PART III

MADELEINE

ONE OF LOVE’S JANSENISTS

THE HISTORY OF RUHLEBEN

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COLLINS—LONDON

MADELEINE

ONE OF LOVE’S JANSENISTS

BY

HOPE MIRRLEES

‘_Aux falseurs ou falseuses de Romans,_

_l’historie de ma vie et celle de ma mort._’

Le Testament de Clyante.

[Illustration]

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL

W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.

GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

Copyright

First Impression, October 1919

Second ” October 1919

TO MY MOTHER

PREFACE

Fiction—to adapt a famous definition of law—is the meeting-point of Life

and Art. Life is like a blind and limitless expanse of sky, for ever

dividing into tiny drops of circumstances that rain down, thick and fast,

on the just and unjust alike. Art is like the dauntless, plastic force

that builds up stubborn, amorphous substance cell by cell, into the frail

geometry of a shell. These two things are poles apart—how are they to

meet in the same work of fiction?

One way is to fling down, _pêle-mêle_, a handful of separate acts and

words, and then to turn on them the constructive force of a human

consciousness that will arrange them into the pattern of logic or of

drama.

Thus, in this book, Madeleine sees the trivial, disorderly happenings

of her life as a momentous battle waged between a kindly Power who had

written on tablets of gold before the world began that she should win

her heart’s desire, and a sterner and mightier Power who had written

on tablets of iron that all her hopes should be frustrated, so that,

finally, naked and bleeding, she might turn to Him. And having this

conception of life all her acquaintances become minor _daimones_,

friendly or hostile, according as they seem to serve one power or the

other.

The other way is to turn from time to time upon the action the fantastic

limelight of eternity, with a sudden effect of unreality and the hint

of a world within a world. My plot—that is to say, the building of the

shell—takes place in this inner world and is summed up in the words that

dog the dreams of Madeleine—_per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur_.

In the outer world there is nothing but the ceaseless, meaningless drip

of circumstances, in the inner world—a silent, ineluctable march towards

a predestined climax.

I have had the epilogue printed in italics to suggest that the action has

now moved completely on to the stage of the inner world. In the outer

world Madeleine might with time have jettisoned the perilous stuff of

youth and have sailed serenely the rough, fresh sea of facts. In the

inner world, there was one thing and one thing only that could happen to

her: life is the province of free-will, art the province of fate.

CONTENTS

PART I

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE DINNER AT MADAME PILOU’S 3

II. A PARTIAL CONFESSION 22

III. A SUPPLEMENT TO THE CONFESSION 34

IV. THE SIN OF NARCISSUS 48

V. AN INVITATION 63

VI. THE GRECIAN PROTOTYPE 72

VII. THE MERCHANTS OF DAMASCUS AND DAN 77

VIII. ‘RITE DE PASSAGE’ 84

IX. AT THE HÔTEL DE RAMBOUILLET 94

X. AFTERWARDS 115

XI. REBUILDING THE HOUSE OF CARDS 122

PART II

XII. THE FÊTE-DIEU 129

XIII. ROBERT PILOU’S SCREEN 133

XIV. A DEMONSTRATION IN FAITH 141

XV. MOLOCH 148

XVI. A VISIT TO THE ABBAYE OF PORT-ROYAL 154

XVII. ‘HYLAS, THE MOCKING SHEPHERD’ 166

XVIII. A DISAPPOINTMENT 171

XIX. THE PLEASURES OF DESPAIR 178

XX. FRESH HOPE 185

PART III

XXI. ‘WHAT IS CARTESIANISM?’ 191

XXII. BEES-WAX 195

XXIII. MADEMOISELLE DE SCUDÉRY’S SATURDAY 200

XXIV. SELF-IMPOSED SLAVERY 216

XXV. THE SYMMETRY OF THE COMIC MUSE 219

XXVI. BERTHE’S STORY 224

XXVII. THE CHRISTIAN VENUS 231

XXVIII. THE ASCENT OF MOUNT CARMEL 237

XXIX. THE BODY OF THE DRAGON 243

XXX. A JAR 244

XXXI. THE END OF THE ‘ROMAN’ 248

XXXII. ‘UN CADEAU’ 255

XXXIII. FACE TO FACE WITH FACTS 267

XXXIV. OUT INTO THE VOID 273

EPILOGUE. THE RAPE TO THE LOVE OF INVISIBLE THINGS 275

PART I

‘_En effet, si on laisse aller le Christianisme sans

l’approfondir et le régénérer de temps en temps, il s’y fait

comme une infiltration croissants de bon sens humain, de

tolérance philosophique, de semi-Pélagianisme à quelque degré

que ce soit: la “folie de la Croix” s’atténue._’

SAINTE-BEUVE.

CHAPTER I

THE DINNER AT MADAME PILOU’S

In the middle of the seventeenth century a family called Troqueville came

from Lyons to settle in Paris. Many years before, Monsieur Troqueville

had been one of the four hundred _procureurs_ of the Palais de Justice.

There were malicious rumours of disgraceful and Bacchic scenes in Court

which had led to his ejection from that respectable body. Whether the

rumours were true or not, Monsieur Troqueville had long ceased to be a

Paris _procureur_, and after having wandered about from town to town, he

had at last settled in Lyons, where by ‘devilling’ for a lawyer, writing

bombastic love-letters for shop apprentices, and playing Lasquinet with

country bumpkins, he managed to earn a precarious livelihood. When, a few

months before the opening of this story, he had been suddenly seized with

a feverish craving to return to Paris ‘and once more wear the glove of

my lady Jurisprudence in the tournay of the law-courts,’ as he put it,

his wife had regarded him with a frigid and sceptical surprise, as she

had long since given up trying to kindle in him one spark of ambition.

However, Madeleine, their only child, a girl of seventeen, expressed such

violent despair and disappointment when Madame Troqueville pronounced her

husband’s scheme to be vain and impracticable, that finally to Paris they

came—for to her mother, Madeleine’s happiness was the only thing of any

moment.

They had taken rooms above a baker’s shop in the petite rue du Paon, in

the East end of the University quarter—the _Pays Latin_, where, for

many centuries, turbulent abstract youth had celebrated with Bacchic

orgies the cherub Contemplation, and strutting, ragged and debonair on

the razor’s edge of most unprofitable speculation, had demonstrated to

the gaping, well-fed burghers, that the intellect had its own heroisms

and its own virtues. At that time it was a neighbourhood of dark,

winding little streets, punctuated by the noble fabrics of colleges and

monasteries, and the open spaces of their fields and gardens—a symbol, as

it were, of contemporary learning, where crabbed scholasticism still held

its own beside the spacious theories of Descartes and Gassendi.

Madame Troqueville had inherited a small fortune from her father, which

made it possible to tide over the period until her husband found regular

employment.

She was by birth and upbringing a Parisian, her father having been a

Président de la Chambre des Comptes. As the daughter of a Judge, she

was a member of ‘la Noblesse de Robe,’ the name given to the class of

the high dignitaries of the _Parlement_, who, with their scarlet robes,

their ermine, and their lilies, their Latin periods and the portentous

solemnity of their manner, were at once ridiculous and awful.

It cannot be wondered at that on her return to Paris she shrank from

renewing relations with old friends whose husbands numbered their legal

posts by the score and who drove about in fine coaches, ruthlessly

bespattering humble pedestrians with the foul mud of Paris. But for

Madeleine’s sake she put her pride in her pocket, and though some ignored

her overtures, others welcomed her back with genial condescension.

The day that this story begins, the Troquevilles were going to dine

with the celebrated Madame Pilou, famous in ‘la Cour et la Ville’ for

her homespun wit and remarkably ill-favoured countenance—it would be

difficult to say of which of these two distinctions she was most proud

herself. Her career had been a social miracle. Though her husband had

been only a small attorney, there was not a Princess or Duchess who did

not claim her as an intimate friend, and many a word of counsel had she

given to the Regent herself.

None of her mother’s old acquaintanceships did Madeleine urge her so

eagerly to renew as the one with Madame Pilou. In vain her mother assured

her that she was just a coarse, ugly old woman.

‘So also are the Three Fates,’ said Jacques Tronchet (a nephew of Madame

Troqueville, who had come to live with them), and Madeleine had looked at

him, surprised and startled.

Madame Pilou dined at midday, so Monsieur Troqueville and Jacques were

to go to her house direct from the Palais de Justice independently

of Madame Troqueville and Madeleine. Madeleine had been ready a full

half-hour before it was time to start. She had sat in the little parlour

for a quarter of an hour absolutely motionless. She was dressed in her

best clothes, a bodice of crimson serge, and an orange petticoat of

_camelot de Hollande_, the slender purse’s substitute for silk. A gauze

neckerchief threw a transparent veil over the extreme _décolletage_ of

her bodice. On her head was one of the new-fashioned _ténèbres_, a square

of black crape that tied under her chin, and took the place of a hat. She

wore a velvet mask and patches, in spite of the Sumptuary Laws, which

would reserve them for ladies of rank, and from behind the mask her clear

gray eyes, that never smiled and seldom blinked, looked out straight in

front of her. Her hands were folded on her lap. She had a remarkable gift

for absolute stillness.

At the end of a quarter of an hour, she went to her mother, who was

preparing a cress salad in the kitchen, and said in a quiet, tense voice:—

‘Maybe you would liefer not go to Madame Pilou’s this morning. If so,

tell me, and I will abandon it,’ then, with a sudden access of fury, ‘You

will make me hate you—you are for ever sacrificing matters of moment to

trifles. An you were to weigh the matter rightly, my having some pleasure

when I was young would seem of greater moment than there being a salad

for supper!’

‘Madame Pilou dines at twelve, and it is but a bare half-hour from our

house to hers, and it is now eleven,’ Madame Troqueville answered slowly,

emphasising each word. ‘But we will start now without fail, if ’tis your

wish, and arrive like true Provincials half an hour before we are due;’

irritation now made the words come tumbling out, one on the top of the

other. Madeleine began to smile, and her mother went on with some heat,

but no longer with irritation.

‘But why in the name of Jesus do you lash yourself into so strange a

humour before going to old Madame Pilou’s? One would think you were off

to the Palais Cardinal to wait on the Regent! She is but a plain old

woman; now if she were very learned, or——’

‘Oh, mother, let her be, and go and make your toilette,’ and Madame

Troqueville went off obediently to her room.

Madeleine paced about like a restive horse until her mother was ready,

but did not dare to disturb her while she was dressing. It used

to surprise Madeleine that she should take such trouble over such

unfashionable toilettes.

It was not long before she came in quite ready. She began to put

Madeleine’s collar straight, which, for some reason, annoyed Madeleine

extremely. At last they were out of the house.

Madame Pilou lived on the other side of the river, in the rue Saint

Antoine, so there was a good walk before Madeleine and her mother, and

judging from Madeleine’s gloomy, abstracted expression, it did not

promise to be a very cheerful one.

They threaded their way into the rue des Augustins, a narrow, cloistered

street flanked on the left by the long flat walls of the Monastery, over

which were wafted the sound of bells and the scent of early Spring. It

led straight out on to the Seine and the peaceful bustle of its still

rustic banks. They crossed it by the Pont-Neuf, that perennial Carnival

of all that Paris held of most picturesque and most disreputable. The

bombastic eloquence of the quacks extolling their panaceas and rattling

their necklaces of teeth; the indescribable foulness of the topical

songs in which hungry-looking bards celebrated to sweet ghostly airs of

Couperin and Cambert the last practical joke played by the Court on the

Town, or the latest extravagance of Mazarin; the whining litany of the

beggars; the plangent shrieks of strange shrill birds caught in American

forests—all these sounds fell unheard on at least one pair of ears.

On they hurried, past the booths of the jugglers and comedians and the

stalls of the money-lenders, past the bronze equestrian statue of Henri

IV., watching with saturnine benevolence the gambols of the Gothic

vagabonds he had loved so dearly in life, cynically indifferent to the

discreet threats of his rival the water-house of the Samaritaine, which,

classical and chaste, hinted at a future little to the taste of the _Vert

Gallant_ and his vagabonds.

From time to time Madame Troqueville glanced timidly at Madeleine but did

not like to break the silence. At last, as they walked down the right

bank of the Seine, the lovely town at once substantial and aerial, taking

the Spring as blithely as a meadow, filled her with such joy that she

cried out:—

‘’Tis a delicate town, Paris! Are not you glad we came, my pretty one?’

‘Time will show if there be cause for gladness,’ Madeline answered

gloomily.

‘There goes a fine lady! I wonder what Marquise or Duchesse she may be!’

cried Madame Troqueville, wishing to distract her. Madeleine smiled

scornfully.

‘No one of any note. Did you not remark it was a _hired_ coach? “_Les

honnêtes gens_” do not sacrifice to Saint Fiacre.’

Madame Troqueville gave rather a melancholy little smile, but her own

epigram had restored Madeleine, for the time being, to good humour. They

talked amicably together for a little, and then again fell into silence,

Madeleine wearing a look of intense concentration.

Madame Pilou’s house was on the first floor above the shop of a

laundress. They were shown into her bedroom, the usual place of reception

in those days. The furniture was of walnut, in the massive style of Henri

IV., and covered with mustard-coloured serge. Heavy curtains of moquette

kept out the light and air, and enabled the room to preserve what

Madeleine called the ‘bourgeois smell.’ On the walls, however, was some

fine Belgian tapestry, on which was shown, with macabre Flemish realism,

the Seven Stations of the Cross. It had been chosen by the son Robert,

who was fanatically devout.

Madame Pilou, dressed in a black dressing-gown lined with green plush,

and wearing a chaperon (a sort of cap worn in the old days by every

bourgeoise, but by that time rarely seen), was lying on the huge

carved bed. Her face, with its thick, gray beard, looming huge and

weather-beaten from under the tasselled canopy, was certainly very ugly,

but its expression was not unpleasing. Monsieur Troqueville and Jacques

had already arrived. Monsieur Troqueville was a man of about fifty, with

a long beard in the doctor’s mode, a very long nose, and small, excited

blue eyes, like a child’s. Jacques was rather a beautiful young man;

he was tall and slight, and had a pale, pointed face and a magnificent

chevelure of chestnut curls, and his light eyes slanting slightly up at

the corners gave him a Faun-like look. He was a little like Madeleine,

but he had a mercurial quality which was absent in her. Robert Pilou

was there too, standing before the chimney-piece; he was dressed in a

very rusty black garment, made to look as much like a priest’s cassock

as possible. Jacques said that with his spindly legs and red nose and

spectacles, he was exactly like old Gaultier-Garguille, a famous actor of

farce at the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and as the slang name for

the Hôtel de Bourgogne was, for some unknown reason, the ‘Pois-Pilés,’

Jacques, out of compliment to Robert’s appearance and Madame Pilou’s

beard, called their house the ‘Poil-Pilou.’

They were all sipping glasses of Hippocras and eating preserved fruit.

Jacques caught Madeleine’s eyes as she came in. His own slanting green

ones were dancing with pleasure, he was always in a state of suppressed

amusement at the Pilous, but there was no answering merriment in

Madeleine’s eyes. She gave one quick look round the room, and her face

fell.

‘Well, my friends, you are exceeding welcome!’ bellowed Madame Pilou in

the voice of a Musketeer. ‘I am overjoyed at seeing you, and so is Robert

Pilou.’ Robert went as red as a turkey-cock, and muttered something

about ‘any one who comes to the house.’ ‘You see I have to say his

_fleurettes_ for him, and he does my praying for me; ’tis a bargain,

isn’t it, Maître Robert?’ Robert looked as if he were going to have a fit

with embarrassment, while Monsieur Troqueville bellowed with laughter,

and exclaimed, ‘Good! good! excellent!’ then spat several times to show

his approval. (This habit of his disgusted Madeleine: ‘He doesn’t even

spit high up on the wall like a grand seigneur,’ she would say peevishly.)

‘Robert Pilou, give the ladies some Hippocras—Oh! I insist on your trying

it. My apothecary sends me a bottle every New Year; it’s all I ever

get out of him, though he gets enough out of me with his draughts and

clysters!’ This sally was also much appreciated by Monsieur Troqueville.

Robert Pilou grudgingly helped each of them to as much Hippocras as would

fill a thimble, and then sat down on the chair farthest removed from

Madame Troqueville and Madeleine.

When the Hippocras had been drunk, Madame Pilou bellowed across to him:

‘Now, Robert Pilou, it would be civil in you to show the young lady your

screen. He has covered a screen with sacred woodcuts, and the design

is most excellently conceived,’ she added in a proud aside to Madame

Troqueville. ‘No, no, young man, you sit down, I’m not going to have

the poor fellow made a fool of,’ as Jacques got up to follow the other

two into an adjoining closet. ‘But you, Troqueville, I think it might

be accordant with your humour—you can go.’ Monsieur Troqueville, always

ready to think himself flattered, threw a look of triumph at Jacques and

went into the closet.

Madeleine was gazing at Robert with a look of rapt attention in her

large, grave eyes, while he expounded the mysteries of his design. ‘You

see,’ he said, turning solemnly to Monsieur Troqueville, ‘I have so

disposed the prints that they make an allegorical history of the Fronde

and——’

‘An excellent invention!’ cried Monsieur Troqueville, all ready to be

impressed, and at the same time to show his own cleverness. ‘Were you a

Frondeur yourself?’

Robert Pilou drew himself up stiffly. ‘No, Monsieur, _I—was—not_. I

was for the King and the Cardinal. Well, as I was saying, profane

history is countenanced if told by means of sacred prints and moreover

itself becomes sacred history.’ Monsieur Troqueville clapped his hands

delightedly.

‘In good earnest it does,’ he cried, ‘and sacred history becomes profane

in the same way—’tis but a matter of how you look at it—why, you could

turn the life of Jesus into the history of Don Quixote—a picture of the

woman who pours the ointment on his feet could pass for the grand lady

who waits on Don Quixote in her castle, and the Virgin could be his

niece——’

‘Here you have a print of Judas Iscariot,’ Robert went on, having looked

at Monsieur Troqueville suspiciously. ‘You observe he is a hunchback,

and therefore can be taken for the Prince de Conti!’ He looked round

triumphantly.

Madeleine said sympathetically, ‘’Tis a most happy comparison!’ but

Monsieur Troqueville was smiling and nodding to himself, much too pleased

with his own idea to pay any attention to Robert’s.

‘And here we have the Cardinal! By virtue of his holy office I need not

find a sacred symbol for him, I just give his own portrait. This, you

see, is St Michael fighting with the Dragon——’

‘Why, that would do most excellently for Don Quixote fighting with the

windmills!’

‘Father, I beseech you, no more!’ whispered Madeleine severely.

‘But why? My conceit is every whit as good as his!’ said Monsieur

Troqueville sulkily. Fortunately Robert Pilou was too muddle-headed and

too wrapt up in himself to understand very clearly what other people were

talking about, so he went on:—

‘It is a symbol of the King’s party fighting with the Frondeurs. Now here

is a picture of a Procession of the Confrérie de la Passion; needless to

say, it shadows forth the triumphant entry of the King and Cardinal into

Paris—you see the banners and the torches—’tis an excellent symbol. And

here you have a picture of the stonemasons busy at the new buildings of

Val de Grâce, that is a double symbol—it stands for the work of the King

and Cardinal in rebuilding the kingdom; it also stands for the gradual

re-establishment of the power of the Church. And this first series ends

up with this’—and he pointed gleefully to a horrible picture of Dives in

Hell—‘this stands for the Prince de Condé in prison. And now we come to

the second series——;’ but just then Madame Pilou called them back to the

other room.

‘It is a most sweet invention!’ said Madeleine in her low, soft voice,

meeting Jacques’s twinkle with unruffled gravity.

‘A most excellent, happy conceit! but I would fain tell you the notion it

has engendered in _my_ mind!’ cried Monsieur Troqueville, all agog for

praise.

‘Oh, I was of opinion it would accord with your humour,’ nodded Madame

Pilou, with rather a wicked twinkle.

‘But what was _your_ notion, Uncle?’ asked Jacques, his mouth twitching.

‘Well, ’tis this way——’ began Monsieur Troqueville excitedly, but

Madeleine felt that she would faint with boredom if her father were given

an innings, so turned the attention of the company to the workmanship of

a handsome clock on the chimney-piece.

