With thanks to Eaglesoars (again)…I need to quit working so much!
AN EXTRAORDINARY WHORE
Before he had to flee the country for killing a man in a duel over a woman, her father raised her in his own image, an Epicurean to her core. She eschewed marriage and the convent as inimical to her autonomy and became the most famous courtesan of her time. She was the incomparable Ninon de Lenclos.
Her timing was never less than flawless. Born in Paris in 1620 when the crowns of Navarre and France were finally joined as a great power, she lived to love and mentor some of the great talents of the age.
17th century France was no kinder to women of modest social status than any other era and certainly not to women who challenged the foundations of the authority of the Church. But that is exactly what she did, and the most notable aspect is that she ended up not in prison but in a convent.
Ninon did not believe in God, soul, heaven or hell. She did, however, believe that man’s moral nature was to seek pleasure and avoid unpleasantness. Romantic love was the apogee of all pleasures; the theologians’ religious construct of human virtue had to be wrong because it was impossible to achieve; and the fruits of an immaterial soul are simply the end results of mechanistic, material causes. Not only that, women were just as epicurean in their nature as men in theirs.
Unwisely, she wrote all this in her letters, the 17th century French version of the internet for intellectuals. Queen Anne packed her off to the Madelonnettes Convent to shut her up. Also because she was getting hysterical letters from wives and mothers who feared their menfolk were being corrupted in her salon.
They weren’t wrong. Her salon at the Hôtel de Sagonne became an intellectual haven for free thinkers, the carriers of The Enlightenment. Fontenelle, Saint-Évremond, Molière, even Richelieu, whose advances she is rumored to have denied. Women were also welcomed, including Françoise d’Aubigné, the future Madame de Maintenon and morganatic wife of Louis XIV.
And true to form, it was another woman and a queen in her own right, who sprung her from the convent. Christina of Sweden, who had abdicated, visited Ninon while she was incarcerated. Christina was an odd duck. She not only renounced her throne, she denied her gender in her behavior, dress, and speech. It seems reasonable that she found Ninon’s views on human sexuality a relief and that is what prompted her to write to Cardinal Mazarin to petition for Ninon’s release. Why Mazarin granted it is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was the possibility that Christina could still, if she chose, claim a throne in Europe, and Mazarin was not a man to make enemies without cause.
Ninon went home and did it again! In 1659, at the age of 39, she published La coquette vengée (The Flirt, Avenged). She argued for the possibility of living a good, virtuous life without the authority of religion.
She had made her point. In her late 40s, Ninon retired from the life of an active courtesan and opened a school. A school to teach the arts of love and pleasure to both young men and young women. The girls attended for free, the boys coughed up the dough.
Throughout her long life, she kept the friends she had made, and continued to make more. Her solicitor, M. Arouet, had a son, Francois Marie, who was introduced to her by the Abbe de Chateauneuf, one of those former lovers who had remained a friend. It was just a year before she died, and the 10 year old Francois found the 84 year old relic “dry as a mummy”. He must have put a good face on it, for in her will she left 2000 francs for M. Arouet to buy books for Francois Marie’s education.
M. Arouet bought the books, Francois Marie read them and today we know him as….Voltaire.
