everything her son manufactured for her delectation. The dramatic
incident of de Sévigné taking letters from Ninon de l'Enclos partly by
ingenuity and partly by force, resembled his tale that he had left
Ninon and that he did not care for her while all the time they were
inseparable. He was truly a lover of Penelope, the bow of Ulysses
having betrayed his weakness.

"The malady of his soul," says his mother, "afflicted his body. He
thought himself like the good Esos; he would have himself boiled in a
caldron with aromatic herbs to restore his vigor."

But Ninon's opinion of him was somewhat different. She lamented his
untimely end, but did not hesitate to express her views.

"He was a man beyond definition," was her panegyric. "He possessed a
soul of pulp, a body of wet paper, and a heart of pumpkin fricasseed
in snow."

She finally became ashamed of ever having loved him, and insisted that
they were never more than brother and sister. She tried to make
something out of him by exposing all the secrets of the female heart,
and initiating him in the mysteries of human love, but as she said:
"His heart was a pumpkin fricasseed in snow."




CHAPTER XIV

A Family Tragedy