‘Yes, for Robert that clock is what the “Messieurs de Port Royal”

(coxcombs all of them, _I_ say!) would call the _grace efficace_, in that

by preventing him from being late for Mass it saves his soul from Hell!’

said Madame Pilou, looking at her son, who nodded his head in solemn

confirmation. Jacques shot a malicious glance at Madeleine, who was

looking rather self-conscious.

‘Now, then, Monsieur Jacques,’ went on Madame Pilou, thoroughly enjoying

herself. ‘You are a learned young man, and sustained your thesis in

philosophy at the University, do you hold it can be so ordered that one

person can get another into Paradise—in short, that one can be pious by

proxy?’

‘Madame Pilou!’ piped Robert plaintively, flapping his arms as though

they had been wings, then he crossed himself and pulled his face back

into its usual expression of stolidity.

‘Because,’ went on Madame Pilou, paying not the slightest attention

to him, ‘it would be much to my liking if Robert could do all my

church-going for me; I was within an ace of fetching up my dinner at Mass

last Sunday, the stench was so exceeding powerful. I am at a loss to know

why people are wont to smell worse in Church than anywhere else!’

‘I suppose that is what is called the odour of sanctity,’ said Jacques,

with his engaging grin, looking at Madeleine to see if she was amused.

Both Madeleine and Madame Troqueville smiled, but Robert was so busy

seeing how long he could keep his cheeks blown out without letting out

the breath that he did not hear, and Monsieur Troqueville was so occupied

with planning how he could go one better that he had no time to smile.

Jacques’s sally, however, displeased Madame Pilou extremely. She was

really very devout in the sane fashion of the old Gallican Church, and

though she herself might make profane jokes, she was not going to allow

them in a very young man.

‘Odour of sanctity indeed!’ she cried angrily. ‘I warrant _you_ don’t

smell any better than your neighbours, young man!’ a retort which made up

in vehemence what it lacked in point. Monsieur Troqueville roared with

delight and Jacques made a face. He had a wonderful gift for making faces.

‘Impudent fellow! One would think your face was Tabarin’s hat by the

shapes you twist it into! Anyway, you have more sense in your little

finger than your uncle has in his whole body! and while we are on the

matter of his shortcomings, I would fain know the _true_ motive of

his leaving Lyons?’ and she shot a malicious look at the discomfited

Monsieur Troqueville, while Madame Troqueville went quite white with

rage. Fortunately, at this moment, the servant came to say that dinner

was ready, and they all moved into the large kitchen, where, true to the

traditions of the old bourgeoisie, Madame Pilou always had her meals.

‘Well, well, Mademoiselle Marie, I dare swear you have not found

that Paris has gained one ounce of wisdom during your sojourn in the

provinces. Although the _Prince des Sots_ no longer enters the gates in

state on Mardi Gras, as was the custom in my young days, that is not to

say that Folly has been banished the town. ‘Do you frequent many of your

old friends?’ bellowed Madame Pilou, almost drowning the noise Monsieur

Troqueville and Robert were making over their soup.

‘Oh, yes, they have proffered me a most kindly welcome,’ Madame

Troqueville answered not quite truthfully.

‘Have you seen the Coigneux and the Troguins?’

‘We have much commerce with the Troguins.’

‘And has not the _désir de parroistre_ been flourishing finely since your

day? All the Parliamentary families have got coats of arms from the

herald Hozier since then, and have them tattooed all over their bodies

like Chinamen.’

Monsieur Troqueville cocked an intelligent eye, he was always on the

outlook for interesting bits of information.

‘And you must know that there are no _families_ nowadays, there are only

“houses”! And they roll their silver up and down the stairs, hoping by

such usage to give it the air of old family plate, instead of eating

off decent pewter as their fathers did before them! And every year the

judges grow vainer and more extravagant—great heavy puffed-out sacks

of nonsense! There is _la cour_ and _la ville_—and _la basse-cour_,

and that’s where the _gens de robe_ live, and the judges are the

turkey-cocks!’ Every one laughed except Robert Pilou. ‘And the sons with

their plumes and swords like young nobles, and the daughters who would

rather wear a velvet gown in Hell than a serge one in Paradise put me in

a strong desire to box their ears!’

‘’Tis your turn now!’ Jacques whispered to Madeleine, who was feeling

terribly conscious of her mask and six patches. However, Madame Pilou

abruptly changed the subject by turning to Madeleine and asking her what

she thought of Paris.

‘I think it is furiously beautiful,’ she answered, at which Madame Pilou

went off into a bellow of laughter.

‘_Jésus!_ Hark to the little Précieuse with her “furiously”! So

“furiously” has reached the provinces, has it? Little Madeleine will be

starting her “_ruelle_” next! Ha! Ha!’ Madeleine blushed crimson, Jacques

looked distressed, Robert Pilou gave a sudden wild whoop of laughter,

then stopped dead, looked anxiously round, and pulled a long face again.

‘That is news to me,’ Monsieur Troqueville began intelligently; ‘is

“furiously” much in use with the Précieuses?’ but Madame Troqueville,

who was very indignant that Madeleine should be made fun of, broke in

hurriedly with, ‘I think my daughter learned it in Mademoiselle de

Scudéry’s _Grand Cyrus_; she liked it rarely; we read it through together

from beginning to end.’

‘Well, I fear me, I cannot confess to the same assiduity, and that though

Mademoiselle de Scudéry brought me the volumes herself,’ said Madame

Pilou. ‘I promised her I would read it if she gave me her word that

that swashbuckler of a brother of hers should not come to the house for

six months, but there he was that very evening, come to find out what I

thought of the description of the battle of Rocroy! Are you a lover of

reading, my child?’ suddenly turning to Madeleine.

‘No, ’tis most distasteful to me,’ she answered emphatically, to her

mother’s complete stupefaction.

‘But Madeleine——’ she began. Madame Pilou, however, cut her short with

‘Quite right, quite right, my child. You’ll never learn anything worth

the knowing out of books. I have lived nearly eighty years, and my Missal

and Æsop his fables are near the only two books I have ever read. What

you can’t learn from life itself is not worth the learning——’

‘But Madeleine has grown into such an excessive humour for books,

that she wholly addicts herself to them!’ cried Madame Troqueville

indignantly. She was determined that an old barbarian like Madame Pilou

should not flatter herself she had anything in common with her Madeleine.

But Madame Pilou was too busy talking herself to hear her.

‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry is writing a new romance, she tells me (it’s all

her, you know; Conrart tells me that all the writing in it that tedious,

prolix, bombastic fop of a brother does is to put his name to the title

page!) and she says that I am to be portrayed in it. Poor Robert is in

a sad taking; he thinks you cannot be both in a romance and the Book of

Life!’ Robert Pilou looked at his mother with the eyes of an anxious dog,

and she smiled at him encouragingly, and assured him that there were many

devotees described in romances.

‘I dare swear she will limn me as a beautiful princess, with Robert Pilou

as my knight, or else I’ll be—what d’ye call her—that heathen goddess,

and Robert Pilou will be my owl!’

Madeleine had been strangely embarrassed for the last few minutes.

When she was nervous the sound of her father’s voice tortured her, and

feeling the imminence of a favourite story of his about an old lady of

Lyons, called Madame Hibou, who had found her gardener drunk in her bed,

she felt she would go mad if she had to listen to it again, so to stop

him, she said hurriedly, ‘Could you tell us, Madame, whom some of the

characters in the _Grand Cyrus_ are meant to depict?’

‘Oh! every one is there, every one of the Court and the Town. I should

be loath to have you think I wasted my time in reading all the dozen

volumes, but I cast my eye through some of them, and I don’t hold with

dressing up living men and women in all these outlandish clothes and

giving them Grecian names. It’s like the quacks on the Pont-Neuf, who

call themselves “Il Signor Hieronymo Ferranti d’Orvieto,” and such like,

though they are only decent French burghers like the rest of us!’

‘Or might it not be more in the nature of duchesses masquerading at the

Carnival as Turkish ladies and shepherdesses?’ suggested Madeleine in a

very nervous voice, her face quite white, as though she were a young

Quakeress, bearing testimony for the first time.

‘Oh, well, I dare swear that conceit would better please the demoiselle,’

said Madame Pilou good-humouredly. ‘But it isn’t only in romances that we

aren’t called by our good calendar names—oh, no, you are baptized Louise,

or Marie, or Marguerite, but if you want to be in the mode, you must

call yourself Amaryllis, or Daphne, or Phillis,’ and Madame Pilou minced

out the names, her huge mouth pursed up. ‘I tell them that it is only

actors and soldiers—the scum of the earth—who take fancy names. No, no,

I am quite out of patience with the present fashion of beribboning and

beflowering the good wood of life, as if it were a great maypole.’

‘And I am clearly on the other side!’ cried Madame Troqueville hotly, ‘I

would have every inch of the hard wood bedecked with flowers!’

‘Well, well, Marie, life has dealt hardly with you,’ said Madame Pilou,

throwing a menacing look at Monsieur Troqueville, ‘but life and I have

ever been good friends; and the cause may be that we are not unlike one

to the other, both strong and tough, and with little tomfoolery about

us.’ Madame Troqueville gazed straight in front of her, her eyes for the

moment as chill as Madeleine’s. This was more than she could stand, she,

the daughter of an eminent judge, to be pitied by this coarse old widow

of an attorney.

‘Maybe the reason you have found life not unkind is because you are not

like the dog in the fable,’ said Madeleine shyly, ‘who lost the substance

out of greediness to possess the shadow.’

Madame Pilou was delighted. Any reference to Æsop’s fables was sure to

please her, for it brought her the rare satisfaction of recognising a

literary allusion.

‘That is very prettily said, my child,’ and she chuckled with glee. Then

she looked at Madeleine meditatively. ‘But see here, as you are so

enamoured of the _Grand Cyrus_, you had better come some day and make the

acquaintance of Mademoiselle de Scudéry.’

‘Oh, Madeleine, you would like that rarely, would you not?’ cried Madame

Troqueville, flushing with pleasure.

But Madeleine had gone deadly white, and stammered out, ‘Oh—er—I am

vastly obliged, Madame, but in truth I shouldn’t ... the honour would put

me out of countenance.’

‘Out of countenance? Pish! Pish! my child,’ laughed Madame Pilou,

‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry is but a human being like the rest of us, she

eats and drinks and is bled and takes her purges like any one else. Yes,

you come and see her, and convey yourself towards her as if she were a

_grande dame_ who had never seen a goose’s quill in her life, and you

will gain her friendship on the spot.’

‘The lady I would fainest in the world meet,’ said Madeleine, and there

was suppressed eagerness in her voice, ‘is Madame de Rambouillet, she——’

‘My child, your wish has something in’t like rare wit and sense,’

interrupted Madame Pilou warmly, ‘she is better worth seeing than

anything else in the world, than the Grand Turk or Prester John himself.’

‘Was it not the late Monsieur Voiture that said of her, “I revere her as

the most noble, the most beautiful, and the most perfect thing I have

ever seen”?’ said Madeleine, the ordeal of quoting making her burn with

self-consciousness.

‘I dare say it was. Poor Voiture, he was an impudent fellow, but his

wit was as nimble as a hare. He always put me in mind of a performer

there used to be on the Pont-Neuf—we called him the “Buveur d’Eau”—he

would fill his mouth with ordinary cold water and then spout it out in

cascades of different coloured scents. Some trick, doubtless, but it was

wonderful. And in the same way Voiture would take some plain homespun

sentiment and twist it and paint it and madrigalise it into something so

fantastical that you would never recognise it as the same.’

‘I remember me to have seen that “Buveur d’Eau” when I came to Paris as

a young man, and——’ began Monsieur Troqueville, in whom for some time

the pleasures of the table had triumphed over the desire to shine. But

Madeleine was not going to let the conversation wander to quacks and

mountebanks. In a clear, though gentle voice, she asked if it were true

that the Marquise de Rambouillet was in very delicate health.

‘Yes, very frail but rarely in Paris nowadays. The last time I went to

see her she said, smiling as is always her way, “I feel like a ghost in

Paris these days, a ghost that died hundreds of years ago,” and I much

apprehend that she will in sober earnest be a ghost before long,’ and

Madame Pilou, who was deeply moved, blew her nose violently on a napkin.

‘She must be a lady of great and rare parts,’ said Madame Troqueville

sympathetically. The remark about ‘feeling like a ghost’ had touched her

imagination.

‘Yes, indeed. She is the only virtuous woman I have ever known who is a

little ashamed of her virtue—and that is perfection. There is but little

to choose between a prude and a whore, _I_ think ... yes, I do, Robert

Pilou. Ay! in good earnest, she is of a most absolute behaviour. The

Marquis has no need to wear _his_ hair long. You know when this fashion

for men wearing love-locks came in, I said it was to hide the horns!’

‘Do the horns grow on one’s neck, then?’ Jacques asked innocently.

Monsieur Troqueville was much tickled, and Madame Troqueville wondered

wearily how many jokes she had heard in her life about ‘horns’ and

‘cuckolds.’

‘Grow on one’s neck, indeed! You’ll find _that_ out soon enough, young

man!’ snorted Madame Pilou.

The substantial meal was now over, and Monsieur Troqueville had licked

from his fingers the last crumbs of the last _Pasté à la mazarinade_,

when Robert Pilou, who had been silent nearly all dinner-time, now said

slowly and miserably, ‘To appear in a romance! In a romance with Pagans

and Libertins! Oh! Madame Pilou!’ His mother looked round proudly.

‘Hark to him! He has been pondering the matter; he always gets there if

you but give him time!’ and she beamed with maternal pride. Then Madame

Troqueville rose and made her adieux, though Madeleine looked at her

imploringly, as if her fate hung upon her staying a little longer. Madame

Pilou was particularly affectionate in her good-bye to Madeleine. ‘Well,

we’ll see if we can’t contrive it that you meet Madame de Rambouillet.’

Madeleine’s face suddenly became radiantly happy.

CHAPTER II

A PARTIAL CONFESSION

At supper that evening Madeleine seemed intoxicated with happiness. She

laughed wildly at nothing and squeezed Jacques’s hand under the table,

which made him look pleased but embarrassed. Monsieur Troqueville was

also excited about something, for he kept smiling and muttering to

himself, gesticulating now and then, his nostrils expanding, his eyes

flashing as if in concert with his own unspoken words. Jacques burst into

extravagant praise of Madame Pilou, couched, as was his way, in abrupt

adjectives, ‘She is _crotesque_ ... she is _gauloise_ ... she is superb!’

‘My dear Jacques,’ said Madame Troqueville, smiling, ‘You would find

dozens of women every whit as _crotesque_ and _gauloise_ in the Halles.

I’ll take you with me when I go marketing some day.’

‘Very well, and I’ll settle down and build my harem there and fill it

with Madame Pilous,’ said he, grinning. ‘If I had lived in the days of

Amadis de Gaul she should have been my lady and I’d have worn ... a hair

shirt made of her beard!’

Madeleine, who did not, as a rule, much appreciate Jacques’s wit, laughed

long and excitedly. Her mother looked at her, not sure whether to rejoice

at or to fear this sudden change from languid gloom. Jacques went on with

his jerky panegyric. ‘She is like some one in Rabelais. She might have

been the mother of Gargantua, she——’

‘Gargamelle! Gargamelle was the mother of Gargantua!’ cried Madeleine

eagerly and excitedly.

‘As you will, Gargamelle, then. Why doesn’t she please you, Aunt? It is

you that are _really_ the Précieuse, and Madeleine is at heart a _franque

gauloise_,’ and he looked at Madeleine wickedly.

‘That I’m not ... you know nothing of my humour, Jacques.... I know best

about myself, I am abhorrent of aught that is coarse and ungallant....

I am to seek why you should make other people share your faults, you——’

Madeleine had tears of rage in her eyes.

‘You are a sprouting Madame Pilou, beard and all!’ teased Jacques. ‘No,

you’re not,’ and he stopped abruptly. It was his way suddenly to get

bored with a subject he had started himself.

‘But Madeleine,’ began Madame Troqueville, ‘what, in Heaven’s name,

prompted you to refuse to meet Mademoiselle de Scutary?’

‘De S-c-u-d-é-r-y,’ corrected Madeleine, enunciating each letter with

weary irritation.

‘De Scudéry, then. You are such a goose, my child; in the name of Our

Lady, how _can_ you expect——’ and Madame Troqueville began to work

herself up into a frenzy, such as only Madeleine was able to arouse in

her.

But Madeleine said with such earnestness, ‘Pray mother, let the matter

be,’ that Madame Troqueville said no more.

Supper being over, Monsieur Troqueville, wearing an abstracted, important

air, took his hat and cloak and went out, and Madame Troqueville went to

her spinning-wheel.

Jacques and Madeleine went up to her bedroom, to which they retired

nearly every evening, nominally to play Spelequins or Tric-trac. Madame

Troqueville had her suspicions that little of the evening was spent in

these games, but what of that? Jacques’s mother had left him a small

fortune, not large enough to buy a post in the _Parlement_, but still a

competency, and if Madeleine liked him they would probably be able to get

a dispensation, and Madame Troqueville would be spared the distasteful

task of negotiating for a husband for her daughter. Her passion for

Madeleine was not as strong as a tendency to shudder away from action,

to sit spellbound and motionless before the spectacle of the automatic

movement of life.

Jacques was now learning to be an attorney, for although his father had

been an advocate, his friends considered that he would have more chance

on the other side. Jacques docilely took their advice, for it was all one

to him whether he eventually became an advocate or an attorney, seeing

that from the clerks of both professions were recruited ‘_les Clercs de

la Bazoche_’—a merry, lewd corporation with many a quaint gothic custom

that appealed to Jacques’s imagination.

They had a Chancellor—called King in the old days—whom they elected

annually from among themselves, and who had complete authority over them.

That year Jacques reached the summit of his ambition, for they chose him

for the post.

He had never seen Madeleine till her arrival in Paris two months before.

At that time he was fanning the dying embers of a passion for a little

lady of the Pays-Latin of but doubtful reputation.

Then the Troquevilles had arrived, and, to his horror, he began to

fall in love with Madeleine. Although remarkably cynical for his age,

he was nevertheless, like all of his contemporaries, influenced by the

high-flown chivalry of Spain, elaborated by the Précieuses into a code

where the capital crime was to love more than once. In consequence, he

was extremely surly with Madeleine at first and laid it on himself as

a sacred duty to find out one fault in her every day. Her solemnity

was unleavened by one drop of the mocking gaiety of France; in an age

of plump beauties she seemed scraggy; unlike his previous love, she

was slow and rather clumsy in her movements. But it was in vain, and

he had finally to acknowledge that she was like one of the grave-eyed,

thin-mouthed beauties Catherine de Médici had brought with her from

Italy, that her very clumsiness had something beautiful and virginal

about it, and, in fact, that he was deeply in love with her.

When he had told her of his new feelings towards herself she had replied

with a scorn so withering as to be worthy of the most prudish Précieuse

of the Marais. This being so, his surprise was as great as his joy

when, about a week before the dinner described in the last chapter, she

announced that he ‘might take his fill of kissing her, and that she loved

him very much.’

So a queer little relationship sprang up between them, consisting of

a certain amount of kissing, a great deal of affectionate teasing

on Jacques’s side, endless discussions of Madeleine’s character and

idiosyncrasies—a pastime which never failed to delight and interest

her—and a tacit assumption that they were betrothed.

But Jacques was not the gallant that Madeleine would have chosen.

In those days, the first rung of the social ladder was _le désir de

parroistre_—the wish to make a splash and to appear grander than you

really were—and this noble aspiration of ‘_une âme bien née_’ was

entirely lacking in Jacques. Then his scorn of the subtleties of

Dandyism was incompatible with being _un honnête homme_, for though

his long ringlets were certainly in the mode, they had originally been

a concession to his mother, and all Madeleine’s entreaties failed to

make him discard his woollen hose and his jerkin of Holland cloth, or

substitute top boots for his short square shoes. Nor did he conform in

his wooing to the code of the modish Cupid and hire the Four Fiddles to

serenade her, or get up little impromptu balls in her honour, or surprise

collations coming as a graceful climax to a country walk. Madeleine had

too fine a scorn for facts to allow the knowledge of his lack of means to

extenuate this negligence.

