Ninon de Lenclos

French courtesan and writer

• Born: November 10, 1620
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: October 17, 1705
• Place of death: Paris, France

Lenclos was a feminist intellectual and a courtesan who scorned marriage and prized her independence. She founded a fashionable salon where some of the most prominent men and women in France gathered for discussions, especially of literature and philosophy. She contributed immeasurably to the intellectual development of seventeenth century French society.

Early Life

Ninon de Lenclos (nee-nohn deh lahn-kloh) was named Anne at birth. She was the third child and only daughter of Henri de Lenclos, a pleasure-loving, free-thinking cavalry officer, and his pious wife, Marie-Barbe de La Marche. It was her father who gave Anne the name “Ninon,” and she would use it the rest of her life. Henri also taught his daughter to play the lute, and he supervised her reading. Despite her mother’s best efforts, Ninon soon turned away from Catholicism, preferring the Epicurean, libertine philosophy her father embraced. Many of the principles she would live by came from one of his favorite writers, the sixteenth century French essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.

Unfortunately, Henri became involved in a love affair with a married woman. He was tried for adultery and had attempts made on his life. After killing one of his persecutors, Henri fled from France, and with his property confiscated, the family was left in straitened circumstances. Marie-Barbe moved to a small house in the Marais, which was the new social and cultural center of Paris. It was here that Lenclos became the “pet” of aristocratic ladies and learned how society operated.

By the time the voluptuous, flirtatious girl was fifteen, it seemed to her mother that her daughter’s marriage should be arranged. What Marie-Barbe did not realize, however, was that none of the young men who flocked to her house would even consider marrying a girl without a dowry. Also, both Lenclos and her mother naively believed the promises of the sieur de Saint-Étienne, a worthless playboy, who seduced Lenclos and then abandoned her. There was another liaison, but this time Lenclos did not let herself fall in love, and she broke off the affair to nurse her dying mother. After Marie-Barbe’s death, Lenclos retreated to a convent, but evidently she decided that she could never take the veil. When she emerged in 1643, she had decided to support herself by becoming a courtesan.

Life’s Work

Over the next four decades, Lenclos received money for her maintenance from five men she referred to as “payeurs.” In return, they were occasionally admitted to her company and some of them to her bed. From among the many men who sought her company, Lenclos chose her lovers, but she never accepted a sou (a trifle) from any of them. In each case, after Lenclos’s passion cooled, she ended an affair, but usually her former lovers remained in her circle of friends, which would become her salon. That circle also included a number of men, and some women, who simply enjoyed her company. Lenclos set the tone for what would become her salon, insisting that her guests behave with the utmost decorum and consider topics of real significance.

Even before her mother’s death, Lenclos had made some impressive friends. At the salon of her friend Marion Delorme, who for a time was the mistress of the powerful Cardinal de Richelieu , Lenclos had met the young abbé Paul Scarron, who would become a famous writer, as well as the distinguished courtier, wit, and writer Saint-Évremond (Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis). Both men became mainstays of Lenclos’s salon, and they remained her lifelong friends. Through her conversations with Saint-Évremond, Lenclos came to understand her place in life. She would live not as the women around her—dependent upon tyrannical men—but like an honnête homme, an independent person governed by a keen sense of honor.

However, no one in France could live unaffected by politics. Lenclos lost a number of her friends during the Wars of the Fronde (1648-1653), in which France saw serious internal challenges to royal power and national unity. That uprising also cost the life of her father, who had evidently slipped back into Paris in 1647; it is not known whether he saw Lenclos during the two years before his death. With Paris intermittently under siege and conditions there almost intolerable, Lenclos fled to a convent. There, however, she did not find the serenity she sought. Instead, she was so hounded by a relative of Richelieu, in this case, the lecherous older brother of the famous statesman, that she decided to return to Paris, where she again maintained her salon, entertained her friends, and indulged in short-lived affairs, including one with the comte de Sévigné, the husband of the brilliant letter writer, Madame de Sévigné.

