Superwomen Part 4

Now she set to work to make the king feel an interest in Madame de Maintenon, whom Louis in his long period of gayety had always disliked. Ninon taught the widow how and when to throw herself in the king's way, and how to treat him. She coached her friend as a stage director coaches a promising but raw actor.

As a result, when Louis came, smarting, from a squabble with the fiery De Montespan, he would find himself, by the merest chance, in the presence of De Maintenon, whose grave gentleness and att.i.tude of awed devotion served as balm to his quarrel-jarred nerves.

He took to seeking out the wise and gentle widow--of his own accord, as he thought--and spending more and more time in her company. And De Maintenon, carefully coached by Ninon, the queen of heart students, managed to awaken in the deadened royal brain a flicker of admiration that slowly warmed into love.

At that point Ninon's genius achieved its most brilliant stroke. Under her instructions the widow gave the king's advances just the right sort of treatment. She made it clear to Louis that she scorned to be a royal favorite.

As a result, one midnight, there was a secret wedding in the palace chapel; King Louis XIV. becoming the legal, if unacknowledged, husband of the penniless humpback's meek widow; Ninon, it is said, being one of the ceremony's few witnesses.

Ninon had "played politics" just once--and with far-reaching results to history; as De Maintenon's future influence over her husband was to prove. Among the results, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes is laid at De Maintenon's door, an act that partly depopulated France and partly populated America.

By this time Ninon had become something more than a winner of hearts and a setter of fas.h.i.+ons. She found herself a social arbiter as well.

Without an introduction to the ill.u.s.trious Ninon de L'Enclos and a word of indors.e.m.e.nt from her, no young man could hope to make his way in Paris society. n.o.blemen in the country, sending their sons to Paris for a career, moved heaven and earth to obtain for them letters of introduction to Ninon.

Her lightest expression of opinion was everywhere quoted as inspired.

With a smile or a frown she could make or unmake men's futures at court. Had she so chosen, she might have become, with this amazing amount of power, a most unbearable tyrant. Instead, she used her power wisely and kindly. Charitable to a fault, her tact and her money and her boundless influence were always making the way easy for some one or other.

For instance, in her old age--or rather in what would have pa.s.sed for old age in any other woman--she took an interest in a wizened, monkey-like boy of the people. She set him on the path to advancement and supplied him with the money for his education. To his dying day, the little man remembered her with a veneration most people would have bestowed on a saint; even though he used the education she had given him to help in tearing down the monarchy whose n.o.bles had been his benefactress' slaves. He is known to fame as Voltaire.

Years came and went. They merged into decades and quarter centuries.

The men who once had loved Ninon de L'Enclos grew old and died, and their places were taken by sons and then by grandsons. Dynasties changed. The world rolled on. New times brought new customs.

But Ninon remained unchanged. Still beautiful, still vibrant with all her early gay charm, she remained to outward appearances what she had been for the past fifty years. The grandsons of her girlhood suitors were as madly in love with her as had been their grandsires. In love, in society, in fas.h.i.+on, she was still the unquestioned sovereign.

Throughout Europe, there was now no one who doubted the unadorned truth of the story concerning the Man in Black; for it seemed that no mortal agency could have kept any woman so perennially young. As the years pa.s.sed, folk fell to speculating on how many drops of the precious rose-colored liquid might still remain in the phial. And, in scared voices, they repeated the prophecy of the man in black:

"~You shall see me once again three days before your death.~"

Perhaps, now that you know Ninon better, you may laugh less contemptuously at the tale of the Man in Black; or, at the least, credit her with believing it. Throughout her life, she never changed the story in any way; nor could the shrewdest cross-examining lead her to contradict herself about any of its most minute details. A haunting fear of the Man in Black's promised return was always in her mind, even during her gayest days and nights.

As late as her ninetieth year men made vehement love to her. At an age when most women are withered crones, she still broke hearts. Men fought duels by the dozen for her favor. In her old age a youth blew out his brains on her account.

During her later years a great sorrow came to her. Through no conscious fault of her own, she was enmeshed in what was probably the most horrible tragedy of its sort in history. This tragedy cannot even be touched on here. In no book written in the English language can you find its complete details. It is enough to say that the nameless horror of it wrecked Ninon's health and her mind, leaving her for the time a mental and physical wreck.

Slowly she recovered her health, her brain, and her unquenchable spirits. Her beauty had never been impaired. And once more she ruled as queen of hearts. Now, too, she blossomed forth into literature, becoming with ease a famous author. Her essays were quoted, imitated, lauded to the skies.

Nor is there the slightest reason to doubt that she was their author.

Always bluntly honest to a fault, the woman who would not accept rank or money was not likely to accept the literary ideas of others and pa.s.s them off as her own. Also, the style of her published work was identical with her private letters.

It is odd, and possibly--or possibly not--significant, that of the world's superwomen, more have leaned toward literature than toward any other one pursuit. The gift of writing comes nearer to being their one common trait than do beauty and all the other hackneyed siren charms.

The power that enables such women to win hearts appears to manifest itself by use of the pen.

To instance a very few of the hundreds of heart-breakers who were also authors, letter writers, and so forth, of greater or less note, one has but to recall George Sand, Adah Menken, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Ninon de L'Enclos, Lola Montez, Madame de Sevigne, Madame Recamier, Madame Roland, and Marie Stuart.

