But, if no woman were permitted to succeed to the place which Marthe du Vigean had occupied in Enghien’s affections, the ardent nature which he had inherited together with the courage of his ancestors soon found satisfaction in amours of a less sentimental character, and his life became so dissipated that, during the summer of 1646, the Prince de Condé felt obliged to remonstrate with him in the strongest terms. “My son,” he writes, “God bless you. Cure yourself, or, it is better to poniard yourself than lead the life that you are doing.... I pray God to console me. I write to you in despair, and am, Monsieur, your good father and friend....”[195] The Duc d’Enghien did not poniard himself, but neither did he amend his ways to any appreciable extent. His conquests in the _pays de tendre_ far outnumbered those beyond the Rhine, but the very ease with which they were achieved deprived them of all value in his eyes and speedily quenched the flame of passion: indeed, the only woman to whose charms he seems to have been really sensible was the celebrated Ninon de l’Enclos, to whom his attention seems first to have been drawn by the enthusiastic praises of their common friend Saint-Évremond. For a year or two the prince was a frequent visitor at Ninon’s hôtel in the Rue des Tournelles, and the lady, whose vanity was flattered by the admiration of the hero of the hour, was very kind to him indeed. But it was not in Ninon’s nature to be faithful to any one for long--“I shall love you for three months,” she once wrote to a new admirer, “and three months is an eternity!”--and, besides, the victor of Rocroi made war a great deal better than he made love, and preferred to receive homage rather than to offer it. So gradually her affection cooled, and when the prince, on his return from the campaign of 1648, reproached her for having encouraged the intrigue between his sister Madame Longueville and La Rochefoucauld, and for permitting the lovers to meet at her house, she dismissed him and consoled herself with the Marquis de Villarceaux, who had long sued for her favours. At the beginning of December, the Prince de Condé, who had been in failing health for the last eighteen months, was taken seriously ill, and at midnight on the 26th he died, in his fifty-seventh year. He made, we are assured, a very Christian end, in the presence of his wife and his two sons--Madame de Longueville had followed her husband to the Congress of Münster--and “parted from _Madame la Princesse_ as though he had loved her all his life.”[196] In his will, he left large sums to the poor, “deeming it incumbent upon him to restore the profits of the benefices that he had wrongly enjoyed,” and even the humblest of his servants was not forgotten. His body was interred in the parish church of Valery; his heart he bequeathed to the Jesuits of the Rue Saint-Antoine, an example which was followed by his descendants.