While Ninon de l'Enclos was receiving and encouraging the attentions
of the most distinguished men of her time, literati, nobles, warriors,
statesmen, and sages, in her house in the Rue des Tournelles, the
mistress of the sovereign, the dear friend who had betrayed her to the
Marquis de Villarceaux, was swallowing, at Versailles, the adulations
of degraded courtiers of every rank and profession. There were met
together there the vain and the ambitious, the designing and the
foolish, the humblest and the proudest of those who, whether proud or
humble, or ambitious, or vain, or crafty, were alike the devoted
servants of the monarch or the monarch's mistress--princes, cardinals,
bishops, dukes and every kind of nobility, excisemen and priests,
keepers of the royal conscience and necessary--all ministers of filth,
each in his degree, from the secretaries of state to the lowest
underlings in office--clerks of the ordnance, victualing, stamps,
customs, colonies, and postoffice, farmers and receivers general,
judges and cooks, confessors and every other caterer to the royal
appetite.
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