Ninon de L'Enclos
Philosopher and Courtesan: A Grand Siècle Celebrity
Ninon de L'Enclos was one of the most famous and controversial French women of the 17th century, and her name remains synonymous with beauty and wit.
The famed author, wit, courtesan and patron Anne de L’Enclos was born in Paris, 1620. Anne was nicknamed “Ninon” by her father, who was exiled from France after a duel in 1632. She lost her mother a decade later, and entered a convent – a common practice for young women wishing to remain independent – but left after a year for the salons of Paris.
Ninon was heavily influenced by anti-conformist Epicurean philosophy and avidly immersed herself in the literary arts, though as a patron rather than author. She encouraged several young writers, including Moliére, and was a friend and philosophical contemporary to intellectuals including Paul Scarron and Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis, seigneur de Saint-Évremond.
In her early thirties, Ninon took a string of influential and powerful lovers that included François, duc de La Rochefoucauld and King Louis XIII’s cousin, Gaspard de Coligny. Her relationships were monogamous but brief, and Ninon characterised each admirer as a ‘payeur’, ‘martyr’ or ‘favourite’. At some point between 1622 and 1642, Cardinal Richelieu, the King’s First Minister, is said to have offered Ninon fifty thousand crowns for one night in his bed. In typical fashion, she took the money and sent a friend in her place.
This degree of candid sexual autonomy was remarkable in a woman of the time, and Ninon did not escape censure. In 1656, Queen Anne (ruling as regent for Louis XIV), ordered Ninon’s imprisonment in a convent, though her release was later successfully lobbied for by Christina, the former queen regnant of Sweden, who had been recently engaged in a bid to become Queen of Naples. Christina, like Ninon, was a woman of considerable independence and determination, though in style and behaviour the two were poles apart.
In 1659, Ninon wrote La coquette vengée (‘The Flirt Avenged’), a riposte to Félix de Juvenel’s unflattering Portrait de la Coquette. In this work, she controversially defended the living of a morally ‘good’ life without religion. From the mid-1660s, Ninon’s salons at l'hôtel Sagonne, Paris, contributed much to the skeptical and Epicurean philosophy of the day, and she continued to nurture playwrights and intellectuals including Jean-Baptiste Racine.
Ninon died, aged 82, in 1705. After her death, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675-1755), the noted soldier and diplomat, wrote that her life had been ‘A shining example of the triumph of vice, when directed with intelligence and redeemed by a little virtue’.
Ninon’s will bequeathed money for books to the nine-year-old François Marie Arouet, the son of her accountant. Better known as the novelist Voltaire, he is said to have modelled the flamboyant character of the Old Woman in Candide after Ninon.
