Ninon de L’Enclos
This modern Aspasia, like her Greek prototype, was remarkable not only for her beauty and wit, but for her fondness for cultivated society. Both of them, though of easy virtue and devoted to pleasure to the end of life, held receptions which were frequented by the most intellectual men and women of the period in which they lived. Ninon had a constant succession of lovers, but at the same time her society was courted by Mme. de Lafayette, Mme. de Sully, Mme. Scarron (afterward De Maintenon), and Christina of Sweden, and among her most favored admirers were the great Condé, La Rochefoucauld, Villarceaux, and D’Estrées. She was regarded as a model of refinement and elegance in her manners. She lived to the age of ninety, yet preserved her beauty and fascination to the last. She had lovers for three generations in the family of Sévigné. She had two illegitimate sons, one of whom, in ignorance of his birth and relationship, was the victim of an unhallowed passion for his mother. He was then nineteen years of age, and Ninon was fifty-six. While urging his love, she found that the only way to check his importunity was to disclose her secret. Thereupon he blew out his brains, but the tragedy made little impression upon Ninon, as she was dead to the instincts of maternal tenderness.