he English Court with an ardent attachment.

The beauties of her person were so far developed at the age of twelve
years, that she was the object of the most immoderate admiration on
the part of men of the greatest renown, and her beauty is embalmed in
their works either as a model for the world, or she is enshrined in
song, poetry, and romance as the heroine.

In fact Ninon had as tutors the most distinguished men of the age, who
vied with one another in embellishing her young mind with all the
graces, learning and accomplishments possible for the human mind to
contain. Her native brightness and active mind absorbed everything
with an almost supernatural rapidity and tact, and it was not long
before she became their peer, and her qualities of mind reached out so
far beyond theirs in its insatiable longing, that she, in her turn,
became their tutor, adviser and consoler, as well as their tender
friend.

CHAPTER IV

The Morals of the Period

Examples of the precocious talents displayed by Mademoiselle de
l'Enclos are not uncommon in the twentieth century, but the
application she made of them was remarkable and uncommon. Accomplished
in music, learned and proficient in the languages, a philosopher of no
small degree, and of a personal beauty sometimes called "beaute de
diable," she appeared upon the social stage at a time when a new idol
was an imperative necessity for the salvation of moral sanity, and the
preservation of some remnants of personal decency in the sexual
relations.

Cardinal Richelieu had just succeeded in consolidating the usurpations
of the royal prerogatives on the rights of the nobility and the
people, which had been silently advancing during the preceding reigns,
and was followed by the long period of unexampled misgovernment, which
oppressed and impoverished as well as degraded every rank and every
order of men in the French kingdom, ceasing only with the Revolution.

The great Cardinal minister had built worse than he had intended, it
is to be hoped; for his clerico-political system had practically
destroyed French manhood, and left society without a guiding star to
cement the rope of sand he had spun. Unable to subject the master
minds among the nobility to its domination, ecclesiasticism had
succeeded in destroying them by augmenting royal prerogatives which it
could control with less difficulty. Public maxims of government,
connected as they were with private morals, had debauche