, at once vivacious and sympathetic, gentle and modest-glancing, yet brilliant with voluptuous languor. Any defects of feature were probably those which crowned their grace—and when as in the matter of a slight wrinkle, which in advanced years she said had rudely planted itself on her forehead, the courtly comment on this of Monsieur de St Evrémond was to the effect that “Love had placed it there to nestle in.” Her well-proportioned figure was a little above middle height, and her dancing was infinitely graceful.