Odd this day
So: happy it-would-have-been-your-404th birthday Anne ‘Ninon’ de l’Enclos — although you may, apparently, have been born on 9 January 1623, and the 1999 book Women in World History says “some sources erroneously cite November 11, 1620”, and some people spell your name Ninon de Lenclos or Ninon de Lanclos, but… puh: details.
Basically, it’s time to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of one of the 17th century’s more prominent authors and patrons of the arts, who is not known for either of those things because her reputation is that of a courtesan. (Which, to be fair, she was — it’s just that that’s not all, to put it mildly.)
Her father nicknamed her ‘Ninon’, and Encyclopaedia Britannica says “she acquired a lasting interest in Epicurean philosophy” from him, too. Unfortunately, when she was about 12 (or 9, depending on what year she was actually born), he had to leave France because he’d just killed someone in a duel. Wikipedia says her mother died ten years later, at which Ninon got herself to a nunnery, changed her mind a year later, and set out on an altogether different path.
The basics are that her lovers included Gaspard de Coligny (soldier, and marquis d’Andelot), Louis de Bourbon, duc d’Énghien (a military commander who became known as Grand Condé), diplomat Pierre de Villars (diplomat), the marquis de Sévigné and — rather splendidly — his son, Charles de Sévigné, too. Among not a few others.
She also had intellectual admirers, including Molière, poet and dramatist Paul Scarron, and Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis, seigneur de Saint-Évremond (a soldier, writer and ~ahem~ hedonist). Her mental prowess was said to be such that Louis XIV never chose a mistress without asking himself what Ninon would say — and she was an noted wit. When a minister ennobled his mistress, she brought up the subject of Caligula and his horse.
However, at this point, I must sound a note of caution. As far as I could gather, the more detailed the sources, the less reliable they seem to be. Still, let’s take a canter through the legend, anyway, because… blimey.
According to Betsy Prioleau’s 2004 book, Seductress — Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love, Ninon was “the tastemaker of her times”, and
So celebrated were her seductive exploits that for years after her death the women of Versailles petitioned her beribboned skull for erotic success in a secret chapel.
(They didn’t. In a secret chapel, the women of Versailles petitioned her beribboned skull for erotic success, perhaps, but they didn’t ask for the erotic success to happen only in that secret chapel, did they? Oh dear. I seem to have digressed into pedantry.)
Anyway, in an era when (apparently) “two-thirds of [women] could not sign their names”, she had learned languages, science, history, philosophy and lute-playing (from her father, a lutenist and composer) and possessed “magnificent erudition”. Chaps apparently thought “her mind was more attractive than her face”, and
At barely twenty, she spellbound the salon with her fund of knowledge and wisdom. She engaged in Latin repartee with the Great Condé, skewered received truths, and expounded her [Epicurean] philosophy.
She realised at a young age that men had “a thousand privileges that women do not enjoy” (a quote which seems to come from her own writings, but wasn’t attributed, so I can’t check), and up with this she would not put, so
she cruised the Cours-la-Reine (a one-mile promenade ground) each day in her silk sedan chair
…choosing likely chaps to send notes to, most of whom seem to have been powerless to resist. She “swam nude”, hosted parties, and had a “prodigious erotic technique”,
But her biggest sexual secret may have been … cleanliness; when bathing was considered heretical, Ninon washed precoitally with soap and water and applied a light lemon scent.
I think when Prioleau quotes another unattributed source as saying she was “the century’s leading feminist”, that might be stretching it a bit — but, Ninon did (apparently) choose
lovers for pleasure and wealthy payeurs (to whom she denied boudoir privileges) for profit
…so, even if that particular ‘f’ word first appears in the mid-19th century, rather than anywhere near the 17th, how many other women at the time were acting so unapologetically?
Apparently, she “limited her amours to three months, always ending the affair at full boil”, but she and Louis de Mornay, the marquis de Villarceaux (with whom she had a son, upon whom she apparently doted) took off out of Paris for three years before she grew bored of him. Even then, when she left him and returned to the capital, he is said to have taken the house opposite, and been consumed with jealousy when he saw light in her bedroom. She is supposed to have cut her hair and given him her ringlets to pacify him, starting a fashion for short bobs, or chevaux à la Ninon.
Still, there were those who did not take to her. The Paris she’d come back to after those three years away had apparently taken a turn for the puritanical. Prioleau’s assertion that
By thirteen Ninon was a hardened blasphemer … and once brought [a church] service to standstill by singing a bawdy ballad in the middle of a Holy Week sermon
…is, again, unattributed. However, a more scholarly text, Paul Hazard’s The Crisis of the European Mind 1680–1715, says she
was convinced that she had no soul, and never abandoned that conviction, not even in advanced old age, not even at the hour of her death.
…and such atheism was unacceptable to the Queen, Anne of Austria, who had Ninon imprisoned in a convent. Our heroine had friends in (other) high places, though, and the former queen of Sweden helped secure her release.
Overall, it’s not hard to see why she inspired an opera, Ninette, in which she and Cyrano de Bergerac are the lead characters. (Shamefully, I hadn’t realised he was an actual historical figure before researching this. Written some years before Edmond Rostand’s version of the life of old big nose, Ninette takes liberties with historical fact, as you would expect, but in a somewhat different direction. In this one, Cyrano is a handsome lover, although there is still mistaken identity, swordplay, and general buckling of swash.)
Perhaps her most impressive bit of arts patronage came during her lifetime when she met François de Castagnères, abbé de Châteauneuf. No, me neither, but he’d brought along his young godson. Ninon was 83 (again, depending on when she was born), and the young chap in question was about 9. His recollection, written about 50 years later, says
I had written some verses which were worth nothing, but which seemed very good for my age. Mademoiselle de Lenclos had known my mother, who was a very good friend of the abbé de Châteauneuf. Finally it pleased them that I should be taken to see her.
In December that year, she wrote her will. The little boy’s father was her executor, and she must have seen something in the precocious child, because she left him a thousand livres to spend on books. The father’s name was François Arouet, and his son was François-Marie Arouet.
Yes. It was Voltaire.
Essentially, although most of the sources are (and therefore most of the above has also been) an exercise in printing the legend, if even half of it’s true, she was, to employ technical language, fucking amazing.
