Very pleasant and entertaining the world of society was then; and seasoned as it was with even unusual spice of malice and spite, scandal was rife. Among others, the stepmother of Madame de Chevreuse, Madame de Montbazon, who was married to the old Duc de Rohan, was a past-mistress in the gentle art of making mischief; and where the material was insufficient, she manufactured it without scruple. In this way she nearly succeeded in bringing a rift into the love-harmonies of Henri de la Rochefoucauld and his adored Madame de Longueville, by means of sheer, brazen lying, alleging that certain letters of Madame de Longueville, which had been found, had dropped from the pocket of Coligny. It was a pitiful fabrication, and Madame de Montbazon—of whom de Retz, in his Memoirs, says “I never saw any person showing in her vices less respect for virtue”—did not come out of it with very flying colours, for all her best efforts at effrontery, and she received an order from Mazarin to retire to Tours. The letters, in effect, proved to be not those of Madame de Longueville at all; and the pocket they dropped out of, was not Coligny’s. It was altogether an affair of another pair of lovers. The embellishments of the Louvre were still not completed, before the queen decided not to reside in it. She began to recall, rather tardily it would seem, all the lugubrious memories of her past life connected with the palace; and she established herself in the magnificent Palais Royal—originally the Palais Cardinal. In all those festivities, Ninon took prominent part. Ever philosophical, she thus consoled herself for the prolonged absence of the Duc d’Enghien, an absence which had, moreover, not intensified the sentiments of adoration she at first conceived for him. It was but Ninon’s way. She had begun to see small defects in the case-armour of the perfection of her Mars. Her acquaintance with the dead languages supplied her with the Latin proverb, “_vir pilosus, aut libidinum aut fortis_.” “Now Esau was a hairy man,” and the Duc d’Enghien was also _vir pilosus_, and Ninon taxed him with being a greater warrior than an ardent wooer, and the passion cooled rapidly; but the friendship and mutual liking ever remained.