to accept presents.”  Tallemant, indeed, says that she sometimes took money from her lovers, but this statement probably involves nothing beyond what is contained in Voltaire’s remark, and, in any case, Tallemant’s gossip, though usually well-informed, was not always reliable.  All are agreed as to her extreme disinterestedness.

When we hear precisely of Ninon de Lenclos in connection with money, it is not as receiving a gift, but only as repaying a debt to an old lover, or restoring a large sum left with her for safe keeping when the owner was exiled.  Such incidents are far from suggesting the professional prostitute of any age; they are rather the relationships which might exist between men friends.  Ninon de Lenclos’s character was in many respects far from perfect, but she combined many masculine virtues, and especially probity, with a temperament which, on the whole, was certainly feminine; she hated hypocrisy, and she was never influenced by pecuniary considerations.  She was, moreover, never reckless, but always retained a certain self-restraint and temperance, even in eating and drinking, and, we are told, she never drank wine.  She was, as Sainte-Beuve has remarked, the first to realize that there must be the same virtues for men and for women, and that it is absurd to reduce all feminine virtues to one.  “Our sex has been burdened with all the frivolities,” she wrote, “and men have reserved to themselves the essential qualities:  I have made myself a man.”  She sometimes dressed as a man when riding (see, e.g., Correspondence Authentique of Ninon de Lenclos, with a good introduction by Emile Colombey).  Consciously or not, she represented a new feminine idea at a period when—­as we may see in many forgotten novels written by the women of that time—­ideas were beginning to emerge in the feminine sphere.  She was the first, and doubtless, from one point of view, the most extreme representative of a small and distinguished group of French women among whom Georges Sand is the finest personality.

Thus it is idle to attempt to adorn the history of prostitution with the name of Ninon de Lenclos.  A debauched old prostitute would never, like Ninon towards the end of her long life, have been able to retain or to conquer the affection and the esteem of many of the best men and women of her time; even to the austere Saint-Simon it seemed that there reigned in her little court a decorum which the greatest princesses cannot achieve.  She was not a prostitute, but a woman of unique personality with a little streak of genius in it.  That she was inimitable we need not perhaps greatly regret.  In her old age, in 1699, her old friend and former lover, Saint-Evremond, wrote to her, with only a little exaggeration, that there were few princesses and few saints who would not leave their courts and their cloisters to change places with her.  “If I had known beforehand what my life would be I would have hanged myself,”