Christina, Queen of Sweden, became one of her friends when at Paris, and was so charmed by her conversation, that at parting she declared to the whole court that she had "never met with any woman in France to compare with the illustrious Ninon." The latter was in her sixty-fifth year when the famous General Sir John Banier (the comrade of Gustavus Adolphus), who fought at Magdeburg and Leipzig, threw himself at her feet, as the poor Chevalier de Villiers and many more had done; but Ninon only laughed, and said-- "My dear general, you will find that it requires more genius to make love than to make war." So time passed on, and, as I have said, at the age of fourscore Ninon was still to all appearance young, and so charming, that the Abbé Gedoine, a youth of twenty, who had fluttered about her house in the Rue de Parlement, became madly in love with her; but Ninon was tiring now of lovers, and even of life itself. "Ah, Ninon," said the abbé, "love has too long been alike your amusement and your occupation." "My dear abbé," she replied, "the most brief follies are the best. I perceive now, when it is somewhat too late, that it was an absurd step in me to accept of you as an admirer. Let us carry the frolic no farther, but fairly quit each other this instant; and for the term of our natural lives." Thus, after inspiring a youth of twenty with a real passion for her, was Ninon, in her eightieth year, the first to break off from him. In short, from her first boy-lover, the Count de Coligni, when she was only seventeen, to the advent of the Abbé Gedoine, her long life had been a succession of conquests. In the first days of October, 1706, an illness of a kind so peculiar that it baffled the best physicians in Paris--a languor, wasting and helplessness fell upon Ninon, but amid it she looked lovelier than ever, though she was then ninety years and five months old! In succession had the doctors come and gone, surprised and bewildered by a malady for which they had neither a name nor a remedy. At last there came one whom no one knew, and who requested to see Ninon alone. He was a decrepit, but hale little man, very old apparently, though his hair was coal-black. He wore a dark suit, an absurd conical hat, and large horn spectacles, and leaned on a silver-headed cane, which at every pace he planted firmly on the pavement, as if he had a very good opinion of himself. In his left hand he carried a pocket-book of scarlet morocco, richly gilt--doubtless his book of pharmacy. Propped upon a pillow, the dying Ninon--for she _was_ dying now--regarded him with an awful expression in her hollow eyes. "Do you remember _me_, madame?" he was heard to say, by those who loitered or listened without. "But too well," moaned the patient. "Yet fair ladies have often brief memories." "And I have been your dupe! Begone, fiend--you are powerless, and I defy you!" The old man uttered his chuckling laugh.