Then, in 1652, when she was twenty-nine, Lenclos fell deeply in love with Louis de Mornay, marquis de Villarceaux. The two left Paris and spent most of the next three years together in the countryside, where, in 1653, their son Louis-François de Mornay was born. By 1655, the affair had run its course, and Lenclos went back to Paris, her friends, and her salon. However, the following year, the religious party at court finally succeeded in having Lenclos sent to a convent dedicated to the reform of wayward women. After nine months in captivity, she received a visit from Queen Christina of Sweden , who used her powerful influence to have Lenclos released.

Lenclos’s friendship with the playwright Molière, which began at about this time, was almost inevitable, given their mutual passion for honesty. He is known to have consulted her regularly about his works. In his comedy Les Précieuses ridicules (pr. 1659, pb. 1660; The Affected Young Ladies , 1732), Molière ridiculed prudish court ladies, such as those who had intrigued against Lenclos. That same year, in her epistle La Coquette vangée , Lenclos’s only significant literary work, she exposed two seemingly pious men who had been sent to her salon as spies. When Molière finished Tartuffe: Ou, L’Imposteur (pr. 1664, pb. 1669; Tartuffe , 1732), a play about a religious hypocrite, he read the play to Lenclos. After it was banned, she joined him in the five-year struggle for permission to return it to the stage.

Lenclos’s final liaison was with Charles Sévigné, the twenty-three-year-old son of one of her earlier lovers. However, her affairs had always been mere amusements to her; it was her social and intellectual life that was always of primary importance. In her later years, Lenclos became the person to whom young aristocrats were sent to be polished, while established intellectual and political leaders continued to frequent her salon. When Lenclos was in her eighties, the young François-Marie Arouet (the writer and philosopher Voltaire) was taken to meet her. She encouraged him to write poetry, and she left him a substantial bequest. Long after he had become famous, Voltaire would often refer to her kindness. Lenclos died on October 17, 1705. She was buried in Paris, at the church of Saint Paul.

Significance

Over the course of her life, Lenclos was well respected for her opinions. It has been said that when King Louis XIV took a new mistress, he wanted to know what Lenclos might say about his decision.

Though her sense of decorum had made her a preeminent social arbiter, Lenclos also functioned as an intellectual lightning rod. She contributed to the thought of Saint-Évremond, as recorded in their correspondence during his long exile in England; she commented on Molière’s works-in-progress. Voltaire was to later make references to her.

Perhaps even more significant, however, is that she was a woman who rejected a masculine culture, society, and Church. She was a courtesan who refused to sell sexual favors, and she was a feminist who was able to bring the great men of her era into her presence, and into the presence of other women, proving that women, too, could be great thinkers.

Bibliography

Austin, Cecil. The Immortal Ninon: A Character-Study of Ninon de L’Enclos. London: G. Routledge, 1927. A fictionalized biography in which the author speculates about the thoughts and feelings of his characters, assumptions generally in line with historical facts. Illustrated.

Cohen, Edgar H. Mademoiselle Libertine: A Portrait of Ninon de Lanclos. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. The standard biography, which provides a useful list of principal persons, a chronology, a bibliography, an index, and illustrations.

Magne, Émile. Ninon de Lanclos. Edited and translated by Gertrude Scott Stevenson. New York: Holt, 1926. A readable study, though lacking in dates. Includes list of Lenclos’s works. Extensive bibliography. Illustrated.

Robinson, Charles Henry, ed. and trans. Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L’Enclos, the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century. 1903. Reprint. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2004. A paperback reprint of one of the earliest biographies of Lenclos written in English.

Sainte-Beuve, C. A. “Mademoiselle de l’Enclos.” In Portraits of the Seventeenth Century, Historic and Literary. Translated by Katharine P. Wormeley. Vol. 1. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964. This work points out the qualities in Lenclos’s character that drew men and women to her and her salon.

Waddicor, Mark. “Voltaire and Ninon de Lenclos.” In Woman and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: Essays in Honour of John Stephenson Spink, edited Eva Jacobs, W. H. Barber, Jean H. Bloch, F. W. Leakey, and Eileen Le Breton. London: Athlone, 1979. The writer examines evidence of Voltaire’s association with Lenclos and his continuing fascination with her.