In short, the fact could not be blinked that Jacques was ignoble enough

to be quite content with being a bourgeois.

Then again, in Metaphysics, Jacques held very different views from

Madeleine, for he was an Atheistic follower of Descartes and a scoffer

at Jansenism, while in other matters he was much in sympathy with the

‘Libertins’—the sworn foes of the Précieuses. The name of ‘Libertin’ was

applied—in those days with no pornographic connotation—to the disciples

of Gassendi, Nandé, and La Motte le Vayer. These had evolved a new

Epicurean philosophy, to some of their followers merely an excuse for

witty gluttony, to others, a potent ethical incentive. The Précieuses,

they held, had insulted by the diluted emotions and bombastic language

their good goddess Sens Commun, who had caught for them some of the

radiance of the Greek Σωφροσύνη. One taste, however, they shared with the

Précieusues, and that was the love of the _crotesque_—of quaint, cracked

brains and deformed, dwarfish bodies, and of colouring. It was the same

tendency probably that produced a little earlier the architecture known

as _baroque_, the very word _crotesque_ suggesting the mock stalactitic

grottoes with which these artists had filled the gardens of Italy. But

this very thing was being turned by the Libertins, with unconscious

irony, _via_ the _genre burlesque_ of the Abbé Scarron, into a sturdy

Gallic realism—for first studying real life in quest of the _crotesque_,

they fell in love with its other aspects too.

Madeleine resented that Jacques continued just as interested in his own

life as before he had met her—in his bright-eyed vagabondage in Bohemia,

his quest after absurdities on the Pont-Neuf and in low taverns. She

hated to be reminded that there could be anything else in the world but

herself. But in spite of her evident disapproval, he continued to spend

just as much of his time in devising pranks with his subjects of La

Bazoche, and in haunting the Pont-Neuf in quest of the _crotesque_.

Another thing which greatly displeased Madeleine was that Jacques and her

father had struck up a boon-companionship, and this also she was not able

to stop.

That same evening, when they got into her room, they were silent for a

little. Jacques always left it to her to give the note of the evening’s

intimacy.

‘What are you pondering?’ he said at last.

‘’Twould be hard to say, Jacques.... I’m exceeding happy.’

‘Are you? I’m glad of it! you have been of so melancholy and strange a

humour ever since I’ve known you. There were times when you had the look

of a hunted thing.’

‘Yes, at times my heart was like to break with melancholy.’

Jacques was silent, then he said suddenly, ‘Has it aught to do with that

Scudéry woman?’

Madeleine gave a start and blushed all over. ‘What ... what ... how d’you

mean?’

‘Oh! I don’t know. I had the fancy it might in some manner refer to her

... you act so whimsically when mention is made of her.’

Madeleine laughed nervously, and examined her nails with unnecessary

concentration, and then with eyes still averted from Jacques, she began

in a jerky, embarrassed voice, ‘I’m at a loss to know how you discovered

it ... ’tis so foolish, at least, I mean rather ’tis so hard to make my

meaning clear ... but to say truth, it _is_ about her ... the humour to

know her has come so furiously upon me _that I shall go mad if it cannot

be compassed_!’ and her voice became suddenly hard and passionate.

‘There is no reason in nature why it should not. Old Pilou said she would

contrive it for you, but you acted so fantastically and begged her not

to, funny one!’

Madeleine once more became self-conscious. ‘I know ... it’s so hard to

make clear my meaning.... ’Tis an odd, foolish fancy, I confess, but I

am always having the feeling that things won’t fall out as I would wish,

except something else happens first. As soon as the desire for a thing

begins to work on me, all manner of little fantastical things crop up

around me, and I am sensible that except I compound with them I shall not

compass the big thing. For example ... for example, if I was going to a

ball and was eager it should prove a pleasant junketing, well, I might

feel it was going to yield but little pleasure unless—unless—I were able

to keep that comb there balanced on my hand while I counted three.’

‘Don’t!’ cried Jacques, clasping his head despairingly. ‘I shall get the

contagion.... I _know_ I shall!’

‘Well, anyway,’ she went on wearily, ‘I was seized by the notion that

... that ... that it wouldn’t ... that I wouldn’t do so well with

Mademoiselle de Scudéry unless I met her for the first time at the Hôtel

de Rambouillet, and it _must_ be there, and if the Marquise be of so

difficult access, perchance it can’t be compassed.... Oh! I would I were

dead,’ the last words came tumbling out all in one breath.

‘Poor little Chop!’ said Jacques sympathetically. (It was the fashion,

brought to Paris by the exiled King of England, to call pets by English

names, and Jacques had heard a bulldog called ‘Chop,’ and was so tickled

by the name, that he insisted on giving it to Madeleine that he might

have the pleasure of often saying it).

‘’Tis a grievous thing to want anything sorely. But I am confident the

issue will be successful.’

‘Are you? Are you?’ she cried, her face lighting up. ‘When do you think

the meeting will take place? Madame de Rambouillet is always falling ill.’

‘Oh! Old Pilou can do what she will with all those great folk, and she

has conceived a liking for you.’

‘Has she? Has she? How do you know? What makes you think so?’

‘Oh, I don’t know ... however, she has,’ he answered, suddenly getting

distrait. ‘Is it truly but as an exercise against the spleen that you

pass whole hours in leaping up and down the room?’ he asked after a

pause, watching her curiously.

Madeleine blushed, and answered nervously:—

‘Yes, ’tis good for the spleen—the doctor told me so—also, if you will,

’tis a caprice——’

‘How ravishing to be a woman!’ sighed Jacques. ‘One can be as great a

_visionnaire_ as one will and be thought to have rare parts withal,

whereas, if a man were to pass his time in cutting capers up and down the

room, he’d be shut up in _les petites maisons_.[1] How comes it that you

want to know Mademoiselle Scudéry more than any one else?’

‘I cannot say, ’tis just that I do, and the wish has worked so powerfully

on my fancy that ’tis become my only thought. It has grown from a little

fancy into a huge desire. ’Tis like to a certain nightmare I sometimes

have when things swell and swell.’

‘When things swell and swell?’

‘Yes, ’tis what I call my Dutch dream, for it ever begins by my being

surrounded by divers objects, such as cheeses and jugs and strings of

onions and lutes and spoons, as in a Dutch picture, and I am sensible

that one of them presently, I never know which ’twill be, will start

to swell. And then on a sudden one of them begins, and it is wont to

continue until I feel that if it get any bigger I shall go mad. And in

like manner, I hold it to be but chance that it was Mademoiselle de

Scudéry that took to swelling, it might quite well have been any one

else.’

Jacques smiled a little. ‘It might always quite well have been any one

else,’ he said.

Madeleine looked puzzled for a minute and then went on unhappily, ‘I feel

’tis all so unreal, just a “vision.” Oh! How I wish it was something

in accordance with other people’s experiences ... something they could

understand, such as falling in love, for example, but this——’

‘It isn’t the cause that is of moment, you know, it’s the strength of the

“passion” resulting from the cause. And in truth I don’t believe any one

_could_ have been subject to a stronger “passion” than you since you have

come to Paris.’

‘So it doesn’t seem to you extravagant then?’ she asked eagerly.

‘Only as all outside one’s own desires do seem extravagant.’ He sat down

beside her and drew her rather timidly to him. ‘I’m confident ’twill

right itself in the end, Chop,’ he whispered. She sprang up eagerly, her

eyes shining.

‘Do you think so, Jacques ... in sober earnest?’

‘Come back, Chop!’ In Jacques’s eyes there was what Madeleine called the

‘foolish expression,’ which sooner or later always appeared when he was

alone with her. It bored her extremely; why could he not be content with

spending the whole time in rational talk? However, she went back with a

sigh of resignation.

After a few minutes she said with a little excited giggle, ‘What do you

think ... er ... Mademoiselle de Scudéry will think of me?’

Jacques only grunted, the ‘foolish expression’ still in his eyes.

‘Jacques!’ she cried sharply, ‘tell me!’ and she got up.

‘What will she think of you? Oh! that you’re an ill-favoured, tedious

little imp.’

‘No, Jacques!’

‘A scurvy, lousy, bombastic——’

‘Oh! Jacques, forbear, for God’s sake!’

‘Provincial——’

‘Oh! Jacques, no more, I’ll _scream_ till you hold your tongue ... _what_

will she think of me, in sober earnest?’

‘She’ll think——’ and he stopped, and looked at her mischievously. Her

lips were moving, as if repeating some formulary. ‘That you are ... that

there is a “I know not what about you of gallant and witty.”’ Madeleine

began to leap up and down the room, then she rushed to Jacques and flung

her arms round his neck.

‘I am furiously grateful to you!’ she cried. ‘I felt that had you not

said something of good omen ere I had repeated “she’ll think” twenty

times, I would never compass my desires, and you said it when I had got

to eighteen times!’ Jacques smiled indulgently.

‘So you know the language she affects, do you?’ said Madeleine, with a

sort of self-conscious pride.

‘Alas! that I do! I read a few volumes of the _Grand Cyrus_, and think it

the saddest fustian——’

‘Madame Pilou said she had begun another ... do you think ... er ... do

you think ... that ... maybe I’ll figure in it?’

‘’Tis most probable. Let’s see. “Chopine is one of the most beautiful

persons in the whole of Greece, as, Madame, you will readily believe when

I tell you that she was awarded at the Cyprian Games the second prize

for beauty.”’ Madeleine blushed prettily, and gave a little gracious

conventional smile. She was imagining that Mademoiselle de Scudéry

herself was reading it to her. ‘“The _first_ prize went, of course, to

that fair person who, having learnt the art of thieving from Mercury

himself, proceeded to rob the Graces of all their charms, the Muses of

all their secrets. Like that of the goddess Minerva, hers is, if I may

use the expression, a virile beauty, for on her chin is the thickest,

curliest, most Jove-like beard that has ever been seen in Greece——”’

‘Jacques! it’s not——’

‘“Madame, your own knowledge of the world will tell you that I speak of

Madame Pilou!”’ Madeleine stamped her foot, and her eyes filled with

angry tears, but just then there was a discreet knock at the door,

and Berthe, the Troqueville’s one servant, came in with a cup and a

jug of Palissy _faience_. She was fat and fair, with a wall-eye and a

crooked mouth. Her home was in Lorraine, and she was a mine of curious

country-lore, but a little vein of irony ran through all her renderings

of local legends, and there was nothing she held in veneration—not even

‘_la bonne Lorraine_’ herself. Her tongue wagged incessantly, and Jacques

said she was like the servant girl, Iambe—‘the prattling daughter of

Pan.’ She had been with the Troquevilles only since they had come to

Paris, but she belonged to the class of servants that become at once

old family retainers. She took a cynically benevolent interest in the

relationship between Jacques and Madeleine, and although there was no

need whatever for the rôle, she had instituted herself the confidante

and adviser of the ‘lovers,’ and from the secrecy and despatch with

which she would keep the two posted in each other’s movements, Monsieur

and Madame Troqueville might have been the parental tyrants of a Spanish

comedy. This attitude irritated Madeleine extremely, but Jacques it

tickled and rather pleased.

‘Some Rossoli for Mademoiselle, very calming to the stomach, in youth one

needs such drafts, for the blood is hot, he! he!’ and she nodded her head

several times, and smiled a smile which shut the wall-eye and hitched up

the crooked mouth. Then she came up to them and whispered, ‘The master is

not in yet, and the mistress is busy with her spinning!’ and the strange

creature with many nods and becks set the jug and cup on the table, and

continuing to mutter encouragement, marched out with soft, heavy steps.

Madeleine dismissed Jacques, saying she was tired and wanted to go to

bed.

CHAPTER III

A SUPPLEMENT TO THE CONFESSION

‘On a oublié le temps où elle vivait et combien dans cette vie

de luxe et de désœuvrement les passions peuvent ressembler à

des fantaisies, de même que les manies y deviennent souvent des

passions.’

SAINTE-BEUVE.—_Madame de Sévigné._

It is wellnigh impossible for any one to be very explicit about their own

nerves, for there is something almost indecently intimate in a nervous

fear or obsession. Thus, although Madeleine’s explanation to Jacques

had given her great relief, it had been but partial. She would sooner

have died than have told him the real impulse, for instance, that sent

her dancing madly up and down the room, or have analysed minutely her

feelings towards Mademoiselle de Scudéry.

The seeds of the whole affair were, I think, to be found in the fact that

an ancestor of Madame Troqueville’s had been an Italian lady of high

family, who had left a strain, fine, fastidious, civilised—in the morbid

way of Italy—to lie hidden in obscurity in the bourgeois stock, and to

crop up from time to time with pathetic persistence, in a tragically

aristocratic outlook, thin features, and the high, narrow forehead that

had given to the pallid beauties of the sixteenth century a look of

_maladif_ intellect.

To Madeleine it had also brought a yearning from earliest childhood for a

radiant, transfigured world, the inhabitants of which seemed first of all

to be the rich merchant families of Lyons.

One of her most vivid memories was an occasion on which a strolling

company of players had acted a comedy in the house of a leader among

these merchants, a certain Maître Jean Prunier. Although the Troquevilles

personally did not know the Pruniers, they had a common friend, and he

had taken Madeleine and her parents to the performance. They went into

an enormous room filled with benches, with a raised platform at one end.

The walls and the ceiling were frescoed with various scenes symbolical

of Maître Prunier’s commercial prowess. He was shown riding on woolly

waves on the back of a dolphin, presenting a casket of gloves to Marie

de Médici, marching in crimson robes at the head of the six guilds of

merchants. On the ceiling was his apotheosis. It showed him sitting, his

lap full of gloves, on a Lyons shawl, which winged Cherubs were drawing

through the air to a naked goddess on a cloud, who was holding out to him

a wreath made of Dutch tulips. When Madame Troqueville saw it she shook

with laughter, much to Madeleine’s surprise.

Maître Prunier and his family sat on the stage during the performance,

that they might be seen as well as see. He was a large stout man, and his

nose was covered with warts, but his youngest daughter held Madeleine’s

eyes spellbound. She had lovely golden hair for one thing, and then,

although she looked no older than Madeleine herself, who was about seven

at the time, she was dressed in a velvet bodice covered with Genoese

point, and—infinitely grander—she was actually wearing what to Madeline

had always seemed one of the attributes of magnificent eld, to wit, a

real stomacher, all stiff with busks and embroidered in brightly coloured

silks with flowers and enchanting beasts—a thing as lovely and magical as

the armour of Achilles in the woodcut that hung in the parlour at home.

Some years later Madeleine was sent to school at a Convent about a mile

out of Lyons. One of the scholars was this very Jeanne Prunier. Madeleine

would watch her stumbling through the Creed, her fat white face puckered

with effort, her stumpy fingers fiddling nervously with her gold chain,

and would wonder what great incomprehensible thoughts were passing behind

that greasy forehead and as what strange phantasmagoria did she see the

world. And that chain—it actually hung round her neck all day long, and

when she went home, was taken through the great wooden door of Maître

Prunier’s house—the door carved with flowers and grinning faces—and

perhaps in a drawer in her bedroom had a little box of its own. And

Maître Prunier probably knew of its existence, as doubtless it had been

his gift, and thus it had a place in the consciousness of that great man,

while she, Madeleine ... he had never heard of her.

Lyons, like most rich provincial towns, was very purse-proud, and this

characteristic was already quite apparent in its young daughters at the

Convent. Their conversation consisted, to a great extent, in boastings

about their fathers’ incomes, and surmises as to those of the fathers of

their companions. They could tell you the exact number of gold pieces

carried on each girl’s back, and when some one appeared in a new dress

they would come up and finger the material to ascertain its texture and

richness. Every one knew exactly how many pairs of Spanish gloves, how

many yards of Venetian lace, how many pure silk petticoats were possessed

by every one else, and how many Turkey carpets and Rouen tapestries and

tables of marble and porphyry, how much gold and silver plate, and how

many beds covered with gold brocade were to be found in each other’s

homes.

As Madeleine’s dresses were made of mere serge, and contemptible

_guese_ was their only trimming, and as it was known that her father

was nothing but a disreputable attorney, they coldly ignored her, and

this made her life in the Convent agonising. Although subconsciously

she was registering every ridiculous or vulgar detail about her passive

tormentors, yet her boundless admiration for them remained quite intact,

and to be accepted as one of their select little coterie, to share their

giggling secrets, to walk arm in arm with one of them in the Convent

garden would be, she felt, the summit of earthly glory.

One hot summer’s day, it happened that both she and a member of the

Sacred Circle—a girl called Julie Duval—felt faint in Chapel. A nun

had taken them into the Refectory—the coolest place in the Convent—and

left them to recover. Madeleine never quite knew how it happened,

but she suddenly found herself telling Julie that her mother was the

daughter of a Duke, and her father the son of an enormously wealthy

merchant of Amsterdam; that he had been sent as quite a young man on a

political mission to the Court of France, where he had met her mother;

that they had fallen passionately in love with one another, and had

been secretly married; when the marriage was announced the parents of

both were furious, owing to her father’s family being Protestant, her

mother’s Catholic, and had refused to have anything more to do with their

respective offspring; that her father had taken the name of Troqueville

and settled in Lyons; that some months ago a letter had come from her

paternal grandfather, in which he told them that he was growing old and

that, although a solemn vow prevented him from ever looking again on the

face of his son, he would like to see his grandchild before he died,

would she come to Amsterdam?; that she had refused, saying that she did

not care to meet any one who had treated her father as badly as he; that

the old man had written back to say that he admired her spirit and had

made her his sole heir, ‘which was really but a cunning device to take,

without tendering his formal forgiveness, the sting from the act whereby

he had disinherited my father, because he must have been well aware that

I would share it all with him!’ (Unconsciously she had turned her father

into a romantic figure, to whom she was attached with the pious passion

of an Antigone. In reality she gave all her love to her mother; but the

unwritten laws of rhetoric commanded that the protagonists in this story

should be _father_ and daughter.)

Julie’s eyes grew rounder and rounder at each word.

‘_Jésus_, Madeleine Troqueville! what a fine lady you will be!’ she said

in an awed voice. Madeleine had not a doubt that by the next morning she

would have repeated every word of it to her friends.

In the course of the day she half came to believing the whole story

herself, and sailed about with measured, stately gait; on her lips a

haughty, faintly contemptuous smile. She felt certain that she was the

centre of attention. She was wearing her usual little serge dress and

plain muslin fichu, but if suddenly asked to describe her toilette,

she would have said it was of the richest velvet foaming with Italian

lace. She seemed to herself four inches taller than she had been the day

before, while her eyes had turned from gray to flashing black, her hair

also was black instead of chestnut.

Mythology was one of the subjects in the Convent curriculum—a concession

to fashion made most unwillingly by the nuns. But as each story was

carefully expurgated, made as anterotic as possible, and given a neat

little moral, Ovid would scarce have recognised his own fables. The

subject for that day happened to be Paris’s sojourn as a shepherd on

Mount Ida. When the nun told them he was really the son of the King of

Troy, Madeleine was certain that all the girls were thinking of her.

Several days, however, went by, and no overtures were made by the Sacred

Circle. Madeleine’s stature was beginning to dwindle, and her hair and

eyes to regain their ordinary colour, when one morning Jeanne Prunier

came up to her, took hold of the little medallion that hung round her

neck on a fine gold chain, and said: ‘Tiens! c’est joli, ça.’

This exclamation so often interchanged among the _élite_, but which

Madeleine had never dreamed that any object belonging to her could

elicit, was the prelude to a period of almost unearthly bliss. She was

told the gallant that each of them was in love with, was given some of

Jeanne’s sweet biscuits and quince jam, and was made a member of their

_Dévises_ Society. The _dévise_ designed for her was a plant springing

out of a _tabouret_ (the symbol of a Duchess); one of its stems bore a

violet, the other a Dutch tulip, and over them both hovered the flowery

coronet of a Duke—wherein was shown a disregard for botany but an

imaginative grasp of Madeleine’s circumstances.

At times she felt rather condescending to her new friends, for the old

man could not live much longer, and when he died she would not only

be richer than any of them, but her mother’s people would probably

invite her to stay with them in Paris, and in time she might be made a

lady-in-waiting to the Regent ... and then, suddenly, the sun would be

drowned and she would feel sick, for a Saint’s day was drawing near, and

they would all go home, and the girls would tell their parents her story,

and their parents would tell them that it was not true.

