Ninon called unexpectedly at Christina's Paris apartments one morning to talk over the plan. She entered the queen's drawing-room unannounced. There on the floor lay a man, one of the Swedish officials in Christina's suite. He was dead--murdered--and was lying as he had fallen when he had been stricken down. Above him stood Christina, at her side the assassin who had struck the blow. The queen turned to Ninon and explained. The official had displeased her majesty by some undiplomatic act; and taking justice into her own hands, Christina had ordered another member of her suite to murder the offender. She was as unconcerned over the killing as if she had ordered a rabid dog to be shot. Ninon fled in panic fear from the apartment. Nor ever again could she be induced to come into the presence of the royal murderess. Thus ended the Swedish project. Though the confidential friendship of one queen was thus taken forcibly from Ninon, she had later the satisfaction of helping on the cause of another and uncrowned queen. It is her one recorded experience in dabbling with politics, and the role she played therein is interesting. King Louis XIV.--son of that Anne of Austria who had hated Ninon--had reached the age when life began at times to drag. The "~Grand Monarque~" had still fewer reasons than those of Ninon's father to deplore the missing of any good times. But youth had fled from him at last. He found himself, in middle age, a sour-faced, undersized man, with a huge periwig, a huger outjutting beak of a nose, and wearing egregiously high boot heels to eke out his height. People--a very few of them and at a safe distance--were beginning to laugh at his pretensions as a lady-killer. Nature, too, was proving herself less a tender mother than a Gorgonlike stepmother, by racking him with dyspepsia, bad nerves, and gout. These causes led him to turn temporarily to what he termed "the higher life." In other words, by his whim, the court took to wearing somber garments, changing its scandalous conversation for pious reflections and its unprintable novels for works on philosophy. Whereat, yawns of boredom assailed high Heaven. In the course of his brief penitence, Louis frowned majestically upon his tempest-tempered favorite, Madame de Montespan. And she--tactless or over-sure of her position--scowled back, harshly derided the new order of affairs, and waxed more evil-tempered than ever. In Madame de Montespan's household was a certain Madame de Maintenon, widow of the humpbacked little Scarron, who had once sued for Ninon de L'Enclos' favor. Strangely enough, his widow and Ninon were close friends. And at this court crisis. Ninon made the term "friendship" mean something.