Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/483

Rh from her wit. At the age of twenty-two, she had a fit of illness, which was believed mortal; and when her friends lamented that she should be thus snatched away in the prime of life, she exclaimed—"Ah! I leave only dying people in the world!" A gentleman who was deeply enamoured of her, not being able to inspire any return, in his indignation wrote some lines, in which he said, he without trouble renounced his love, which had lent her charms she did not in reality possess. Ninon immediately wrote an answer in the same measure, saying, that if love lent charms, why did he not borrow some?

With her friend, Marion de Lormes, Ninon thus led a licentious life; but the death of her mother, who was a virtuous and pious woman, with her entreaties and advice, seemed to change her heart all at once. She fled to a convent, to expiate her errors by penitence; but the good impression she had imbibed vanished with her grief, and she came back to the world, which received her with new admiration.

After the death of Richelieu and Louis XIII. the first years of the regency were marked by every species of dissipation; according to the description of St. Evremond, the friend of Ninon, "error was no longer called evil, and vice was named pleasure." Yet the queen at one time had an intention of shutting her up in a convent, but her numerous friends prevented it; and the troubles which soon arose in Paris, induced her to leave it with the Marquis de Villarceaux, with whom she retired to a seat distant from Paris, and remained three years, to the astonishment of every body. At the end of the civil war they returned, and Ninon found her father dying, who