The Saint’s day came in due course, and after it, the awful return to

the Convent. Had they been undeceived about her or had they not? It

was difficult to tell, for during the morning’s work there were few

opportunities for social intercourse. It was true that in the embroidery

class, when Madeleine absent-mindedly gave the Virgin a red wool nose

instead of a white one, and the presiding nun scolded her, the girls

looked coldly at her instead of sympathetically; then in the dancing

lesson as a rule the sacred ones gave her an intimate grin from time

to time, or whispered a pleasantry on the clumsy performance of some

companion outside the Sacred Circle, but this morning they merely stared

at her coldly. Still their indifference might mean nothing. Did it, or

did it not?

’Un, deux, trois,

Marquez les pas,

Faites la ré-vé-ren-ce,’

chanted the little master.

How Madeleine wished she were he, a light, artificial little creature,

with no great claims on life.

But her fears became a certainty, when going into the closet where they

kept their pattens and brushes, Jeanne commanded her in icy tones to

take her ‘dirty brush’ out of her, Jeanne’s, bag. And that was all. If

they had been boys, uproariously contemptuous, they would have twitted

Madeleine with her lie, but being girls, they merely sneered and ignored

her. She felt like a spirit that, suspended in mid-air, watches the body

it has left being torn to pieces by a pack of wolves. Days of dull agony

followed, but she felt strangely resigned, as if she could go on bearing

it for ever and a day.

It was during the Fronde, and Jeanne and her friends had a cult for Condé

and Madame de Longueville, the royal rebels. They taught their parrots

at home to repeat lines of Mazarinades, they kept a print of Condé at

the battle of Rocroy in their book of Hours, and had pocket mirrors with

his arms emblazoned on the back, while Madame de Longueville simpered

at them from miniatures painted on the top of their powder boxes or the

backs of their tablets. As the nuns, influenced by the clergy, were

strong Royalists, and looked upon Condé as a sort of Anti-Christ, the

girls had to hide their enthusiasm.

Some weeks after Madeleine’s fall, it was announced that on the following

Wednesday there was to be a public demonstration in favour of Condé and

the Frondeurs, and that there would be fireworks in their honour, and

that some of the streets would be decorated with paper lanterns.

On Wednesday Jeanne and Julie came to Madeleine and ordered her to slip

out of her window at about eight o’clock in the evening, go down to the

gate at the end of the avenue, and when they called her from the other

side, to unbolt it for them. They then went to one of the nuns and,

pleading a headache, said they would like to go to bed, and did not want

any supper.

During the last weeks Madeleine had lost all spirit, all personality

almost, so she followed their instructions with mechanical submission,

and was at the gate at the appointed time, opened it, let them in, and

all three got back to bed in safety.

About a week later, all the girls were bidden to assemble in the

Refectory, where the Reverend Mother was awaiting them with a look of

Rhadamanthine severity.

‘Most grievous news had been given her concerning a matter that must be

dealt with without delay. She would ask all the demoiselles in turn if

they had left their bedrooms on Wednesday evening.’

‘No, Madame.’

‘No, Madame,’ in voices of conscious rectitude, as one girl after another

was asked by name. It was also the answer of Jeanne and Julie. Then:

‘Mademoiselle Troqueville, did you leave your bedroom on Wednesday

evening?’

There was a pause, and then came the answer: ‘Yes, Madame.’

All eyes were turned on her, and Julie, covertly, put out her tongue.

‘Mesdemoiselles, you may all go, excepting Mademoiselle Troqueville.’

Madeleine noticed that the Reverend Mother had a small mole on her cheek,

she had not seen it before.

Then came such a scolding as she had never before experienced. Much

mention was made of ‘obedience,’ ‘chastity,’ ‘Anti-Christ,’ ‘the enemies

of the King and the Church.’ What had they to do with walking across the

garden and opening a gate? Perhaps she had shown too much leg in climbing

out of the window—that would, at least, account for the mention of

chastity.

The Reverend Mother had asked _if any one had left their bedroom_—that

was all—and Madeleine had. And to her mind, dulled, and, as is often

the case, made stupidly literal by sheer terror, this fact had lost all

connection with Jeanne’s and Julie’s escapade, and seemed, by itself, the

cause of this mysterious tirade. It certainly was wrong to have left her

bedroom—but why did it make her ‘an enemy of the King’?

She found herself seizing on a word here and there in the torrent and

spelling it backwards.

‘Example’ ... elpmaxe ... rather a pretty word! _la chastité_ ...

étitsahc al ... it sounded like Spanish ... who invented the different

languages? Perhaps a prize had once been offered at a College for the

invention of the best language, and one student invented French and got

the prize, and another nearly got the second, but it was discovered in

time that he had only turned his own language backwards, and that was

cheating.... _Jésus!_ there was a little bit of wood chipped out of

the Reverend Mother’s crucifix! But these thoughts were just a slight

trembling on the surface of fathoms of inarticulate terror and despair.

Then she heard the Reverend Mother telling her that it would be a sign of

grace if she were to disclose the names of her companions.

In a flash she realised that she was supposed to have done whatever it

was that Jeanne and Julie had done on Wednesday evening.

‘But, Madame, I didn’t ... ’twas only——’

‘Mademoiselle, excuses and denials will avail you nothing. Who was the

other lady with you?’

‘Oh, it isn’t that ... there were no others, at least ... ah! I am

at a loss how I can best make it clear, but we are, methinks, at

cross-purposes.’

But her case was hopeless. She could not betray Jeanne and Julie, and

even if she had wished to, she was incapable just then of doing so,

feeling too light-headed and rudderless to make explanations. Finally she

was dismissed, and walked out of the room as if in a trance.

She was greeted by a clamour of questions and reproaches from the girls.

Jeanne and Julie were in hysterics. When they discovered that she had not

betrayed them, they muttered some sheepish expressions of gratitude, and

to save their faces they started badgering her in a half-kindly way for

having got herself into trouble so unnecessarily; why could she not have

said ‘No’ like the rest of them? Madeleine had no satisfactory answer to

give, because she did not know why herself. In sudden crises it seemed

as if something stepped out from behind her personality and took matters

into its own hands, and spite of all her good-will it would not allow her

to give a false answer to a direct question. And this although, as we

have seen, she could suddenly find herself telling gratuitous falsehoods

by the gross.

Of course Madeleine was in terrible disgrace, and penance was piled on

penance. The Sacred Circle was friendly to her again, but this brought

no comfort now, and the severe looks of the nuns put her in a perpetual

agony of terror.

About a week went by, and then one day, when she was sitting in the

little room of penance, the door was thrown open and in rushed Julie

turned into a gurgling, sniffing whirlwind of tears.

‘The Reverend Mother’ ... sob ... ‘says I must’ ... sob ... ‘ask your

forgiveness’ ... scream, and then she flopped down on the floor, overcome

by the violence of her emotion. It was clear to Madeleine that in some

miraculous way all had been discovered, but she did not feel particularly

relieved. The ‘movement of the passions’ seemed to have been arrested

in her. She sat watching Julie with her clear, wide-open eyes, and her

expression was such as one might imagine on the face of an Eastern god

whose function is to gaze eternally on a spectacle that never for an

instant interests or moves him. She did not even feel scorn for Julie,

just infinite remoteness.

Julie began nervously to shut and open one of her hands; Madeleine looked

at it. It was small and plump and rather dirty, and on one of its fingers

there was a little enamelled ring, too tight for it, and pressing into

the flesh. It looked like a small distracted animal; Madeleine remembered

a beetle she had once seen struggling on its back. Its smallness and

dirtiness, and the little tight ring and its suggestion of the beetle,

for some reason touched Madeleine. A sudden wave of affection and pity

for Julie swept over her. In a second she was down beside her, with her

arms around her, telling her not to cry, and that it didn’t matter. And

there she was found some minutes later by the Reverend Mother, from whom

she received a panegyric of praise for her forgiving spirit and a kiss,

which she could well have dispensed with.

Then the whole thing was explained; an anonymous letter had been sent

to the Reverend Mother saying that the writer had seen, on the evening

of the demonstration in favour of Condé, two girls masked and hooded,

evidently of position, as they had attendants with them, and that they

were laughing together about their escape from the Convent. The Reverend

Mother had never thought of connecting with the affair Jeanne’s and

Julie’s early retirement that evening. Now she had just got a letter

from Maître Prunier informing her that it had come to his knowledge that

his daughter and her great friend had been walking in the town that same

evening. He had learned this distressing news from one of his servants

whom Jeanne had got to accompany her on her escapade. He bade the

Reverend Mother keep a stricter watch on his daughter. She had sent for

Jeanne and Julie and they had told her that it was only through coercion

that Madeleine had played any part in the escapade.

Then the Reverend Mother and Julie went away, and Jeanne came in to

offer her apologies. She also had evidently been crying, and her mouth

had a sulky droop which did not suggest that her self-complacency had

shrivelled up, like that of Julie. Madeleine found herself resenting

this; how _dare_ she not be abject?

The two following sentences contained Jeanne’s apology:—

(_a_) ‘The Reverend Mother is a spiteful old dragon!’ and she sniffed

angrily.

(_b_) ‘Will you come home for my Fête Day next month? There is to be a

Collation and a Ball and a Comedy,’ and she gave the little wriggle of

her hips, and the complacent gesture of adjusting her collar, which were

so characteristic.

A few weeks ago, this invitation would have sent Madeleine into an

ecstasy of pleasure. To enter that great fantastic door had seemed a

thing one only did in dreams. As Jeanne gave her invitation she saw it

clearly before her, cut off from the house and the street and the trees,

just itself, a finely embossed shield against the sky. It was like one

of the woodcuts that she had seen in a booth of the Fair that year by a

semi-barbarian called Master Albert Dürer. Woodcuts of one carrot, or a

king-fisher among the reeds, or, again, a portion of the grassy bank of a

high road, shown as a busy little commonwealth of bees and grasses, and

frail, sturdy flowers, heedless of and unheeded by the restless stream

of the high road, stationary and perfect like some obscure island of

the Ægean. The world seen with the eyes of an elf or an insect ... how

strange! Then she looked at Jeanne, and suddenly there flashed before her

a sequence of little ignoble things she had subconsciously registered

against her. She had a provincial accent and pronounced _volontiers_,

_voulentiers_; she had a nasty habit of picking her nose; Madeleine had

often witnessed her being snubbed by one of the nuns, and then blushing;

there was something indecently bourgeois in the way she turned the pages

of a book.

The ignoble pageant took about two seconds for its transit, then

Madeleine said, ‘I am much beholden to you, albeit, I fear me I cannot

assist at your Fête,’ and dropping her a curtsey she opened the door,

making it quite clear that Jeanne was to go, which she did, without a

word, as meek as a lamb.

In Madeleine’s description of this scene to Jacques long afterwards she

made herself say to Jeanne what actually she had only thought; many young

people, often the most sensitive, hanker after the power of being crudely

insolent: it seems to them witty and mature.

That night Madeleine was delirious, and Madame Troqueville was sent for.

It was the beginning of a long illness which, for want of a better name,

her doctor called a sharp attack of the spleen.

CHAPTER IV

THE SIN OF NARCISSUS

In time she recovered, or at least was supposed to have recovered, but

she did not return to the Convent, and her mother still watched her

anxiously and was more than ever inclined to give in to her in everything.

The doctor had advised her to continue taking an infusion of steel in

white wine, and to persist in daily exercise, the more violent the

better. So at first she would spend several hours of the day playing at

shuttlecock with her mother, but Madame Troqueville’s energy failing her

after the first few weeks, Madeleine was forced to pursue her cure by

herself.

She found the exercise led to vague dreaming of a semi-dramatic

nature—imaginary arguments with a nameless opponent dimly outlined

against a background of cloth of gold—arguments in which she herself was

invariably victorious. In time, she discarded the shuttlecock completely,

finding that this semi-mesmeric condition was reached more easily through

a wild dance, rhythmic but formless.

In the meantime her social values had become more just, and she

realised that rank is higher than wealth, and that she herself, as the

granddaughter of a Judge of the Paris _Parlement_, and even as the

daughter of a _procureur_, was of more importance socially than the

daughters of merchants, however wealthy.

Round the Intendant of the province and his wife there moved a select

circle, dressed in the penultimate Paris fashion, using the penultimate

Paris slang, and playing for very high stakes at Hoc and Reversi. It was

to this circle that Madeleine’s eyes now turned with longing, as they had

formerly done to the Sacred Circle at the Convent.

In time she got to know some of these Olympians. Those with whom she had

the greatest success were the Précieuses, shrill, didactic ladies who

by their unsuccessful imitation of their Paris models made Lyons the

laughing-stock of the metropolis. Some of them would faint at the mention

of a man’s name; indeed, one of them, who was also a _dévote_, finding it

impossible to reconcile her prudishness with the idea of a male Redeemer,

started a theory that Christ had been really a woman—‘’Tis clear from

His clothes,’ she would say—and that the beard that painters gave Him,

was only part of a plot to wrest all credit from women. They spoke a

queer jargon, full of odd names for the most ordinary objects and barely

intelligible to the uninitiated. Madeleine talked as much like them as

self-consciousness would permit. Also, she copied them in a scrupulous

care of her personal appearance, and in their attention to personal

cleanliness, which was considered by the world at large as ridiculous

as their language. Madame Troqueville feared she would ruin her by the

expensive scents—_poudre d’iris_, _musc_, _civette_, _eau d’ange_—with

which she drenched herself.

In the meantime she had got to know a grubby, smirking old gentleman who

kept a book-shop and fancied himself as a literary critic. He used to

procure the most recent publications of Sercy and Quinet and the other

leading Paris publishers, and his shop became a favourite resort of a

throng of poetasters and young men of would-be fashion who came there to

read and criticise in the manner of the Paris _muguets_. Hither also came

Madeleine, and in a little room behind the shop, where she was safe from

ogles and insolence, she would devour all the books that pleased and

modelled the taste of the day.

Here were countless many-volumed romances, such as the _Astrée_ of Honoré

d’Urfé, La Calprenèdes’s _Cassandre_, and that flower of modernity,

Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s _Grand Cyrus_. _Romans à clef_, they were

called, for in them all the leaders of fashion, all the _bels esprits_ of

the day were dressed up in classical or Oriental costumes, and set to the

task of fitting the fashions and fads of modern Paris into the conditions

of the ancient world or of the kingdom of the Grand Turk. But the

important thing in these romances was what Madeleine called to herself,

with some complacency at the name, ‘_l’escrime galante_’—conversations

in which the gallant, with an indefatigable nimbleness of wit, pays

compliment after compliment to the prudishly arch belle, by whom they

are parried with an equal nimbleness and perseverance. If the gallant

manages to get out a declaration, then the belle is _touchée_, and in

her own eyes disgraced for ever. Then, often, paragons of _esprit_ and

_galanterie_, and the other urbane qualities necessary to _les honnêtes

gens_, give long-winded discourses on some subtle point in the psychology

of lovers. And all this against a background of earthquakes and fires and

hair-breadth escapes, which, together with the incredible coldness of

the capricious heroine, go to prove that nothing can wither the lilies

and roses of the hero’s love and patience and courage. Then there were

countless books of _Vers Galants_, sonnets, and madrigals by beplumed,

beribboned poets, who, like pedlars of the Muses, displayed their wares

in the _ruelles_ and alcoves of great ladies. There were collections of

letters, too, or rather, of _jeux d’esprit_, in which verse alternated

with prose to twist carefully selected news into something which had

the solidity of a sonnet, the grace of a madrigal. Of these letters,

Madeleine was most dazzled by those of the late Vincent Voiture, Jester,

and spoilt child of the famous Hôtel de Rambouillet, and through his

letters she came to feel that she almost knew personally all those

laughing, brilliant people, who had made the Hôtel so famous in the reign

of Louis XIII.—the beautiful touchy ‘Lionne,’ with her lovely voice and

burnished hair; the Princess Julie, suave and mocking, and, like all her

family, an incorrigible tease; and the great Arthénice herself, whimsical

and golden-hearted, with a humorous, half-apologetic chastity. She knew

them all, and the light fantastic world in which they lived, a world of

mediæval romance _pour rire_, in which magic palaces sprang up in the

night, and where ordinary mortals who had been bold enough to enter were

apt to be teased as relentlessly as Falstaff by the fairies of Windsor

Forest.

But what Madeleine pored over most of all was the theory of all these

elegant practices, embodied in species of guide-books to the polite

world, filled with elaborate rules as to the right way of entering a room

and of leaving it, analyses of the grades of deference or of insolence

that could be expressed by a curtsey, the words which must be used and

the words that must not be used, and all the other tiny things which,

pieced together, would make the paradigm of an _honnête homme_ or a

_femme galante_. There Madeleine learned that the most heinous crime

after that of being a bourgeois, was to belong to the Provinces, and the

glory speedily departed from the Lyons Précieuses to descend on those

of Paris. Her own surroundings seemed unbearable, and when she was not

storming at the Virgin for having made her an obscure provincial, she was

pestering her with prayers to transplant her miraculously to some higher

sphere.

The craze for Jansenism—that Catholic Calvinism deduced from the

writings of Saint Augustine by the Dutch Jansen, and made fashionable

by the accomplished hermits of Port-Royal—already just perceptibly on

the wane in Paris, had only recently reached Lyons. As those of Paris

some years before, the haberdashers of Lyons now filled their shops

with collars and garters _à la Janséniste_, and the booksellers with

the charming treatises on theology by ‘_les Messieurs de Port-Royal_.’

Many of the ladies became enamoured of the ‘furiously delicious Saint

Augustine,’ and would have little debates, one side sustaining the view

that his hair had been dark, the other that it had been fair. They raved

about his Confessions, vowing that there was in it a ‘Je ne sais quoi de

doux et de passionné.’

Madeleine also caught the craze and in as superficial a manner as the

others. For instance, the three petticoats worn by ladies which the

Précieuses called ‘_la modeste_,’ ‘_la friponne_,’ and ‘_la secrète_,’

she rechristened ‘_la grâce excitante_,’ ‘_la grâce subséquente_,’ and

‘_la grâce efficace_.’ She gained from this quite a reputation in Lyons.

That Lent, the wife of the Intendant manœuvred that a priest of

recognised Jansenist leanings should preach a sermon in the most

fashionable Church of the town. He based his sermon on the Epistle for

the day, which happened to be 2 Timothy, iii. 1. ‘This know also, that

in the last days perilous times shall come. _For men shall be lovers

of their own selves._’ The whole sermon was a passionate denunciation

of _amour-propre_—_self-love_ according to its earliest meaning—that

newly-discovered sin that was to dominate the psychology of the

seventeenth century. By a certain imaginative quality in his florid

rhetoric, he made his hearers feel it as a thing loathly, poisonous,

parasitic. After a description of the awful loneliness of the self-lover,

cut off for ever from God and man, he thundered out the following

peroration:—

‘Listen! This Narcissus gazing into the well of his own heart beholds,

not that reflection which awaits the eyes of every true Christian, a

Face with eyes like unto swords and hair as white as wool, a King’s head

crowned with thorns, no, what meets _his_ eyes is his own sinful face.

In truth, my brethren, a grievous and unseemly vision, but anon his face

will cast a shadow a thousand-fold more unsightly and affrighting—to wit,

the fiery eyes and foaming jowl of the Dragon himself. For to turn into a

flower is but a pretty fancy of the heathen, to turn into the Dragon is

the doom of the Christian Narcissus.’

Madeleine left the Church deeply moved. She had realised that _she_ was

such a Narcissus and that ‘_amour-propre_’ filled every cranny of her

heart.

She turned once more to the publications of Port-Royal, this time not

merely in quest of new names for petticoats, and was soon a convinced

Jansenist.

Jansenism makes a ready appeal to egotists ... is it not founded on the

teaching of those two arch-egotists, Saint Paul and Saint Augustine? And

so Madeleine found in Jansenism a spiritual pabulum much to her liking.

