The whim once seized Ninon to pretend to one of her admirers that she wished to marry. The young man ardently expressed his willingness for this; but Ninon insisted on having a settlement from him, and no small one, being in fact nearly his whole fortune. He signed it away to her. Long before the arrival of the proposed wedding-day, however, the _fiancé’s_ ardour had cooled; and his misery at the loss of his money would have melted a stone to compassion. Having carried on her amusement long enough, Ninon one morning told him, as she sat at her toilet-table, to unroll the curl-paper on her left temple. He did so, and Ninon bade him keep it, which he joyfully did; for it was his little bill of eighty thousand or so of livres. Then she released him from his allegiance, warning him to be more careful in future of rash promises; since some women were designing and absolutely unscrupulous. Monsieur de Navailles, the husband of the lady who had the care of the queen’s young ladies of honour, was another admirer of Ninon’s. His devotion was out-rivalled, however, by that he paid to Bacchus. Piqued at his neglect of her, she contrived to punish him on one of the several occasions when the vine-leaves were in his hair, by appearing to him, after his prolonged sleep, in his own _pourpoint_, and putting his hat on her head, she entered the room where he lay snoring. Flourishing a sword, and swearing like a trooper, she threatened to run him through; and then, having succeeded in really alarming him, she laughingly revealed her identity. Madame de Navailles was a rigid disciplinarian with her charges—not without cause, for Louis XIV., arriving at years of discretion, had evinced great interest in the mode of life led by them in their private apartments; but Madame de Navailles was adamant. De Navailles, therefore, who was ambitious of advancement at Court, devised the notion of becoming once more greatly enamoured of his wife; and thus gaining access to the general salon of the ladies, he contrived, without madame’s knowledge, to get a panel knocked out in the wall skirting a small stairway, by which nothing was easier than for his youthful Majesty to come and go at pleasure. This means of communication being however, very soon discovered, the aperture was blocked up; so greatly to the annoyance of the king, that he dismissed Madame de Navailles from her post; though he had the gratitude to present her husband with the marshal’s bâton.