an, he repented him; I feel the
same about Remond."

But to return to the Abbe Gedoyn: he left the Jesuits with the Abbe
Fraguier in 1694, that is to say, when Mademoiselle de l'Enclos was
seventy-eight years of age. Both of them immediately made the
acquaintance of Ninon and Madame de la Saliere, and, astonished at the
profound merit they discovered, deemed it to their advantage to
frequent their society for the purpose of adding to their talents
something which the study of the cloister and experience in the king's
cabinet itself had never offered them. Abbe Gedoyn became particularly
attached to Mademoiselle de l'Enclos, whose good taste and
intellectual lights he considered such sure and safe guides. His
gratitude soon received the additions of esteem and admiration, and
the young disciple felt the growth of desires which it is difficult to
believe were real, but which became so pressing, that they revived in
a heart nearly extinct a feeble spark of that fire with which it had
formerly burned. Mademoiselle de l'Enclos refused to accede to the
desires of her lover until she was fully eighty years of age, a term
which did not cool the ardor of the amorous Abbe, who waited
impatiently and on her eightieth birthday compelled his benefactress
to keep her word.

This incident recalls the testimony of a celebrated Countess of
Salisbury, who was called to testify as an expert upon the subject of
love in a celebrated criminal case that was tried over a hundred years
ago in the English House of Lords. The woman correspondent was of an
age when human passion is supposed to be extinct, and her counsel was
attempting to prove that fact to relieve her from the charge. The
testimony of the aged Countess, who was herself over seventy-five
years of age, was very unsatisfactory, and the court put this question
to her demanding an explicit answer.

"Madame," he inquired, "at what age does the sentiment, passion, or
desire of love cease in the female heart?"

Her ladyship, who had lived long in high society and had been
acquainted with all of the gallants and coquettes of the English court
for nearly two generations, and who, herself, had sometimes been
suspected of not having been averse to a little waywardness, looked
down at her feet for a moment thoughtfully, then raising her eyes and
locking squarely into those of the judge, answered:

"My Lord, you will have to ask a woman older than I."

CHAPTER XII

The Villarce