For instance, grace comes to the Jansenist in a passion of penitence, an

emotion more natural to an egotist than the falling in love with Christ

which was the seal of conversion in the time of Louis XIII., with its

mystical Catholicism _à l’espagnole_, touched with that rather charming

_fadeur_ peculiar to France. Then to the elect (among whom Madeleine

never doubted she was numbered) there is something very flattering in the

paradox of the Jansenists that although it is from the Redemption only

that Grace flows, and Christ died for all men, yet Grace is no vulgar

blessing in which all may participate, but it is reserved for those whom

God has decided shall, through no merit of their own, eventually be

saved.

Above all, Jansenism seemed made for Madeleine in that it promised a

remedy for man’s ‘sick will,’ a remedy which perhaps would be more

efficacious than steel and white wine for the lassitude, the moral

leakage, the truly ‘sick will’ from which she had suffered so long. The

Jansenist remedy was a complete abandonment to God, ‘an oarless drifting

on the full sea of Grace,’ and at first this brought to her a sense of

very great peace.

Her favourite of the Port-Royal books was _La Fréquente Communion_,

in which the Père Arnauld brought to bear on Theology in full force

his great inheritance, the Arnauld legal mind, crushing to powder the

treatise of a certain Jesuit priest who maintained that a Christian can

benefit from the Eucharist without Penitence.

Influenced by this book, very few Jansenists felt that they had reached

the state of grace necessary for making a good Communion.

So, what with self-examination, self-congratulation, and abstaining from

the Eucharist, for a time Jansenism kept Madeleine as happy and occupied

as a new diet keeps a _malade imaginaire_. Her emotions when she danced

became more articulate. She saw herself the new abbess of Port-Royal, the

wise, tender adviser of the ‘Solitaires,’ Mère Angélique with a beautiful

humility having abdicated in her favour, ‘for here is one greater than

I.’ She went through her farewell address to her nuns, an address of

infinite beauty and pathos. She saw herself laid out still and cold in

the Chapel, covered with flowers culled by royal fingers in the gardens

of Fontainebleau, with the heart-broken nuns sobbing around her. Finally

the real Madeleine flung herself on her bed, the tears streaming from her

eyes. Her subtle enemy, _amour-propre_, had taken the veil.

She had started a diary of her spiritual life, in which she recorded

the illuminations, the temptations, the failures, the reflections, the

triumphs, of each day. The idea suddenly occurred to her of sending the

whole to Mère Agnès Arnauld, who was head of the Paris Port-Royal. She

wrote her also a letter in which she told her of certain difficulties

that had troubled her in the Jansenist doctrine, suggested by the Five

Propositions. These were conclusions of an heretical nature, drawn from

Jansen’s book and submitted to the Pope. The Jansenists denied that they

were fair conclusions, but in their attempt to prove this, they certainly

laid themselves open to the charge of obscurantism. She included in her

letter the following _énigme_ she had written on _amour-propre_, on the

model of those of the Abbé Cotin, whose fertile imagination was only

equalled by his fine disregard of the laws of prosody.

Je brûle, comme Narcisse, de ma propre flamme,

Quoique je n’aie pas

L’excuse des doux appas

De ce jeune conquérant des cœurs de dames.

Selon mon nom, de Vénus sort ma race;

Suis-je donc son joli fils

Qui rit parmi les roses et lys?

Moi chez qui jamais se trouve _la Grâce_?

The pun on ‘Grace’ seemed to her a stroke of genius. She was certain

that Mère Agnès could not fail to be deeply impressed with the whole

communication, and to realise that Madeleine was an instrument

exquisitely tempered by God for fine, delicate work in His service.

Madeleine planned beforehand the exact words of Mère Agnèse’s answer:—

‘Your words have illumined like a lamp for myself and my sister

many a place hitherto dark.’ ‘My dearest child, God has a great

work for you.’ ‘My brother says that the Holy Spirit has so

illumined for you the pages of his book, that you have learned

from it things he did not know were there himself,’

were a few of the sentences. In the actual letter, however, none of

them occurred. Mère Agnès seemed to consider Madeleine’s experiences

very usual, and irritated her extremely by saying with regard to some

difficulty that Madeleine had thought unutterably subtle and original:—

‘Now I will say to you what I always say to my nuns when they

are perplexed by that difficulty.’

The letter ended with these words of exhortation:—

‘Remember that pride of intellect is the most deadly and

difficult to combat of the three forms of Concupiscence,

and that the pen, although it can be touched into a shining

weapon of God’s, is a favourite tool of the Evil One, for

_amour-propre_ is but too apt to seize it from behind and make

it write nothing but one’s own praises, and that when one

would fain be writing the praises of God. Are you certain, my

dear child, that this has not happened to you? Conceits and

_jeux d’esprit_ may sometimes without doubt be used to the

Glory of God, as, for example, in the writings of the late

Bishop of Geneva of thrice blessed memory. But by him they were

always used as were the Parables of Our Lord, to make hard

truths clear to simple minds, but you, my child, are not yet

a teacher. Examine your heart as to whether there was not a

little vanity in your confessions. I will urgently pray that

grace may be sent you, to help you to a _true_ examination of

your own heart.’

In Madeleine’s heart rage gave way to a dull sense of failure. She

would not be a Jansenist at all if she could not be an eminent one. It

was quite clear to her that her conversion had merely reinforced her

_amour-propre_. What was to be done?

Jansenism had by no means destroyed her hankerings after the polite

society of Paris, it had merely pushed them on to a lower shelf in her

consciousness. One night she dreamed that she was walking in a garden

in thrillingly close communion with the Duc de Candale. Their talk was

mainly about his green garters, but in her dream it had been fraught with

passionate meaning. Suddenly he turned into Julie de Rambouillet, but the

emotion of the intimacy was just as poignant. This dream haunted her all

the following day. Then in a flash it occurred to her that it had been

sent from above as a direct answer to prayer. Obviously love for some one

else was the antidote to _amour-propre_. This was immediately followed

by another inspiration. Ordinary love was gradually becoming a crime in

the code of the Précieuses, and ‘_l’amitié tendre_’ the perfect virtue.

But would it not be infinitely more ‘gallant’ and distinguished to make a

_woman_ the object of that friendship? It seemed to her the obvious way

of keeping friendship stationary, an elegant statue in the discreet and

shady groves of Plato’s Academe which lies in such dangerous contiguity

to the garden of Epicurus. Thus did she settle the demands at once of

Jansenism and of the Précieuses.

The problem that lay before her now was to find an object for this

Platonic tenderness. Julie de Rambouillet, as a wife, mother, and

passionately attached daughter, could scarcely have a wide enough

emotional margin to fit her for the rôle. After first choosing and then

discarding various other ladies, she settled on Madeleine de Scudéry.

Unmarried and beyond the age when one is likely to marry (she was over

forty), evidently of a romantic temperament, very famous, she had every

qualification that Madeleine could wish. Then there was the coincidence

of the name, a subject for pleasant thrills. Madeleine soon worked up

through her dances a blazing pseudo _flamme_. The sixth book of Cyrus,

which treats of Mademoiselle de Scudéry herself, under the name of

Sappho, and of her own circle, seemed full of tender messages for _her_.

‘Moreover, she is faithful in her friendships; and she has

a soul so tender, and a heart so passionate, that one may

certainly place the supreme felicity in being loved by Sappho.’

‘I conceive that beyond a doubt there is nothing so sweet as to

be loved by a person that one loves.’

She pictured herself filling the rôle of Phaon, whom she had heard was

but an imaginary character, Mademoiselle de Scudéry having as yet made no

one a ‘_Citoyen de Tendre_.’

‘And the most admirable thing about it was that in the midst

of such a large company, Sappho did not fail to find a way

of giving Phaon a thousand marks of affection, and even of

sacrificing all his rivals to him, without their remarking it.’

Oh, the thrill of it! It would set Madeleine dancing for hours.

The emotions of her dances were at first but a vague foretasting of

future triumphs and pleasures, shot with pictures of wavering outlines

and conversations semi-articulate. But she came in time to feel a need

for a scrupulous exactitude in details, as if her pictures acquired some

strange value by the degree of their accuracy. What that value was, she

could not have defined, but her imaginings seemed now to be moulding the

future in some way, to be making events that would actually occur.... It

was therefore necessary that they should be well within the bounds of

probability.

This new conviction engendered a sort of loyalty to Mademoiselle de

Scudéry, for previously a stray word or suggestion would fire her with

the charms of some other lady, whom she would proceed to make for the

time the centre of her rites—la Comtesse de la Suze, after having read

her poetry, the Marquise de Sévigné, when she had heard her praised

as a witty beauty—but now, with the fortitude of a Saint Anthony, she

would chase the temptresses from her mind, and firmly nail her longings

to Mademoiselle de Scudéry. And soon the temptation to waver left her,

and Mademoiselle de Scudéry became a corroding obsession. She began to

crave feverishly to go to Paris. Lyons turned into a city of Hell, where

everything was a ghastly travesty of Heaven. The mock Précieuses with

their grotesque graces, the vulgar dandies, so complacently unconscious

of their provincialism, the meagre parade of the Promenade, it was all,

she was certain, like the uncouth Paris of a nightmare. If she went to

Paris, she would, of course, immediately meet Mademoiselle de Scudéry,

who, on the spot, would be fatally wounded by her _esprit_ and air

gallant, and the following days would lead the two down a gentle slope

straight to _le Pays de Tendre_. But how was she to get to Paris?

Then, as if by a miracle, her father was also seized by a longing to go

to Paris, and finally a complete _déménagement_ was decided upon. What

wonder if Madeleine felt that the gods were upon her side?

But once in Paris, she was brought face to face with reality. It had

never struck her that a meeting with Mademoiselle de Scudéry might be a

thing to need manœuvring. Days, weeks, went by, and she had not yet met

her. She began to realise the horror of time, as opposed to eternity.

Her meeting with Mademoiselle de Scudéry could only be the result of a

previous chain of events, not an isolated miracle. To fit it into an

air-tight compartment of causality and time, seemed to require more

volition than her ‘sick will’ could compass.

Then there was the maddening thought that while millions of people were

dead, and millions not yet born, and millions living at the other side

of the world, Mademoiselle de Scudéry was at that very moment alive, and

actually living in the same town as herself, and yet she could not see

her, could not speak to her. What difference was there in her life at

Paris to that at Lyons?

They had settled, as we have seen, in the Quartier de l’Université, as

it was cheap, and not far from the Île Notre-Dame, where Jacques and

Monsieur Troqueville went every day, to the Palais de Justice. It was a

quarter rich in the intellectual beauty of tradition and in the tangible

beauty of lovely objects, but—it was not fashionable and therefore held

no charm for Madeleine.

The things she valued were to be found in the quarters of Le Marais, of

the Arsenal, of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, of the Place Royale. She hated

the Rambouillets for not begging her to live with them, she hated the

people in the streets for not acclaiming her with shouts of welcome every

time she appeared, she hated Mademoiselle de Scudéry for never having

heard of her. Whenever she passed a tall, dark lady, she would suddenly

become very self-conscious, and raising her voice, would try and say

something striking in the hopes that it might be she.

She was woken every morning by the cries of the hawkers:—

‘Grobets, craquelines; brides à veau, pour friands museaux!’

‘Qui en veut?’

‘Salade, belle Salade!’

‘La douce cerise, la griotte à confire, cerises de Poitiers!’

‘Amandes nouvelles, amandes douces; amendez-vous!’

And above these cries from time to time would rise the wail of an old

woman carrying a basket laden with spoons and buttons and old rags,

‘Vous désirez quelque cho-o-se?’

Was it Fate come to mock her?

There is no position so difficult to hold for any length of time as a

logical one. Even before leaving Lyons, in Madeleine’s mind the steps had

become obliterated of that ruthless argument by which the Augustinian

doctors lead the catechumen from the premises set down by Saint Paul to

conclusions in which there is little room for hope. She struggled no

longer in close mental contact—according to Jansenius’s summing up of the

contents of Christianity—with:—

‘Hope or Concupiscence, or any of the forms of Grace; or with

the price or the punishment of man, or with his beatitude

or his misery; or with free-will and its enslavage; or with

predestination and its effect; or with the love and justice and

mercy and awfulness of God; in fact, with neither the Old nor

the New Testament.’

But, without any conscious ‘revaluing of values,’ the kindly god of the

Semi-Pelagians, a God so humble as to be grateful for the tiniest crumb

of virtue offered Him by His superb and free creatures, this God was born

in her soul from the mists made by expediency, habit, and the ‘Passions.’

But when she had come to Paris and no miracle had happened, she began

to get desperate, and Semi-Pelagianism cannot live side by side with

despair. The kind Heavenly Father had vanished, and His place was taken

by a purblind and indifferent deity who needed continual propitiation.

These changes in her religious attitude took place, as I have said,

unconsciously, and Madeleine considered herself still a sound Jansenist.

As a consequence of this spiritual slackening, the imaginary connection

had been severed between her obsession and her religion. She had

forgotten that her love for Mademoiselle de Scudéry had originally been

conceived as a remedy for _amour-propre_. But, about a week before the

dinner at Madame Pilou’s, she had come upon these lines of Voiture:—

‘De louange, et d’honneur, vainement affamée,

Vous ne pouvez aimer, et voulez estre aymée.’

To her fevered imagination these innocent words hinted at some mysterious

law which had ordained that the spurner of love should in his turn be

spurned. She remembered that it was a commonplace in the writings of

both the ancients and the moderns that it was an ironical lawgiver who

had compiled the laws of destiny. And if this particular law were valid,

the self-lover was on the horns of a horrible dilemma, for, while he

continued in a condition of _amour-propre_, he was shut off from the

love of God, but if he showed his repentance by falling in love, he was

bringing on himself the appointed penalty of loving in vain. And here her

morbid logic collapsed, and she thought of a very characteristic means

of extricating herself. She would immediately start a love affair that

it might act as a buffer between the workings of this law and her future

affair with Mademoiselle de Scudéry.

It was this plan that had sent her to Jacques with the startling

announcement I have already mentioned, that she loved him very much, and

that he might take his fill of kissing her.

CHAPTER V

AN INVITATION

A few days after the dinner at Madame Pilou’s Madeleine was dancing

Mænad-like up and down her little room. Then with eyes full of a wild

triumph she flung herself on her bed.

Beside her on the table lay the sixth volume of _Le Grand Cyrus_, which

she had taken to using as a kind of _Sortes Virgilianæ_. She picked it up

and opened it. Her eyes fell on the following words:—

‘For with regard to these ladies, who take pleasure in being

loved without loving; the only satisfaction which lies in store

for them, is that which vanity can give them.’

She shut it impatiently and opened it again. This time, it was these

words that stood out:—

‘Indeed,’ added she, ‘I remember that my dislike came near to

hatred for a passably pleasant gentlewoman——’

Madeleine crossed herself nervously, got down from her bed, and took

several paces up and down the room, and then opened the book again.

‘Each moment his jealousy and perturbation waxed stronger.’

Three attempts, and not one word of good omen. She had the sense of

running round and round in an endless circle between the four walls of a

tiny, dark cell. Through the bars she could see one or two stars, and

knew that out there lay the wide, cool, wind-blown world of causality,

governed by eternal laws that nothing could alter. But knowing this did

not liberate her from her cell, round which she continued her aimless

running till the process made her feel sick and dizzy.

She opened the book again. This time her eyes fell on words that, in

relation to her case, had no sense. She looked restlessly round the room

for some other means of divination. The first thing she noticed was her

comb. She seized it and began counting the teeth, repeating:—

‘Elle m’aime un peu, beaucoup, passionément, pas de tout.’ ‘Passionément’

came on the last tooth. She gave a great sigh of relief; it was as if

something relaxed within her.

Then the door opened, and Berthe padded in, smiling mysteriously.

‘A lackey has brought Mademoiselle this letter.’ Madeleine seized it.

It had not been put in an envelope, but just folded and sealed. It was

addressed in a very strange hand, large and illegible, to:—

Mademoiselle Troqueville,

Petite Rue du Paon,

Above the baker Paul,

At the Sign of the Cock,

Near the Collège de Bourgogne.

‘He wore a brave livery,’ Berthe went on, ‘the cloth must have cost

several _écus_ the yard, and good strong shoes, but no pattens. I

wouldn’t let him in to stink the house, I told him——’

‘Would you oblige me by leaving me alone, Berthe?’ said Madeleine. Berthe

chuckled and withdrew.

A letter brought to her by a lackey, and in a strange writing! Her heart

stood still. It must either be from Mademoiselle de Scudéry or Madame

de Rambouillet, it did not much matter which. She felt deadly sick.

Everything danced before her. She longed to get into the air and run for

miles—away from everything. She rushed back into her room, and locked the

door. She still was unable to open the letter. Then she pulled herself

together and broke the seal. Convinced that it was from Mademoiselle de

Scudéry, she threw it down without reading it, and, giggling sheepishly,

gave several leaps up and down the room. Then she clenched her hands,

drew a deep breath, picked it up and opened it again. Though the lines

danced before her like the reflection of leaves in a stream, she was

able to decipher the signature. It was: ‘Votre obéissante à vous faire

service, M. Cornuel.’ Strange to say, it was with a feeling of relief

that Madeleine realised that it was not from Mademoiselle de Scudéry. She

then read the letter through.

‘MADEMOISELLE,—My worthy friend, Madame Pilou, has made mention

of you to me. Mademoiselle de Scudéry and I intend to wait on

Madame de Rambouillet at two o’clock, Thursday of next week. An

you would call at a quarter to two at my Hôtel, the Marais, rue

St-Antoine, three doors off from the big butcher’s, opposite

_Les Filles d’Elizabeth_, I shall be glad to drive you to the

Hôtel de Rambouillet and present you to the Marquise.’

The Lord was indeed on her side! So easily had He brushed aside the

hundreds of chances that would have prevented her first meeting

Mademoiselle de Scudéry at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, on which, as we have

seen, she had set her heart.

In a flash God became once more glorious and moral—a Being that cares for

the work of His hands, a maker and keeper of inscrutable but entirely

beneficent laws, not merely a Daimon of superstitious worship. Then she

looked at her letter again. So Madame Cornuel had not bothered to tie it

round with a silk ribbon and put it in an envelope! She was seized by a

helpless paroxysm of rage.

‘In my answer I’ll call her _Dame_ Cornuel,’ she muttered furiously. Then

she caught sight of the Crucifix above her bed, and she was suddenly

filled with terror. Was this the way to receive the great kindness of

Christ in having got her the invitation? Really, it was enough to make

Him spoil the whole thing in disgust. She crossed herself nervously and

threw herself on her knees. At first there welled up from her heart a

voiceless song of praise and love ... but this was only for a moment,

then her soul dropped from its heights into the following Litany:—

‘Blessed Virgin, Mother of Our Lord, make me shine on Thursday.

Guardian Angel, that watchest over me, make me shine on

Thursday.

Blessed Saint Magdalene, make me shine on Thursday.

Blessed Virgin, Mother of Our Lord, give me the friendship of

Mademoiselle de Scudéry.

Guardian Angel, that watchest over me, give me the friendship

of Mademoiselle de Scudéry.

Blessed Saint Magdalene, give me the friendship of Mademoiselle

de Scudéry.’

She gabbled this over about twenty times. Then she started a wild dance

of triumphant anticipation. It was without plot, as in the old days; just

a wallowing in an indefinitely glorious future. She was interrupted by

her mother’s voice calling her. Feeling guilty and conciliatory, as she

always did when arrested in her revels, she called back:—

‘I am coming, Mother,’ and went into the parlour. Madame Troqueville was

mending a jabot of Madeleine’s. Monsieur Troqueville was sitting up

primly on a chair, and Jacques was sprawling over a chest.

‘My love, Berthe said a lackey brought a letter for you. We have been

impatient to learn whom it was from.’

‘It was from Madame Cornuel, asking me to go with her on Thursday to the

Hôtel de Rambouillet.... Mademoiselle de Scudéry is to be there too.’

(Madeleine would much rather have not mentioned Mademoiselle de Scudéry

at all, but she felt somehow or other that it would be ‘bearing

testimony’ and that she _must_.)

Madame Troqueville went pink with pleasure, and Jacques’s eyes shone.

‘Madame de Rambouillet! The sister of Tallemant des Réaux, I suppose.

