She herself had plainly shown that she had no interest in the king. Now she set to work to make the king feel an interest in Madame de Maintenon, whom Louis in his long period of gayety had always disliked. Ninon taught the widow how and when to throw herself in the king's way, and how to treat him. She coached her friend as a stage director coaches a promising but raw actor. As a result, when Louis came, smarting, from a squabble with the fiery De Montespan, he would find himself, by the merest chance, in the presence of De Maintenon, whose grave gentleness and attitude of awed devotion served as balm to his quarrel-jarred nerves. He took to seeking out the wise and gentle widow--of his own accord, as he thought--and spending more and more time in her company. And De Maintenon, carefully coached by Ninon, the queen of heart students, managed to awaken in the deadened royal brain a flicker of admiration that slowly warmed into love. At that point Ninon's genius achieved its most brilliant stroke. Under her instructions the widow gave the king's advances just the right sort of treatment. She made it clear to Louis that she scorned to be a royal favorite. As a result, one midnight, there was a secret wedding in the palace chapel; King Louis XIV. becoming the legal, if unacknowledged, husband of the penniless humpback's meek widow; Ninon, it is said, being one of the ceremony's few witnesses. Ninon had "played politics" just once--and with far-reaching results to history; as De Maintenon's future influence over her husband was to prove. Among the results, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes is laid at De Maintenon's door, an act that partly depopulated France and partly populated America. By this time Ninon had become something more than a winner of hearts and a setter of fashions. She found herself a social arbiter as well. Without an introduction to the illustrious Ninon de L'Enclos and a word of indorsement from her, no young man could hope to make his way in Paris society. Noblemen in the country, sending their sons to Paris for a career, moved heaven and earth to obtain for them letters of introduction to Ninon. Her lightest expression of opinion was everywhere quoted as inspired. With a smile or a frown she could make or unmake men's futures at court. Had she so chosen, she might have become, with this amazing amount of power, a most unbearable tyrant. Instead, she used her power wisely and kindly. Charitable to a fault, her tact and her money and her boundless influence were always making the way easy for some one or other.