thoroughly, her
experience extending over a period of seventy-five years of intimate
association with men of every stamp, from the Royal prince to the
Marquis de Sevigne, the latter wearying her to such an extent that she
designated him as "a man beyond definition; with a soul of pulp, a
body of wet paper, and a heart of pumpkin fricasseed in snow," his own
mother, the renowned Madame de Sevigne, admitting that he was "a heart
fool."

Ninon took this weak Chevalier in charge and endeavored to make a man
of him by exposing his frailties, and, entering into a long
correspondence, to instruct him in the pathology of the female heart,
with which he was disposed to tamper on the slightest provocation. Her
letters will show that she succeeded finally in bringing him to
reason, but that in doing so, she was compelled to betray her own sex
by exposing the secret motives of women in their relations with men.

That she knew women as well as men, can not be disputed, for,
beginning with Madame de Maintenon and the Queen of Sweden, Christine,
down along the line to the sweet Countess she guards so successfully
against the evil designs of the Marquis de Sevigne, including Madame
de La Fayette, Madame de Sevigne, Madame de La Sabliere, and the most
distinguished and prominent society women of France, they all were her
particular friends, as well as intimates, and held her in high esteem
as their confidante in all affairs of the heart.

No other woman ever held so unique a position in the world of society
as Mademoiselle de l'Enclos, and her letters to the Marquis de Sevigne
may, therefore, be considered as standards of the epistolary art upon
the subjects she treats; as containing the most profound insight into
the female heart where love is concerned, and as forming a study of
the greatest value in everything that pertains to the relations
between the sexes.

There is an entire absence of mawkish sentimentality, of effort to
conceal the secret motives and desires of the heart beneath specious
language and words of double meaning. On the contrary, they tear away
from the heart the curtain of deceit, artifice and treachery, to
expose the nature of the machinery behind the scenes.

These letters must be read in the light of the opinions of the wisest
philosophers of the seventeenth century upon her character.

"Inasmuch as the first use she (Mademoiselle de l'Enclos) made of her
reason, was to become enfranchised from vulgar err