Her husband makes a lot of cuckolds. Madame _Cornuel_, did you say? If

she’s going to meet young Rambouillet, it will be her husband that will

have the _cornes_! _hein_, Jacques? _hein?_ It will be he that has the

_cornes_, won’t it?’ exclaimed Monsieur Troqueville, who was peculiarly

impervious to emotional atmosphere, chuckling delightedly, and winking at

Jacques, his primness having suddenly fallen from him. Madeleine gave a

little shrug and turned to the door, but Madame Troqueville, turning to

her husband, said icily:—

‘’Twas of the _Marquise_ de Rambouillet that Madeleine spoke, no kin

whatever of the family you mention. Pray, my love, tell us all about it.

Which Madame Cornuel is it?’

Monsieur Troqueville went on giggling to himself, absolutely intoxicated

by his own joke, and Madeleine began eagerly:—

‘Oh! the famous one ... “Zénocrite” in the _Grand Cyrus_. She’s an

exceeding rich widow and a good friend of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. She

is famed in the Court and in the Town, for her quaint and pungent wit.

’Twas she who stuck on the malcontents the name of “_les Importants_,”

you know, she——’

‘I had some degree of intimacy with her in the past,’ said Madame

Troqueville, then in a would-be careless voice, ‘I wonder if she has any

sons!’ Madeleine shut her eyes and groaned, and Jacques with his eyes

dancing dragged up Monsieur Troqueville, and they left the house.

So her mother had known Madame Cornuel once; Madeleine looked round the

little room. There was a large almanac, adorned, as was the custom,

with a woodcut representing the most important event in the previous

year. This one was of Mazarin as a Roman General with Condé and Retz as

barbarian prisoners tied to his chariot; her mother had bound its edges

with saffron ribbon. The chairs had been covered by her with bits of silk

and brocade from the chest in which every woman of her day cherished her

sacred hoard. On the walls were samplers worked by her when she had been

a girl.

What was her life but a pitiful attempt to make the best of things? And

Madeleine had been planning to leave her behind in this pathetically thin

existence, while she herself was translated to unutterable glory. It

suddenly struck her that her _amour-propre_ had sinned more against her

mother than any one else. She threw her arms round her neck and hugged

her convulsively, then ran back to her own room, her eyes full of tears.

She flung herself on her knees.

‘Blessed Virgin, help me to show that I am sensible to your great care

over me by being more loving and dutiful to my mother, and giving her

greater assistance in the work of the house. Oh, and please let pleasant

things be in store for _her also_. And oh! Blessed Lady, let me cut an

exceeding brave figure on Thursday. Give me occasions for airing all

the conceits I prepare beforehand. Make me look furiously beautiful and

noble, and let them all think me _dans le dernier galant_, but mostly

_her_. _Give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry._’ She had not

meant to add this long petition about herself, but the temptation had

been too great.

And now to business. She must ensure success by being diligent in her

dancing, thus helping God to get her her heart’s desire.

Semi-Pelagianism does not demand the blind faith of the Jansenists. Also,

it implicitly robs the Almighty of omnipotence. Thus was Madeleine a

true Semi-Pelagian in endeavouring to assist God to effect her Salvation

(we know she considered her Salvation inextricably bound up with the

attainment of the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry), for:—

‘The differentia of semi-Pelagianism is the tenet that in regeneration,

and all that results from it, the divine and the human will are

co-operating, co-efficient (synergistic) factors.’

* * * * *

In the train of the shadowy figure of Madame Cornuel, Madeleine mounts

the great stairs of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. The door is flung open;

they enter the famous _Salle Bleue_. Lying on a couch is an elderly lady

with other ladies sitting round her, at whose feet sit gallants on their

outspread cloaks.

‘Ah! dear Zénocrite, here you come leading our new _bergère_,’ cries

the lady on the couch. ‘Welcome, Mademoiselle, I have been waiting with

impatience to make your acquaintance.’

Madeleine curtseys and says with an indescribable mixture of modesty and

pride:—

‘Surely the world-famed amiability of Madame is, if I may use the

expression, at war with her judgment, or rather, for two such qualities

of the last excellence must ever be as united as Orestes and Pylades,

some falsely flattering rumour has preceded me to the shell of Madame’s

ear.’

‘Say rather some Zephyr, for such always precede Flora,’ one of the

gallants says in a low voice to another.

‘But no one, I think,’ continues Madeleine, ‘will accuse me of flattery

when I say that the dream of one day joining the pilgrims to the shrine

of Madame was the fairest one ever sent me from the gates of horn.’

‘Sappho, our _bergère_ has evidently been initiated into other mysteries

than those of the rustic Pan,’ says Arthénice, smiling to Mademoiselle

de Scudéry, whom Madeleine hardly dares to visualise, but feels near, a

filmy figure in scanty, classic attire.

Madeleine turns to Sappho with a look at once respectful and gallant, and

smiling, says:—

‘That, Madame, is because being deeply read in the Sibylline Books—which

is the name I have ventured to bestow on your delicious romances—I need

no other initiation to _les rites galants_.’

‘I fear, Mademoiselle, that if the Roman Republic had possessed only the

Books that you call Sibylline, it would have been burned to the ground by

the great Hannibal,’ says Sappho with a smile.

‘Madame, it would have been of no consequence, for the Sibyl herself

would have taken captive the conqueror,’ answers Madeleine gallantly.

‘Ah, Sappho!’ cries the Princess Julie, ‘I perceive that we Nymphs are

being beaten by the Shepherdess in the battle of flowers.’

‘Ah, no, Madame!’ Madeleine answers quickly. ‘Say rather that the

Shepherdess knows valleys where grow wild flowers that are not found

in urban gardens, and these she ventures to twine into garlands to lay

humbly at the feet of the Nymphs.’ She pauses. Sappho, by half a flicker

of an eyelid, shows her that she knows the garlands are all meant for her.

‘But, Mademoiselle, if you will pardon my curiosity, what induced you to

leave your agreeable prairies?’ asks Mégabate.

‘Monsieur,’ answers Madeleine, smiling, ‘had you asked Aristæus why he

left the deserts of Libya, his answer would have been the same as mine:

“There is a Greece.”’

‘Was not Aristæus reared by the Seasons themselves and fed upon nectar

and ambrosia?’ asks Sappho demurely.

‘To be reared by the Seasons! What a ravishing fate!’ cries one of the

gallants. ‘It is they alone who can give the _real_ roses and lilies,

which blossom so sweetly on the cheeks of Mademoiselle.’

‘Monsieur, one of the Seasons themselves brings the refutation of your

words. For Lady Winter brings ... _la glace_,’ says Madeleine, with a

look of delicious raillery.

‘But, indeed,’ she continues, ‘I must frankly admit that my distaste

for Bœotia (for that is what I call the Provinces!) is as great as that

felt for pastoral life by Alcippe and Amaryllis in the _Astrée_. There

is liberty in the prairies, you may say, but any one who has read of the

magic palaces of Armide or Alcine in _Amadis de Gaule_, would, rather

than enjoy all the liberty of all the sons of Boreas, be one of the

_blondines_ imprisoned in the palace of the present day Armide,’ and she

bows to Arthénice.

‘I do not care for _Amadis de Gaule_,’ says Sappho a little haughtily.

Madeleine thrills with indescribable triumph. Can it be possible that

Sappho is jealous of the compliment paid to Arthénice?

CHAPTER VI

THE GRECIAN PROTOTYPE

During the days that followed, Madeleine wallowed in Semi-Pelagianism.

With grateful adoration, she worshipped the indulgent God, who had hung

upon a Cross that everything she asked might be given her.

As a result of this new-found spiritual peace, she became much more

friendly and approachable at home. She even listened with indulgence to

her father’s egotistical crudities, and to her mother’s hopes of her

scoring a great success on the following Wednesday when the Troguins

were giving a ball. Seeing that her imprisonment in the bourgeois world

of pale reflections was so nearly over, and that she would so soon be

liberated to the plane of Platonic ideas and face to face with the _real_

Galanterie, the _real_ Esprit, the _real_ Fashion, she could afford a

little tolerance.

Then, in accordance with her promise to the Virgin, she insisted on

helping her mother in the work of the house. Madame Troqueville would

perhaps be sewing, Madeleine would come up to her and say in a voice

of resigned determination: ‘Mother, if you will but give me precise

instructions what to do, I will relieve you of this business.’ Then,

having wrested it from her unwilling mother, she would leave it half

finished and run off to dance—feeling she had discharged her conscience.

The virtue did not lie in a thing accomplished, but in doing something

disagreeable—however useless. The boredom of using her hands was so acute

as to be almost physical pain. It was as if the fine unbroken piece of

eternity in which her dreams took place turned into a swarm of little

separate moments, with rough, prickly coats that tickled her in her

most tender parts. The prickly coats suggested thorns, and—the metaphor

breaking off, as it were, into a separate existence of its own—she

remembered that in the old story of her childhood, it was thorns that

had guarded the palace of the hidden Princess. This association of ideas

seemed full of promise and encouraged her to persevere.

Many were the winks and leers of Berthe over this new domesticity, which

she chose to interpret in a manner Madeleine considered unspeakably

vulgar. ‘Ho! Ho!’ ... wink ... ‘Mademoiselle is studying to be a

housewife! Monsieur Jacques will be well pleased.’ And when Madeleine

offered to help her wash some jabots and fichus, she said, with a

mysterious leer, that she was reminded of a story of her grandmother’s

about a girl called Nausicaa, but when Madeleine asked to be told the

story, she would only chuckle mysteriously.

One evening she made a discovery that turned her hopes into certainty.

After supper, she had given Jacques a signal to follow her to her own

room. It was not that she wanted his society, but it was incumbent on her

to convince the gods that she loved him. She sat down on his knee and

caressed him. He said suddenly:—

‘I could scarce keep from laughing at supper when my uncle was descanting

on his diverse legal activities and reciting the fine compliments paid

him by judges and advocates by the score! _Malepest!_ So you do not drive

him to a nonplus with too close questionings, but let him unmolested

utter all his conceit, why then his lies will give you such entertainment

as——’

‘Have a care what you say, Jacques,’ she cried, ‘I’ll not have my father

called a liar. It may be that he paints the truth in somewhat gaudy

colours, but all said, ’tis a good-natured man, and I am grateful to

him in that being exercised as to the material welfare of my mother and

myself, he came to Paris to better our fortunes. Jacques! Have done with

your foolish laughter!’

But Jacques continued cackling with shrill, mocking glee.

‘My aunt’s and your material welfare, forsooth! This is most excellent

diversion! If you but knew the true cause of his leaving Lyons! If you

but knew!’

‘Well, tell me.’

‘That I will not, sweet Chop! Oh, ’tis a most fantastic nympholeptic! As

passionate after dreams as is his daughter.’

‘I am to seek as to your meaning, Jacques,’ said Madeleine very coldly,

and she slipped down from his knee.

Jacques went on chuckling to himself: ‘To see him standing there,

nonplussed, and stammering, and most exquisitely amorous.

‘Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus

Flamma demanat, sonitu suopte

Tintinant aures, gemina teguntur

Lumina nocte.’

‘What’s that you are declaiming, Jacques?’

‘Some lines of the Grecian Sappho, turned into Latin by Catullus, that

figure, with an exquisite precision, the commingling in a lover of

passion and of bashfulness.’

The look of cold aloofness suddenly vanished from Madeleine’s face.

‘The Grecian Sappho!’ she cried eagerly. ‘She is but a name to me. Tell

me of her.’

‘She was a poetess. She penned amorous odes to diverse damsels, and then

leapt into the sea,’ he answered laconically, looking at her with rather

a hostile light in his bright eyes.

‘Repeat me one of her odes,’ she commanded, and Jacques began in a level

voice:—

‘Deathless Dame Venus of the damasked throne, daughter of Jove,

weaver of wiles, I beseech thee tame not my soul with frets and

weariness, but if ever in time past thou heard’st and hearkened

to my cry, come hither to me now. For having yoked thy chariot

of gold thou did’st leave thy father’s house and fair, swift

swans, with ceaseless whirring of wings over the sable earth

did carry thee from heaven through the midmost ether. Swift

was their coming, and thou, oh, blessed one, a smile upon thy

deathless face, did’st ask the nature of my present pain, and

to what new end I had invoked thee, and what, once more, my

frenzied soul was fain should come to pass.

‘“Who is she now that thou would’st fain have Peitho lead to

thy desire? Who, Sappho, does thee wrong? _For who flees, she

shall pursue; who spurns gifts, she shall offer them; who loves

not, willy-nilly she shall love._”

‘Now, even now, come to me! Lift from me the weight of hungry

dreams, consummate whatever things my soul desires, and do thou

thyself fight by my side.’

He looked at her, his eyes screwed up into two hard, bright points.

Madeleine continued to gaze in front of her—silent and impassive.

‘Well, is it to your liking?’ he asked.

‘What?’ she cried with a start, as if she had been awakened from a

trance. ‘Is it to my liking? I can scarcely say. To my mind ’tis ... er

... er to speak ingenuously, somewhat blunt and crude, and lacking in

_galanterie_.’

He broke into a peal of gay laughter, the hostile look completely

vanished.

‘_Galanterie_, forsooth! Oh, Chop, you are a rare creature! Hark’ee, in

the “smithy of Vulcan,” as you would say, weapons are being forged of

the good iron of France—battle-axes _à la Rabelais_, and swords _à la

Montaigne_—and they will not tarry to smash up your fragile world of

_galanterie_ and galimatias into a thousand fragments.’

Madeleine in answer merely gave an abstracted smile.

Madame Troqueville came in soon afterwards to turn out Jacques and order

Madeleine to bed. Madeleine could see that she wanted to talk about the

Troguin’s ball, but she was in no mood for idle conjectures, and begged

her to leave her to herself.

As soon as she was alone she flung herself on her knees and offered up a

prayer of solemn triumphant gratitude. That of her own accord she should

have come to the conclusion reached centuries ago by the Paris Sappho’s

namesake—that the perfect _amitié tendre_ can exist only between two

women—was a coincidence so strange, so striking, as to leave no doubt in

her mind that her friendship with Mademoiselle de Scudéry was part of the

ancient, unalterable design of the universe. Knowing this, how the Good

Shepherd must have laughed at her lack of faith!

CHAPTER VII

THE MERCHANTS OF DAMASCUS AND DAN

Madeleine woke up the following morning to the sense of a most precious

new possession.

She got out of bed, and, after having first rubbed her face and hands

with a rag soaked in spirit, was splashing them in a minute basin of

water—her thoughts the while in Lesbos—when the door opened and in walked

Madame Troqueville.

‘_Jésus!_ Madeleine, it _cannot_ be that you are _again_ at your

washing!’ she cried in a voice vibrant with emotion. ‘Why, as I live,

’twas but yesterday you did it last. Say what you will, it will work

havoc with your sight and your complexion. I hold as naught in this

matter the precepts of your Précieuses. You need to sponge yourself but

once a week to keep yourself fresh and sweet, a skin as fine and delicate

as yours——’

But Madeleine, trembling with irritation that her mother should break

into her pleasant reverie with such prosaic and fallacious precepts,

cried out with almost tearful rage: ‘Oh, mother, let me be! What you say

is in the last of ignobility; ’tis the custom of all _honnêtes gens_

to wash their hands and face _each day_.... I’ll not, not, _not_ be a

stinking bourgeoise!’

It was curious how shrill and shrewish these two outwardly still and

composed beings were apt to become when in each other’s company.

Madame Troqueville shrugged her shoulders: ‘Well, if you won’t be ruled!

But let that go—I came to say that we should do well to go to the Foire

Saint-Germain this morning to provide you with some bravery for the

Troguin’s ball——’

‘The Troguin’s ball, forsooth! Ever harping on that same string! Are you

aware _that I am for the Hôtel de Rambouillet_ on Thursday? That surely

is a more staid and convenient event on which to hang your hopes!’

‘Is it?’ said Madame Troqueville, with a little smile. ‘Well, what shall

you wear on that most pregnant day? Your flowered ferrandine petticoat

and your crimson sarge bodice?’

Madeleine went rather pale; she rapped out in icy tones: ‘_Les honnêtes

gens_ pronounce it _serge_. Leave me, please ... I have the caprice to

dress myself unaided this morning.’

Once alone, Madeleine flung herself on her bed, clutched her head in her

hands and gave little, short, sharp moans.

The truth of the matter was this—that when, in her dances, she rehearsed

her visit to the Hôtel de Rambouillet, she pictured herself dressed in

a very _décolleté_ bodice of _céladon_ velvet sparkling with jewels and

shrouded in priceless Italian lace, a petticoat of taffetas dotted with

countless knots of ribbon, and green silk stockings with rose-coloured

clocks. Until this moment, when her mother, with her irritating sense of

reality, had brought her face to face with facts, it had never so much

as occurred to her that nothing of this bravery existed outside her own

imagination. Yes, it was true! a serge bodice and a ferrandine petticoat

were all the finery her wardrobe could provide. Was she then to make

her début at the Palace of Arthénice as a dingy little bourgeoise? What

brooked the Grecian Sappho and her conceits, what brooked the miraculous

nature of Madame Cornuel’s invitation if the masque of reality was to

lack the ‘ouches and spangs’ of dreams? Well, God had made the path of

events lead straight to Mademoiselle de Scudéry, could He not too turn

her mother’s purse into that of Fortunatus? She could but go to the

Fair—and await a miracle.

As they made their way along the bank of the Seine, Madame Troqueville

was wrapt in pleasant reverie. None of the wealthy young bourgeoises at

the ball would look as delicate and fine as her Madeleine ... what if

she took the fancy of some agreeable young magistrate, with five or six

different posts in the _Parlement_, and a flat, red house with white

facings in the Place Dauphine, like the Troguins? Then he would ‘give

the Fiddles’ for a ball, and offer Madeleine a bouquet in token that it

was in her honour, then Madeleine would ‘give the Fiddles’ for a return

ball.... The Troguins would lend their house ... and then ... why not?

stranger things had happened.

‘A fragment of Lyons silk ... some _bisette_ and some _camelot de

Hollande_ ... a pair of shoes that you may foot it neatly ... yes, you

will look rare and delicate, and ’twill go hard but one gold coin will

furnish us with all we need.’

Madeleine smiled grimly—unless she were much mistaken, not even one

_silver_ coin would be squandered on the Troguins’s ball.

They were now making their way towards two long rows of wooden buildings

in which was held the famous Fair.

In the evenings it was a favourite haunt of beauty and fashion, but in

the mornings it was noisy with all the riff-raff of the town—country

cousins lustily bawling ‘Stop, thief!’; impudent pages; coarse-tongued

musketeers; merchant’s wives with brazen tongues and sharp, ruthless

elbows; dazzled Provincials treating third-rate courtesans to glasses of

_aigre de cèdre_ and the delicious cakes for which the Fair was famous.

Through this ruthless, plangent, stinking crowd, Madame Troqueville and

Madeleine pushed their way, with compressed lips and faces pale with

disgust.

Of a sudden, their ears were caught by the cry:—

‘Galants pour les dames! Faveurs pour les galants! Rubans d’écarlate, de

cramoisie, et de Cé-la-don!’

It came from a little man of Oriental appearance, sitting at a stall that

contained nothing but knots of ribbon of every colour, known as _galants_.

When he caught sight of Madeleine, he waved before her one of pale green.

‘A _céladon galant_ for the young lady—a figure of the perfect lover,’ he

called out. ‘Mademoiselle cannot choose but buy it!’ Céladon, the perfect

lover, in the famous romance called _Astrée_, had given his name to a

certain shade of green.

Madeleine, thinking the words of good omen, pinched her mother’s arm and

said she _must_ have it. After a good deal of bargaining, they got it for

more than Madame Troqueville had intended spending on a pair of shoes,

and with a wry little smile, she said:—

‘Enough of these childish toys! Let us now to more serious business,’ and

once more began to push her way through the hateful, seething crowd.

Suddenly, Madeleine again pinched her mother’s arm, and bade her stop.

They were passing the stall of a mercer—a little man with black, beady

eyes, leering at them roguishly from among his delicate merchandise.

‘Here is most rare Italian lace,’ said Madeleine, with a catch in her

voice.

‘Ay, here, for example, is a piece of _point de Gênes_ of most exquisite

design,’ broke in the mercer’s wife—an elegant lady, with a beautifully

dressed head of hair, ‘I sold just such a piece, a week come Thursday, to

the Duchesse de Liancourt.’

