n all their various
lights and shades.

Imbibing such philosophy from her earliest infancy, the father taking
good care to press them deep into her plastic mind, it is not
astonishing that Ninon should discard the more distasteful fruits to
be painfully harvested by following her mother's tuition, and accept
the easily gathered luscious golden fruit offered her by her father.
Like all children and many adults, the glitter and the tinsel of the
present enjoyment were too powerful and seductive to be resisted, or
to be postponed for a problematic pleasure.

The very atmosphere which surrounded the young girl, and which she
soon learned to breathe in deep, pleasurable draughts, was surcharged
with the intoxicating oxygen of freedom of action, liberality, and
unrestrained enjoyment. While still very young she was introduced into
a select society of the choicest spirits of the age and speedily
became their idol, a position she continued to occupy without
diminution for over sixty years. No one of all these men of the world
had ever seen so many personal graces united to so much
intellectuality and good taste. Ninon's form was as symmetrical,
elegant and yielding as a willow; her complexion of a dazzling white,
with large sparkling eyes as black as midnight, and in which reigned
modesty and love, and reason and voluptuousness. Her teeth were like
pearls, her mouth mobile and her smile most captivating, resistless
and adorable. She was the personification of majesty without pride or
haughtiness, and possessed an open, tender and touching countenance
upon which shone friendship and affection. Her voice was soft and
silvery, her arms and hands superb models for a sculptor, and all her
movements and gestures manifested an exquisite, natural grace which
made her conspicuous in the most crowded drawing-room. As she was in
her youth, so she continued to be until her death at the age of ninety
years, an incredible fact but so well attested by the gravest and most
reliable writers, who testify to the truth of it, that there is no
room for doubt. Ninon attributed it not to any miracle, but to her
philosophy, and declared that any one might exhibit the same
peculiarities by following the same precepts. We have it on the most
undoubted testimony of contemporaneous writers, who were intimate with
him, that one of her dearest friends and followers, Saint-Evremond, at
the age of eighty-nine years, inspired one of the famous beauties of
t