In 1580 (when not more than thirty-four) Veronica confessed to the Holy Office that she had had six children.  In the same year she formed the design of founding a home, which should not be a monastery, where prostitutes who wished to abandon their mode of life could find a refuge with their children, if they had any.  This seems to have led to the establishment of a Casa del Soccorso.  In 1591 she died of fever, reconciled with God and blessed by many unfortunates.  She had a good heart and a sound intellect, and was the last of the great Renaissance courtesans who revived Greek hetairism (Graf, Attraverso il Cinquecento, pp. 217-351).  Even in sixteenth century Venice, however, it will be seen, Veronica Franco seems to have been not altogether at peace in the career of a courtesan.  She was clearly not adapted for ordinary marriage, yet under the most favorable conditions that the modern world has ever offered it may still be doubted whether a prostitute’s career can offer complete satisfaction to a woman of large heart and brain.

Ninon de Lenclos, who is frequently called “the last of the great courtesans,” may seem an exception to the general rule as to the inability of a woman of good heart, high character, and fine intelligence to find satisfaction in a prostitute’s life.  But it is a total misconception alike of Ninon de Lenclos’s temperament and her career to regard her as in any true sense a prostitute at all.  A knowledge of even the barest outlines of her life ought to prevent such a mistake.  Born early in the seventeenth century, she was of good family on both sides; her mother was a woman of severe life, but her father, a gentleman of Touraine, inspired her with his own Epicurean philosophy as well as his love of music.  She was extremely well educated.  At the age of sixteen or seventeen she had her first lover, the noble and valiant Gaspard de Coligny; he was followed for half a century by a long succession of other lovers, sometimes more than one at a time; three years was the longest period during which she was faithful to one lover.  Her attractions lasted so long that, it is said, three generations of Sevignes were among her lovers.  Tallemant des Reaux enables us to study in detail her liaisons.

It is not, however, the abundance of lovers which makes a woman a prostitute, but the nature of her relationships with them.  Sainte-Beuve, in an otherwise admirable study of Ninon de Lenclos (Causeries du Lundi, vol. iv), seems to reckon her among the courtesans.  But no woman is a prostitute unless she uses men as a source of pecuniary gain.  Not only is there no evidence that this was the case with Ninon, but all the evidence excludes such a relationship.  “It required much skill,” said Voltaire, “and a great deal of love on her part, to induce her