‘Ah! but if one be fair and young and juicy ’tis the transparent _point

de Venise_ that is best accordant with one’s humour,’ interrupted the

mercer, with a wink at Madeleine. ‘’Tis the _point de Venise_ that

discovers the breasts, Mademoiselle! Which, being so, I vow the names

should be reversed, and the _transparent_ fabric be called _point de

Gênes_, _hein_? _Point de gêne!_’ and he gleefully chuckled over his own

wit, while his wife gave him a good-natured push and told him with a grin

not to be a fool.

‘Whatever laces you may stock, good sir, no one can with truth affirm

that you have—_point d’Esprit_,’ said Madeleine graciously.

‘Come, my child!’ said Madame Troqueville, with a smile, and prepared to

move away. This put the mercer on his mettle.

‘Ladies, you would be well advised to tarry a while with me!’ he cried,

in the tones of a disinterested adviser. ‘Decked in these delicate toys

you would presently learn how little serves, with the help of art, to

adorn a great deal. Let a lady be of any form or any quality, after a

visit to my stall she’d look a Marquise!’

‘Nay, say rather that she’d look a Duchesse,’ amended his wife.

‘Come, my child!’ said Madame Troqueville again.

‘Nay, lady, there is good sense in what I say!’ pleaded the mercer, ‘the

very pith of modishness is in my stall. A _galant_ of gay ribbons, and a

fichu of fine point—such as this one, for example—in fact the trifling

congeries which in the dress of _gallants_ is known as “_petite oie_”

will lend to the sorriest _sarge_ the lustre of velvet!’

Madeleine’s eyes were blazing with excitement. God had come to her

rescue once again, and forgoing, with the economy of the true artist,

the meretricious aid of a material miracle, had solved her problem in

the simplest manner by the agency of this little mercer. To cut a brave

figure on Thursday, there was no need of Fortunatus’s purse. Her eyes

had been opened. Of course, as in manners, so in dress, the days of

solidity were over. Who now admired the heavy courtesy of the school of

the Admiral de Bassompière in comparison with the careless, mocking grace

of the _air galant_? In the same way, she, twirling a little cane in her

hand, motley with ribbons, her serge bodice trimmed with the _pierreries

du Temple_ (of which, by the way, more anon), with some delicate trifles

from the mercer’s stall giving a finish to the whole, could with a free

mind, allow three-piled velvet and strangely damasked silk to feed the

moths in the brass-bound, leather chests that slumber in châteaux, far

away mid the drowsy foison of France.

With strange, suppressed passion, she pleaded with her mother, first,

for a Holland handkerchief, edged with Brussels lace, and caught up at

the four corners by orange-coloured ribbon; then for a pair of scented

gloves, also hung with ribbons; then for a bag of rich embroidery for

carrying her money and her Book of Hours. And Madame Troqueville, under

the spell of Madeleine’s intense desire, silently paid for one after

another.

They left the mercer’s stall, having spent three times over the coin that

Madame Troqueville had dedicated to the Troguins’s ball. Suddenly, she

realised what had happened, and cried out in despair:—

‘I have done a most inconsiderate, rash, weak thing! How came it that I

countenanced such shameless, such fantastic prodigality? I fear——’

‘Mother, by that same prodigality I have purchased my happiness,’ said

Madeleine solemnly.

‘Oh, my foolish love! ’Tis only children that find their happiness in

toys,’ and her mother laughed, in spite of herself. ‘Well, our purse

will not now rise above a piece of ferrandine. We must see what we can

contrive.’

They walked on, Madeleine in an ecstasy of happiness—last night, the

Grecian Sappho, this morning, God’s wise messenger, the mercer—the Lord

was indeed on her side!

They were passing the stall of a silk merchant. He was a tight-lipped,

austere-looking old man, and he was listening to an elderly bourgeoise,

whose expression was even more severe than his own. The smouldering

fire in her eye and the harsh significance of her voice, touched their

imagination, and they stopped to listen.

‘Ay, as the Prophet tells us, the merchants of Damascus and Dan and

Arabia brought in singing ships to the fairs of Tyre, purple, and

broidered work, and fine linen, and coral, and agate, and blue clothes in

chests of rich apparel, bound with cords and made of cedar. And where now

is Tyre, Master Petit?’

‘Tyre, with its riches and its fairs, and its merchandise and its

mariners fell into the midst of the seas in the day of its ruin,’

solemnly chanted in reply Master Petit. Evidently neither he nor the lady

considered the words to have any application either to himself or to the

costly fabrics in which he was pleased to traffic.

‘Vanity of vanities! ’Tis a lewd and sinful age,’ said the lady, with

gloomy satisfaction, ‘I know one old vain, foolish fellow who keeps in

my attic a suit of tawdry finery in which to visit bawdy-houses, as if,

forsooth, all the purple and fine linen of Solomon himself could add

an ounce of comeliness to his antic, foolish face! He would be better

advised to lay up the white garment of salvation with sprigs of the

lavender of grace, in a coffer of solid gold, where neither moth nor rust

doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal. I do

oft-times say to him: “Monsieur Troqueville——”’

‘Come, my child,’ said Madame Troqueville quietly, moving away.

So this was what Jacques had meant by his mysterious hints the night

before! Madeleine followed her mother with a slight shudder.

CHAPTER VIII

‘RITE DE PASSAGE’

At about six o’clock on Wednesday evening a hired coach came to take them

to the Troguin’s. To a casual eye it presented a gorgeous appearance of

lumbering gilt, but Madeleine noticed the absence of curtains, the straw

leaking out of the coachman’s cushion, and the jaded, shabby horses.

Jacques had arranged that a band of his devoted clerks of _la Bazoche_,

armed with clubs, should follow the coach to the Île Notre Dame, for the

streets of Paris were infested by thieves and assassins, and it did not

do to be out after dusk unarmed and unattended. On ordinary occasions

this grotesque parody of the state of a Grand Seigneur—a hired coach,

and grinning hobbledehoys instead of lackeys, strutting it, half proud,

half sheepish, in their quaint blue and yellow livery—would have nearly

killed Madeleine with mortification. To-night it rather pleased her, as

a piquant contrast to what was in store for her to-morrow and onwards.

For were not _all_ doors to open to her to-morrow—the doors of the Hôtel

de Rambouillet, the doors of the whole fashionable world, as well as

the doors of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s heart? The magical _petite-oie_,

hidden away in her drawer at home, and the miraculous manner in which her

eyes had been opened to its efficacy were certain earnests of success.

The whole universe was ablaze with good omens—to-morrow ‘the weight

of hungry dreams’ would drop from her, and her soul would get what it

desired.

She found herself remembering with some perplexity that in romances

the siege of a lady’s heart was a very long affair. Perhaps the

instantaneous yielding of the fortress, which she felt certain would be

the case with Mademoiselle de Scudéry when they met, was not quite in the

best traditions of _Galanterie_. It was annoying, but inevitable, for she

felt that any further delay would kill her.

The Troguins lived in the new, red-brick triangle of houses called la

Place Dauphine, facing the bronze statue of Henri IV., and backed by

Notre-Dame.

Lackeys holding torches were standing on the steps of their house, that

the guests might have no trouble in finding it.

After having taken off their cloaks and pattens, the Troquevilles went

into the ball-room. Here were countless belles and gallants, dressed

in white, carnation, and sea-water green, which, on the authority

of a very grave writer, we know to be the colours that show best by

candle-light. Here and there this delicate mass of colour was freaked

with the sombre _soutanes_ of magistrates and the black silk of dowagers.

The Four Fiddles could be heard tuning up through the hubbub of mutual

compliments. Madeleine felt as if she were gazing at it all from some

distant planet. Then Madame Troguin bustled up to them.

‘Good-evening, friends, you are exceeding welcome. You must all have a

glass of Hippocras to warm you. It operates so sweetly on the stomach. I

am wont to say a glass of Hippocras is better than any purge. I said as

much to Maître Patin—our doctor, you know—and he said——’

Madeleine heard no more, for she suddenly caught sight of her father’s

shining, eager eyes and anxious smile, ‘his vanity itching for praise,’

she said to herself scornfully. She saw him make his way to where the

youngest Troguin girl was sitting on a _pliant_ with several young men

on their cloaks at her feet. How could he be such an idiot, Madeleine

wondered, he _must_ know that the Troguin girl did not want to talk to

_him_ just then. But there he stood, hawking and spitting and smirking.

Now he was sitting down on a _pliant_ beside her ... how angry the young

men were looking ... Madeleine was almost certain she saw the Troguin

girl exchange a look of despair with one of them. Now, from his arch

gesture, she could see that he was praising the outline of her breasts

and regretting the jabot that hid them.... _Jésus!_ his provinciality!

it was at least ten years ago since it had been fashionable to praise a

lady’s breasts! So her thoughts ran on, while every moment she felt more

irritated.

Then the fiddles struck up the air of ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon,’ and the

whole company formed up into circles for the opening _Branle_.

There was her father, grimacing and leaping like a baboon in a nightmare,

grave magistrates capering like foals, and giving smacking kisses to

their youthful partners, young burghers shouting the words at the top of

their voices. The whole scene seemed to Madeleine to grow every minute

more unreal.

Then the fiddles stopped and the circles broke up into laughing,

breathless groups. A young bourgeois, beplumed and beribboned, and

wearing absurd thick shoes, came up to her, and taking off his great hat

by the crown, instead of, in the manner of ‘_les honnêtes gens_,’ by the

brim, made her a clumsy bow. He began to ‘_galantise_’ her. Madeleine

wondered if he had learned the art from the elephant at a fair. She fixed

him with her great, still eyes. Then she found herself forced to lead

him out to dance a _Pavane_. The fiddles were playing a faint, lonely

tune, full of the sadness of light things bound to a ponderous earth, for

these were the days before Lulli had made dance tunes gay. The beautiful

pageant had begun—the _Pavane_, proud and preposterous as a peacock or

a Spaniard. Then some old ladies sitting round the room began in thin,

cracked voices to sing according to a bygone fashion, the words of the

dance:—

‘Approche donc, ma belle,

Approche-toi, mon bien;

Ne me sois plus rebelle,

Puisque mon cœur est tien;

Pour mon âme apaiser,

Donne mois un baiser.’

They beat time with their fans, and their eyes filled with tears.

Gradually the song was taken up by the whole room, the words rising up

strong and triumphant:—

‘Approche donc, ma belle,

Approche-toi, mon bien——’

Madeleine’s lips were parted into a little smile, and her spellbound eyes

filled with tears; then she saw Jacques looking at her and his eyes were

bright and mocking. She blushed furiously.

‘He is like Hylas, the mocking shepherd in the _Astrée_,’ she told

herself. ‘Hylas, hélas, Hylas, hélas,’ she found herself muttering.

After another pause for _Galanterie_ and preserved fruits, the violins

broke into the slow, voluptuous rhythm of the Saraband. The old ladies

again beat time with their fans, muttering ‘vraiment cela donne à rêver.’

Madeleine danced with Jacques and he never took his eyes from her face,

but hers were fixed and glassy, and the words of the Sapphic Ode, ‘that

man seems to me the equal of the gods’ ... clothed itself, as with a

garment, with the melody.

She was awakened from her reverie by feeling Jacques’s grasp suddenly

tighten on her hand. She looked at him, he was white and scowling. A

ripple of interest was passing over the dancers, and all eyes were turned

to the door. Two or three young courtiers had just come in, attracted by

the sound of the fiddles. For in those days courtiers claimed a vested

right to lounge uninvited into any bourgeois ball, and they were always

sure of an obsequious welcome.

There was the Président Troguin puffily bowing to them, and the

Présidente bobbing and smirking and offering refreshment. Young Brillon,

the giver of the fiddles, had left his partner, Marguerite Troguin, and

was standing awkwardly half-way to the door, unable to make up his mind

whether he should doff his hat to the courtiers before they doffed theirs

to him; but they rudely ignored all three, and, swaggering up to the

fiddles, bade them stop playing.

‘_Foi de gentilhomme_, I vow that it is of the last consequence that this

Saraband should die. It is really ubiquitous,’ lisped one of them, a

little _muguet_, with a babyish face.

‘It must be sent to America with the Prostitutes,’ said another.

‘That is furiously well turned, Vicomte. Really it deserves to be put to

the torture.’

‘Yes, because it is a danger to the kingdom, it debases the coinage.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it generates tender emotions in so many vulgar bosoms turning

thus the fine gold of Cupid into a base alloy!’

‘Bravo! Comte, tu as de l’esprit infiniment.’

During this bout of wit, the company had been quite silent, trying hard

to look amused, and in the picture.

‘My friends, would you oblige us with the air of a _Corante_?’ the

Vicomte called out with a familiar wink to the ‘Four Fiddles,’ with

whom it behoved every fashionable gallant to be on intimate terms. The

‘Fiddles’ with an answering wink, started the tune of this new and most

fashionable dance.

‘Ah! I breathe again!’ cried the little Marquis. They then proceeded to

choose various ladies as partners, discussing their points, as if they

had been horses at a Fair. The one they called Comte, a tall, military

looking man, chose Marguerite Troguin, at which Brillon tried to assert

himself by blustering out that the lady was _his_ partner. But the Comte

only looked him up and down, with an expression of unutterable disgust,

and turning to the Marquis, asked: ‘What _is_ this _thing_?’ Brillon

subsided.

Then they started the absurd _Corante_. The jumping steps were performed

on tip-toe, and punctuated by countless bows and curtseys. There was a

large audience, as very few of the company had yet learned it. When it

was over, it was greeted with enthusiastic applause.

The courtiers proceeded to refresh themselves with Hippocras and

lemonade. Suddenly the little Marquis seized the cloak of the Comte, and

piped out in an excited voice:—

‘Look, Comte, over there ... I swear it is our old friend, the ghost of

the fashion of 1640!’

‘It is, it is, it’s the black shadow of the white Ariane! The _crotesque_

and importunate gallant!’ They made a dash for Monsieur Troqueville, who

was trying hard to look unconscious, and leaping round him beset him

with a volley of somewhat questionable jests. All eyes were turned on

him, eyebrows were raised, questioning glances were exchanged. Madame

Troqueville sat quite motionless, gazing in front of her, determined not

to hear what they were saying. She would _not_ be forced to see things

too closely.

When they had finished with Monsieur Troqueville, they bowed to the

Présidente, studiously avoiding the rest of the company in their

salutation, and, according to their picture of themselves, minced or

swaggered out of the room. Jacques followed them.

This interlude had shaken Madeleine out of her vastly agreeable dreams.

The _muguets_ had made her feel unfinished and angular, and they had not

even asked her to dance. Then, their treatment of her father had been a

sharp reminder that after all she was by birth nothing but a contemptible

bourgeoise. But as the evening’s gaiety gradually readjusted itself, so

did her picture of herself, and by the time of the final _Branle_, she

was once more drunk with vanity and hope.

The Troguins sent them back in their own coach, and the drive through the

fantastic Paris of the night accentuated Madeleine’s sense of being in

a dream. There passed them from time to time troops of tipsy gallants,

their faces distorted by the flickering lights of torches, and here and

there the _lanternes vives_ of the pastry-cooks—brilliantly-lighted

lanterns round whose sides, painted in gay colours, danced a string of

grimacing beasts, geese, and apes, and hares and elephants—showed bright

and strange against the darkness.

Then the words:—

_La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies!_ echoed melancholy in the distance.

It was the cry of the _Oublieux_, the sellers of wafers and the

nightingales of seventeenth century Paris, for they never began to cry

their wares before dusk.

_La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies!_

_Oublie, oublier!_ The second time that evening there came into

Madeleine’s head a play on words.

_La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies!_ Could it be that the secret of

_la joie_ was nothing but this dream-sense and—_l’oubli_?

They found Jacques waiting for them, pale but happy. He would not

tell them why he had left the ball-room, but he followed Madeleine to

her room. He was limping. And then, with eyes bright with triumph,

he described how, at their exit from the ball-room, he had rallied

the _Clercs_ of the _Bazoche_ (they had stayed to play cards with the

Troguin’s household), how they had followed the courtiers, and, taking

them by surprise, had given them the soundest cudgelling they had

probably ever had in their lives. ‘Though they put up a good fight!’ and

he laughed ruefully and rubbed his leg.

‘How came it that they knew my father?’ Madeleine asked. Jacques grinned.

‘Oh, Chop, should I tell you, it would savour of the blab ... yet, all

said, I would not have you lose so good a diversion ... were I to tell

you, you would keep my counsel?’

‘Yes.’

Then he proceeded to tell her that her father had fallen in love in Lyons

with a courtesan called Ariane. She had left Lyons to drive her trade in

Paris, and that was the true cause of his sudden desire to do the same.

On reaching Paris, his first act was to buy from the stage wardrobe of

the Hôtel de Bourgogne, an ancient suit of tawdry finery, which long

ago had turned a courtier into the Spirit of Spring in a Royal Ballet.

This he had hidden away in the attic of an old Huguenot widow who kept a

tavern on the Mont Sainte-Geneviève, and had proceeded to pester Ariane

with letters and doggerel imploring an interview—but in vain! Finally,

he had taken his courage in both hands, and donning his finery—‘which he

held to have the virtue of the cestus of Venus!’ laughed Jacques—he had

boldly marched into Ariane’s bedroom, only to be received by a flood of

insults and ridicule by that lady and her gallants.

Madeleine listened with a pale, set face. Why had she been so pursued

these last few days by her father’s sordid _amours_?

‘So this ... Ariane ... rejected my father’s suit?’ she said in a low

voice.

‘Ay, that she did! How should she not?’ laughed Jacques.

‘And you gave your suffrage to the foolish enterprise?’

Jacques looked rather sheepish.

‘I am not of the stuff that can withstand so tempting a diversion—why,

’twill be a jest to posterity! His eager, foolish, obsequious face; _and_

his tire! I’faith, I would not have missed it for a kingdom!’ and he

tossed back his head and laughed delightedly.

Hylas, _hélas_!... Jacques was limping ... Vulcan was lame, wasn’t he?

‘In the smithy of Vulcan weapons are being forged that will smash up your

world of _galanterie_ and galamatias into a thousand fragments!’

‘Why, Chop, you look sadly!’ he cried, with sudden contrition. ‘’Tis

finished and done with, and these coxcombs’ impudence bred them, I can

vouch for it, a score of bruises apiece! Chop, come here! Why, the most

modish and _galant_ folk have oftentimes had the strangest _visionnaires_

for fathers. There is Madame de Chevreuse—who has not heard of the

_naïvetés_ and _visions_ of her father? And ’twas a strange madman that

begot the King himself!’ he said, thinking to have found where the shoe

pinched. But Madeleine remained silent and unresponsive, and he left her.

Yes, why had she been so pursued these last few days by her father’s

_amours_? It was strange that love should have brought him too from

Lyons! And he too had set his faith on the magical properties of bravery!

What if.... Then there swept over her the memory of the Grecian Sappho,

driving a host of nameless fears back into the crannies of her mind.

Besides—_to-morrow_ began the new era!

She smiled ecstatically, and, tired though she was, broke into a

triumphant dance.

CHAPTER IX

AT THE HÔTEL DE RAMBOUILLET

When Madeleine awoke next morning, the feeling she had had over night of

being in a dream had by no means left her.

From the street rose the cries of the hawkers:—

‘Ma belle herbe, anis fleur.’

‘A la fraîche, à la fraîche, qui veut boire?’

‘A ma belle poivée à mes beaux épinards! à mon bel oignon!’

And then shrill and plaintive:—

‘Vous désirez quelque cho-o-o-se?’

It was no longer a taunt but the prayer of a humble familiar asking for

its mistress’s orders, or, rather, of Love the Pedlar waiting to sell

her what she chose. She opened her window and looked out. The length

of the narrow street the monstrous signs stuck out from either side,

heraldic lions, and sacred hearts, and blue cats, and mothers of God,

and _Maréchales_ looking like Polichinelle. It was as incongruous an

assortment as the signs of the Zodiac, as flat and fantastic as a pack of

cards——

‘_Vous désirez quelque cho-o-ose?_’ She laughed aloud. Then she suddenly

remembered her vague misgivings of the night before. She drew in her head

and rushed to her divination book. These were the lines her eyes fell

upon:—

‘ ... and she seemed in his mind to have said a thousand good

things, which, in reality, she had not said at all.’