By 1706 there was scarce a man or woman left alive who remembered Ninon when, as a girl, she had come first to Paris. Youths who had wors.h.i.+ped her as a middle-aged woman were now aged men. She herself was ninety.

To say that she was still a girl in looks and actions is a gross exaggeration, of course; not the firmest believers in the Man in Black claimed that. But, at ninety, she was still beautiful, still alluring and adorable, as men continued to learn. Younger women--women young enough to be her grandchildren--were neglected for her sake. It is said that on her ninetieth birthday she received a fervent declaration of love from a n.o.ble who had met her but a few days earlier.

Then came the end. On one day, in 1706, Ninon de L'Enclos was in blooming health; on the next she was dying. She wrote a single line to one of her friends and dispatched it by a messenger.

The letter did not find the woman to whom it was addressed until nearly a week later. Three days from the time she wrote it, Ninon died. The friend, opening the letter, read, scrawled in a fear-shaken hand, this sentence:

"~I have just seen the man in black again!~"

CHAPTER THREE

PEG WOFFINGTON

IRISH HEART CONJURER

A throng of people--barefoot peasants, modish idlers, tradesfolk, riffraff--stood in a Dublin courtyard one day in 1727, providing the much-admired "sea of upturned faces." All eyes were raised, all necks were back bent. Every one was looking aloft to where a taut wire was stretched between two post tops.

Along the wire walked a harlequin, taking mincing dance steps and balancing across his shoulders a pole from whose extremities dangled two huge baskets. To make the feat the more interesting by adding a spice of possible peril, announcement had been made that each basket contained a live child.

The chance of a triple tragedy in the event of a misstep made the tight-wire walk a right diverting spectacle, and thrilling withal, to the good folk of Dublin. But half way between the two extremity posts, still a new element of interest was added.

For, at that point, the top suddenly popped off one of the baskets, and a big-eyed, laughing face beamed down, over the edge, at the crowd. The face of a seven-year-old child--a girl. A roar of applause followed upon the youngster's unrehea.r.s.ed appearance.

Thus did Peg Woffington, a queen of her century's actresses and consummate heart conjurer, make her professional debut.

Peg--her full first name, which n.o.body dreamed of using, was Margaret--was the daughter of an Irish bricklayer who had one point in common with certain modernists in that he was rabidly opposed to all doctors.

And the medical guild had in due time its revenge on the sacrilegious brick artist. For once, when Woffington fell ill, he fiercely refused to have a physician summoned. And he rapidly grew better. As her husband was convalescing, Mrs. Woffington sought to make a.s.surance doubly certain by calling in a doctor. The pill juggler looked at the invalid and p.r.o.nounced him out of danger. Next day Woffington died.

Peg was just learning to walk at the time of her lamented father's tilt with the cult of aesculapius. She and her baby sister, Mary, at once set about helping to earn their own living, by toddling on either side of their mother when the widow hawked watercress through the streets, and shrilly piping in duet the virtues of her wares.

To Dublin, when Peg was seven, came one Madame Violante, with a troupe of tumblers and rope dancers. Peg was apprenticed to Madame Violante.

But her term of service as a baby acrobat was short. Her employer had better use for her.

It was Madame Violante who originated the ever-since-popular custom of producing famous plays and operas, with child actors filling all the roles. Her "Liliputian Troupe" scored a big success in Dublin and the provinces. Much of this success was due to Peg, who almost invariably was cast for old-woman parts, and who "doubled in the bra.s.s" by doing quaint little step dances between the acts.

It was cruelly hard work for a growing child; nor was the early eighteenth-century theater the very best sort of nursery and moral training school for little girls. But apart from other and less creditable lessons acquired, she learned stage presence and practically every art and trick of the profession.

From the "Liliputian Troupe," Peg graduated into the more lucrative and equally moral pursuit of theater orange vender. In slack seasons, when no cargo of oranges chanced to have landed recently from the Americas, she acted, off and on; playing, at twelve, mature roles in provincial theater comedies, and exhibiting a rollicking humor that carried her audiences by a.s.saut. At seventeen, she was playing--at seven dollars and fifty cents a week--~Ophelia~ and other exacting parts.

Incidentally, on both sides of the footlight candles--as actress and as orange girl in the pit--she had long since made herself the toast of the Dublin beaux. She was pretty--though not strikingly so. She had a ready, and occasionally flaying, Irish wit. She had, too, the magic, if still undeveloped, fascination of the super-woman. As to her morals--they were the morals of any and every other girl of her environment and upbringing. She was quite as good as she knew how to be. There was not a grain of real vice in her whole cosmos.

But there was a blazing ambition; an ambition that was cramped and choked in the miserable, makes.h.i.+ft provincial playhouses. She burned to be a famous actress. There was no chance for her in Ireland. So she came to London.

It was a case of burning her bridges behind her. For she carried a worn purse that held seventeen s.h.i.+llings. And the not-overnew dress she wore was her sole wardrobe. These were her tangible a.s.sets. On this capital and on genius and pluck and ambition and good looks and the charm that was daily growing more and more irresistible, Peg relied to keep her going.

To manager after manager she trudged. Not one would find work for her.

In all, she made nineteen applications. And she scored just precisely nineteen rank failures.

Finally, half starved and wholly discouraged, she succeeded in interesting the manager of the Covent Garden Theater. And he gave her, or sold her, the chance she sought--the chance to appear before a London audience.