ing the
social ladder.

It was perhaps due to Ninon's kindness in the Villarceaux episode,
that enabled her to retain the friendship of Madame de Maintenon when
the latter had reached the steps of the throne. The mistress of
royalty endeavored to persuade Ninon to appear at court but there was
too great a difference in temper and constitution between the two
celebrated women to admit of any close relations. Ninon made use of
the passion of love for the purpose of pleasure only, while her more
exalted rival made it subservient to her ambitious projects, and did
not hesitate with that view to cloak her licentious habits beneath the
mantle of religion, and add hypocrisy to frailty. The income of Ninon
de l'Enclos was agreeably and judiciously spent in the society of men
of wit and letters, but the revenues of the Marchioness de Maintenon
were squandered on the useless decoration of her own person, or
hoarded for the purpose of elevating into rank and notice an
insignificant family, who had no other claim to such distinction than
that derived from the easy honesty of a female relation, and the
dissolute extravagance of a vain and licentious sovereign.

While Ninon de l'Enclos was receiving and encouraging the attentions
of the most distinguished men of her time, literati, nobles, warriors,
statesmen, and sages, in her house in the Rue des Tournelles, the
mistress of the sovereign, the dear friend who had betrayed her to the
Marquis de Villarceaux, was swallowing, at Versailles, the adulations
of degraded courtiers of every rank and profession. There were met
together there the vain and the ambitious, the designing and the
foolish, the humblest and the proudest of those who, whether proud or
humble, or ambitious, or vain, or crafty, were alike the devoted
servants of the monarch or the monarch's mistress--princes, cardinals,
bishops, dukes and every kind of nobility, excisemen and priests,
keepers of the royal conscience and necessary--all ministers of filth,
each in his degree, from the secretaries of state to the lowest
underlings in office--clerks of the ordnance, victualing, stamps,
customs, colonies, and postoffice, farmers and receivers general,
judges and cooks, confessors and every other caterer to the royal
appetite. This was the order of things that Ninon de l'Enclos was
contending against, and that she succeeded by methods that must be
considered saintly compared with the others, stands recorded in the
pages of