Slowly she recovered her health, her brain, and her unquenchable spirits. Her beauty had never been impaired. And once more she ruled as queen of hearts. Now, too, she blossomed forth into literature, becoming with ease a famous author. Her essays were quoted, imitated, lauded to the skies. Nor is there the slightest reason to doubt that she was their author. Always bluntly honest to a fault, the woman who would not accept rank or money was not likely to accept the literary ideas of others and pass them off as her own. Also, the style of her published work was identical with her private letters. It is odd, and possibly--or possibly not--significant, that of the world's superwomen, more have leaned toward literature than toward any other one pursuit. The gift of writing comes nearer to being their one common trait than do beauty and all the other hackneyed siren charms. The power that enables such women to win hearts appears to manifest itself by use of the pen. To instance a very few of the hundreds of heart-breakers who were also authors, letter writers, and so forth, of greater or less note, one has but to recall George Sand, Adah Menken, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Ninon de L'Enclos, Lola Montez, Madame de Sevigne, Madame Recamier, Madame Roland, and Marie Stuart. By 1706 there was scarce a man or woman left alive who remembered Ninon when, as a girl, she had come first to Paris. Youths who had worshiped her as a middle-aged woman were now aged men. She herself was ninety. To say that she was still a girl in looks and actions is a gross exaggeration, of course; not the firmest believers in the Man in Black claimed that. But, at ninety, she was still beautiful, still alluring and adorable, as men continued to learn. Younger women--women young enough to be her grandchildren--were neglected for her sake. It is said that on her ninetieth birthday she received a fervent declaration of love from a noble who had met her but a few days earlier. Then came the end. On one day, in 1706, Ninon de L'Enclos was in blooming health; on the next she was dying. She wrote a single line to one of her friends and dispatched it by a messenger. The letter did not find the woman to whom it was addressed until nearly a week later. Three days from the time she wrote it, Ninon died. The friend, opening the letter, read, scrawled in a fear-shaken hand, this sentence: "~I have just seen the man in black again!~" CHAPTER THREE PEG WOFFINGTON IRISH HEART CONJURER A throng of people--barefoot peasants, modish idlers, tradesfolk, riffraff--stood in a Dublin courtyard one day in 1727, providing the much-admired "sea of upturned faces." All eyes were raised, all necks were back bent. Every one was looking aloft to where a taut wire was stretched between two post tops.