non under the influence of
his master, and to charm her with the great honor done her by a man
upon whom were fixed the eyes of all Europe, prepared a series of
gorgeous fetes, banquets and entertainments at the palace at Rueil.
But Ninon was not in the least overwhelmed, and refused to hear the
sighs of the great man. Hoping to inspire jealousy, he affected to
love Marion de Lormes, a proceeding which gave Ninon great pleasure as
it relieved her from the importunities of the Cardinal. The end of it
was, that Richelieu gave up the chase and left Ninon in peace to
follow her own devices in her own way.

Whatever may have been the relations between Ninon and Cardinal
Richelieu, it is certain that the Count de Coligny was her first
sentimental attachment, and the two lovers, in the first intoxication
of their love, swore eternal constancy, a process common to all new
lovers and believed possible to maintain. It was not long, however,
before Ninon perceived that the first immoderate transports of love
gradually lost their activity, and by applying the precepts of her
philosophy to explain the phenomenon, came to regard love by its
effects, as a blind mechanical movement, which it was the policy of
men to ennoble according to the conventional rules of decency and
honor, to the exclusion of its original meaning.

After coldly reasoning the matter out to its only legitimate
conclusion, she tore off the mask covering a metaphysical love, which
could not reach or satisfy the light of intelligence or the sentiments
and emotions of the heart, and which appeared to her to possess as
little reality as the enchanted castles, marvels of magic, and
monsters depicted in poetry and romance. To her, love finally became a
mere thirst, and a desire for pleasure to be gratified by indulgence
like all other pleasure. The germ of philosophy already growing in her
soul, found nothing in this discovery that was essentially unnatural;
on the contrary, it was essentially natural. It was clear to her
logical mind, that a passion like love produced among men different
effects according to different dispositions, humors, temperament,
education, interest, vanity, principles, or circumstances, without
being, at the same time, founded upon anything more substantial than a
disguised, though ardent desire of possession, the essential of its
existence, after which it vanished as fire disappears through lack of
fuel. Dryden, the celebrated English poetic