For one moment Madeleine’s heart seemed to stop beating. Did it mean

that she was not going to get in her prepared mots? No, the true

interpretation was surely that Mademoiselle de Scudéry would think her

even more brilliant than she actually was. She fell on her knees and

thanked her kind gods in anticipation.

However, she too must do her part, must reinforce the Power behind

her, so over and over again she danced out the scene at the Hôtel de

Rambouillet, trying to keep it exactly the same each time. ‘_Ah! dear

Zénocrite! here you come, leading our new Bergère._’

All the morning she seemed in a dream, and her mother, father, Jacques,

and Berthe hundreds of miles away. She could not touch a morsel of

food. ‘Ah! the little creature with wings. I know, I know,’ Berthe kept

muttering.

With her throat parched, and still in a strange, dry dream, she went to

dress. The magical _petite-oie_ seemed to her to take away all shabbiness

from the serge bodice and the petticoat of _camelot de Hollande_. Then,

in a flash, she remembered she had decided to add to her purchases at

the Fair a trimming of those wonderful imitation jewels known as the

_pierreries du Temple_. The _petite-oie_ had taken on the exigency of a

magic formulary, and its contents, to be efficacious, had to conform as

rigidly to the original conception as a love-potion must to its receipt.

In a few minutes she would have to start, and the man who sold the stones

lived too far from Madame Cornuel for her to go there first. She was in

despair.

At that moment the door opened, and in walked Jacques; as a rule he did

not come home till evening. He sheepishly brought out of his hose an

elaborate arrangement of green beads.

‘Having heard you prate of the _pierreries du Temple_, I’ve brought you

these glass gauds. I fear me they aren’t from the man in the Temple, for

I failed to find the place ... but these seemed pretty toys. I thought

maybe they would help you to cut a figure before old Dame Scudéry.’

It was truly a strange coincidence that he should have brought her the

very thing that at that very moment she had been longing for. But was it

the very thing? For the first time that morning, Madeleine felt her feet

on earth. The beads were hideous and vulgar and as unlike the _pierreries

du Temple_ as they were unlike the emeralds they had taken as their

model. She was almost choked by a feeling of impotent rage.

How dare Jacques be such a ninny with so little knowledge of the fashion?

How dare he expect a belle to care for him, when he was such a miserable

gallant with such execrable taste in presents? The idea of giving _her_

rubbish like that! She would like to kill him!

Always quick to see omens, her nerves, strung up that morning to their

highest pitch, felt in the gift the most malignant significance. _Timeo

Danaos et dona ferentes_—I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts. She

blanched, and furtively crossed herself. Having said, in a dead voice,

some words of thanks, she silently pinned the bead trimming on to her

bodice and slowly left the room.

It was time to start; she got into the little box-like sedan. There was

her mother standing at the door, waving her hand, and wishing her good

luck. She was soon swinging along towards the Seine.

When the house was out of sight, with rude, nervous fingers she tore off

the beads, and they fell in a shower about the sedan. Though one could

scarcely move in the little hole, she managed to pick them all up, and

pulling back the curtain she flung them out of the window. They were at

that moment crossing the Pont-Neuf, and she caught a glimpse of a crowd

of beggars and pages scrambling to pick them up. Recklessly scattering

jewels to the rabble! It was like a princess in _Amadis_, or like the

cardinal’s nieces, the two Mancini, whose fabulous extravagance was the

talk of the town. Then she remembered that they were only glass beads.

Was it an omen that her grandeur would be always a mere imitation of

the real thing? Also—though she had got rid of the hateful trimming,

her _petite-oie_ was still incomplete. Should she risk keeping Madame

Cornuel waiting and go first to the man in the Temple? No, charms or

no charms, she was moving on to her destiny, and felt deadly calm.

What she had prayed for was coming and she could not stop it now. Its

inevitableness frightened her, and she began to feel a poignant longing

for the old order, the comforting rhythm of the rut she was used to,

with the pleasant feeling of every day drawing nearer to a miraculous

transformation of her circumstances.

She pulled back the curtain again and peeped out, the Seine was now

behind them, and they were going up la rue de la Mortellerie. Soon she

would be in the clutches of Madame Cornuel, and then there would be no

escape. Should she jump out of the sedan, or tell the porters to take her

home? She longed to; but if she did, how was she to face the future? And

what ingratitude it would be for the exquisite tact with which the gods

had manipulated her meeting with Sappho! the porters swung on and on, and

Madeleine leaned back and closed her eyes, hypnotised by the inevitable.

The shafts of the sedan were put down with a jerk, and Madeleine

started up and shuddered. One of the porters came to the window. ‘Rue

Saint-Antoine, Mademoiselle.’ Madeleine gave him a coin to divide with

his companion, opened the door, and walked into the court. Madame

Cornuel’s coach was standing waiting before the door.

She walked in and was shown by a valet into an ante-room. She sat

down, and began mechanically repeating her litany. Suddenly, there

was a rich rustle of taffeta, the door opened, and in swept a very

handsomely-dressed young woman. Madeleine knew that it must be

Mademoiselle le Gendre, the daughter of Monsieur Cornuel’s first wife. In

a flash Madeleine took in the elegant continence of her toilette. While

Madeleine had seven patches on her face, she had only three. Her hair

was exquisitely neat, and she was only slightly scented, while her deep,

plain collar _à la Régente_, gave an air of puritanic severity to the

bright, cherry-coloured velvet of her bodice. Also, she was not nearly as

_décolletée_ as Madeleine.

Madeleine felt that all of a sudden her _petite-oie_ had lost both its

decorative and magical virtue and had become merely incongruous gawds on

the patent shabbiness of her gown. For some reason there flashed through

her head the words she had heard at the Fair: ‘As if all the purple and

fine linen of Solomon himself could add an ounce of comeliness to his

antic, foolish face.’

‘Mademoiselle Troqueville? My step-mother awaits us in the coach,

will you come?’ said the lady. Her manner was haughty and unfriendly.

Madeleine realised without a pang that it would all be like this. But

after all, nothing in this dull reality really mattered.

‘Bestir yourself! ’Tis time we were away!’ shouted a voice from the

_carrosse_. Mademoiselle le Gendre told Madeleine to get in.

‘Mademoiselle Troqueville? I am glad to make your acquaintance—pray

get in and take the back seat opposite me.’ Madeleine humbly obeyed,

indifferent to what in her imaginings she would have looked upon as an

unforgivable insult, the putting her in the back seat.

‘Hôtel de Rambouillet,’ Madame Cornuel said to a lackey, who was waiting

for orders at the window. The words left Madeleine quite cold.

Madame Cornuel and her step-daughter did not think it necessary to talk

to Madeleine. They exchanged little remarks with each other at intervals,

and laughed at allusions which she could not catch.

‘Are we to fetch Sappho?’ suddenly asked the younger woman.

‘No, she purposes coming later, and on foot.’

Madeleine heard the name without a thrill.

The coach rolled on, and Madeleine sat as if petrified. Suddenly she

galvanised herself into activity. In a few minutes they would be there,

and if she allowed herself to arrive in this condition all would be lost.

Why should she let these two horrid women ruin her chance of success? She

muttered quickly to herself:—

‘Oh! blessed Virgin, give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’

and then started gabbling through her prepared scene.

‘“Ah, dear Zénocrite, here you come, leading our new

_bergère_!” cries the lady on the bed. “Welcome, Mademoiselle,

I have been waiting with impatience to make your acquaintance.”’

Would she get it finished before they arrived? She felt all her happiness

depended on it.

‘“Madame, it would have been of no consequence, for the Sibyl

herself would have taken the conqueror captive.... But,

Mademoiselle, what, if you will pardon my curiosity, induced

you to leave your agreeable prairies?”’

They were passing the Palais Cardinal—soon they would turn down the rue

St Thomas du Louvre—she had not much time.

The coach was rolling into the court of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and she

had not finished. They got out. A tall woman, aged about thirty, with

reddish hair and a face badly marked by smallpox, but in spite of these

two blemishes of an extremely elegant and distinguished appearance, came

towards them, screwing up her eyes in the manner of the near-sighted. Her

top petticoat was full of flowers; she was too short-sighted to recognise

Madame Cornuel till she was quite close, then she dropped a mock-low

curtsey, and drawled ‘Ma-a-a-dame.’ Madame Cornuel laughed: evidently

she had imitated a mutual acquaintance. With a sudden sense of exclusion

Madeleine gave up hope.

‘Are you following the example of our friend of the Faubourg St-Germain,

may I inquire?’ asked Madame Cornuel, with a little smile, pointing to the

flowers, at which her step-daughter laughed, and the tall red-haired lady

made a _moue_ and answered with a deep sigh:—

‘Ah! the wit of the Marais!’ The meaning of this esoteric persiflage was

entirely lost on Madeleine, and she sat with an absolutely expressionless

face, trying to hide her own embarrassment.

‘Ah! pardon me, I had forgotten,’ Madame Cornuel exclaimed. ‘Mademoiselle

de Rambouillet, allow me to present to you Mademoiselle Troqueville.’

(It may have been Madeleine’s imagination, but it seemed to her that

Madame Cornuel paused before calling her Mademoiselle.) Mademoiselle de

Rambouillet screwed up her eyes at her and smiled quite pleasantly, while

Madeleine, absolutely tongue-tied, tried to perform the almost impossible

task of curtseying in a coach. They got out, and went inside, the three

others continuing their mystifying conversation.

They went up a staircase and through one large splendid room after

another. So here was Madeleine, actually in the famous ‘Palais de

Cléomire,’ as it was called in _Cyrus_, but the fact did not move her,

indeed she did not even realise it. Once Mademoiselle de Rambouillet

turned round and said to her:—

‘I fear ’tis a long journey, Mademoiselle,’ but the manner in which she

screwed up her eyes both terrified and embarrassed her, so instead of

answering she merely blushed and muttered something under her breath.

Finally they reached Madame de Rambouillet’s bedroom (she had ceased for

some years to receive in the _Salle Bleue_). She was lying on a bed in an

alcove and there were several people in the _ruelle_; as the thick velvet

curtains of the windows were drawn Madeleine got merely an impression of

rich, rare objects glowing like jewels out of the semi-darkness, but in

a flash she took in the appearance of Madame de Rambouillet. Her face

was pale and her lips a bright crimson, which was obviously not their

natural colour; she had large brown eyes with heavy pinkish eyelids, and

the only sign that she was a day over fifty was a slight trembling of the

head. She was wearing a loose gown of some soft gray material, and on her

head were _cornettes_ of exquisite lace trimmed with pale yellow ribbons.

One of her hands was lying on the blue coverlet, it was so thin that its

veins looked almost like the blue of the coverlet shining through. The

fingers were piled up with beautiful rings.

There was a flutter round the bed, and then Madeleine found herself being

presented to the Marquise.

‘Ah! Mademoiselle Toctin, I am ravished to make your acquaintance,’ she

said in a wonderfully melodious voice, with a just perceptible Italian

accent. ‘You come from delicious Marseilles, do you not? You will be able

to recount to us strange Orient romances of orange-trees and Turkish

soldiers. Angélique, bring Mademoiselle Touville a _pliant_, and place it

close to me, and I will warm myself at her Southern _historiettes_.’

‘It is from Lyons that I come, not from Marseilles,’ was the only

repartee of which at the moment Madeleine was capable. Her voice sounded

strange and harsh, and she quite forgot a ‘Madame.’ However, the Marquise

did not hear, as she had turned to another guest. But Angélique de

Rambouillet heard, and so did another lady, with an olive complexion

and remarkably bright eyes, whom Madeleine guessed to be Madame de

Montausier, the famous ‘Princesse Julie.’ They exchanged glances of

delight, and Madeleine began to blush, and blush, though, as a matter of

fact, it was by their mother they were amused.

In the meantime a very tall, elderly man, with a hatchet face, came

stumbling towards her.

‘You have not a chair, have you, Mademoiselle?’

‘Here it is, father,’ said Angélique, who was bringing one up.

‘Ah! that is right, Mademoiselle er ... er ... er ... will sit here.’

Madeleine took to this kind, polite man, and felt a little happier. He

sat down beside her and made a few remarks, which Madeleine, full of the

will to be agreeable, answered as best she could, endeavouring to make up

by pleasant smiles for her sudden lack of _esprit_. But, unfortunately,

the Marquis was almost stone-blind, so the smiles were lost upon him, and

before long Madeleine noticed by his absent laugh and amused expression

that his attention was wandering to the conversation of the others.

‘I am of opinion you would look inexpressibly _galant_ in a scarlet hat,

Marquis,’ Madame de Rambouillet was saying to a short, swarthy man with

a rather saturnine expression. They all looked at him mischievously.

‘Julie would be obliged to join Yvonne in the Convent, but there would

be naught to hinder you from keeping Marie-Julie at your side as your

_adopted_ daughter.’ The company laughed a little, the laugh of people

too thoroughly intimate to need to make any effort. ‘Monsieur de Grasse

is wearing his episcopal smile—look at him, pray! Come, Monseigneur, you

_must_ confess that a scarlet hat would become him to a marvel,’ and

Madame de Rambouillet turned her brilliant, mischievous eyes on a tiny

prelate with a face like a naughty schoolboy’s.

He had been called Monsieur de Grasse. Could he, then, be the famous

Godeau, bishop and poet? It seemed impossible. For Saint Thomas is the

patron saint of provincials when they meet celebrities in the flesh.

‘I fear Monsieur’s head would be somewhat too _large_ to wear it with

comfort,’ he answered.

‘Hark to the episcopal _fleurette_! Marquis, rise up and bow!’ but the

only answer from the object of these witticisms was a surly grunt.

Another idle smile rippled round the circle, and then there fell a

silence of comfortable intimacy. If Madeleine had suddenly found herself

in the kingdom of Prester John she could not have understood less of what

was going on around her.

‘Madame Cornuel has a furiously _galante historiette_ she is burning to

communicate to us,’ said Mademoiselle de Rambouillet, screwing up her

eyes at Madame Cornuel.

‘Julie, bid Monsieur de Grasse go upstairs to play with Marie-Julie, and

then Madame Cornuel will tell it.’

‘Monsieur de Grasse——’

‘Madame la Marquise come to my rescue! I too would fain hear the

_historiette_!’

‘Nolo episcopari, hein?’

‘Now, then, be obedient, and get you to Marie-Julie!’

‘Where can I take refuge?’

‘If there were a hazel-nut at hand, ’twould serve your purpose.’

‘No, Madame la Marquise, permit me to hide within your locket.’

‘As you will. Now, Madame, we are all attention.’

Throughout this fooling, Madeleine had sat with aching jaws stretched

into a smile, trying desperately hard not to look out of it. They all

looked towards Madame Cornuel, who sat smiling in unruffled silence.

‘Madame?’

‘Well, Mademoiselle, tell me who is to be its heroine, who its hero, and

what its plot, and then I will recount it to you,’ she said. They seemed

to think this very witty, and laughed heartily. There was another pause,

and Madeleine again made an attempt to engage the Marquis’s attention.

‘The ... the ... the houses in Paris ... seem to me most goodly

structures,’ she began. He gave his nervous laugh.

‘Yes, yes, we have some rare architects these days. Have you been to see

the new buildings of the Val de Grâce?’

‘No, I have not ... er ... it is a Convent, is it not?’

‘Yes. Under the patronage of Notre Dame de la Crêche.’

His attention began to wander again; she made a frantic effort to

rekindle the flames of the dying topic.

‘What a strange name it is—Val de Grâce, what do you think can be its

meaning?’

‘Yes, yes,’ with his nervous laugh, ‘Val de Grâce, doubtless there is

some legend connected with it.’

Madeleine gave up in despair.

The languid, intimate talk and humorous silences had suddenly turned into

something more animated.

‘Madame de Sablé vows that she saw her there with her own eyes, and that

she was dressed in a _justaucorps_.’

‘Sophie has seen more things than the legendary Argos!’

‘Well, it has been turned into a Vaudeville in her quarter.’

‘In good earnest, has it? What an excellent diversion! Julie, pray ask

Madame d’Aiguillon about it and tell us. Go to-day.’

‘I daren’t; “my dear, my dear, _cela fait dévotion_ and that puts me in

mind, the Reine-Mère got a special chalice of Florentine enamel and I

must——” Roqueten, Roqueten, Roquetine.’

‘Upon my life, the woman’s talk has less of meaning than a magpie’s!’

growled Madeleine to herself.

At that moment the door opened and in came a tall, middle-aged woman,

swarthy, and very ugly. She was dressed in a plain gown of gray serge.

Her face was wreathed in an agreeable smile, that made her look like a

civil horse.

Madeleine had forgotten all about Mademoiselle de Scudéry, but when this

lady came in, it all came rushing back; she got cold all over, and if

before she had longed to be a thousand miles away, she now longed to be

ten thousand.

There was a general cry of:—

‘Mademoiselle: the very person we were in need of. You know everything.

Tell us all about the Présidente Tambonneau, but avoid, in your

narration, an excessive charity.’

‘If you talk with the tongues of men and of Angels and yet _have_

Charity, ye are become as sounding brass and as a tinkling cymbal,’ said

Madame Cornuel in her clear, slow voice. She spoke rarely, but when she

did it was with the air of enunciating an oracle.

‘Humph! That is a fault that _you_ are rarely guilty of!’ growled

Montausier quite audibly.

‘The Présidente Tambonneau? No new extravagance of hers has reached my

ears. What is there to tell?’ said the new-comer. She spoke in a loud,

rather rasping voice, and still went on smiling civilly.

‘Oh, you ladies of the Marais, every one is aware that you are

omniscient, and yet you are perfect misers of your _historiettes_!’

‘Sappho, we must combine against the _quartier du Palais Cardinal_,

albeit they _do_ call us “omniscient.” It sounds infinitely _galant_, but

I am to seek as to its meaning,’ said Madame Cornuel.

‘Ask Mademoiselle, she is in the last intimacy with the _Maréchal des

mots_; it is reported he has raised a whole new company to fight under

his _Pucelle_.’

‘From all accounts, she is in sore need of support, poor lady. Madame

de Longueville says she is “_parfaitement belle mais parfaitement

ennuyeuse_,”’ said Mademoiselle de Rambouillet very dryly.

‘That would serve as an excellent epitome of divers among our friends,’

murmured Madame de Montausier.

‘Poor Chapelain! all said, he, by merely being himself, has added

infinitely more to our diversion than the wittiest person in the world,’

said Madame de Rambouillet, looking mischievously at Mademoiselle de

Scudéry, who, though still wearing the same smile, was evidently not

pleased.

‘Yes, Marquis, when you are made a duke, you would do well to employ

Monsieur Chapelain as your jester. Ridiculous, solemn people are in

reality much more diverting than wits,’ said Mademoiselle de Rambouillet

to Montausier, who looked extremely displeased, and said in angry,

didactic tones:—

‘Chapelain a des sentiments fins et delicats, il raisonne juste, et dans

ses œuvres on y trouve de nobles et fortes expressions,’ and getting up

he walked over to Mademoiselle de Scudéry, and they were soon talking

earnestly together.

Madeleine all this time had been torn between terror of being introduced

to Mademoiselle de Scudéry, and terror of not being introduced. Her face

was absolutely impassive, and she had ceased to pretend to take any

interest in what was going on around her.

Suddenly she heard Madame de Rambouillet saying to Monsieur de Grasse:—

‘You remember Julie’s and her sister’s _vision_ about night-caps?’

‘Ah, yes, and the trick played on them by Voiture, and the poor,

excellent Marquis de Pisani.’

‘Yes,’ she answered, with a little sigh and a smile. ‘Well, it has been

inherited by little Marie-Julie, whenever she beholds one she becomes

transfixed by terror. _Visions_ are strange things!’

Madeleine for the first time that afternoon felt happy and pleased.

She herself had always loathed night-caps, and as a child had screamed

with terror whenever she had seen any one wearing one. What a

strange coincidence that this _vision_ should be shared by Madame de

Rambouillet’s daughters! She turned eagerly to the Marquis.

‘Monsieur, I hear Madame la Marquise telling how Mesdames her daughters

were wont to be affrighted by night-caps; when I was a child, they worked

on me in a like manner, and to speak truth, to this day I have a dislike

to them.’

‘Indeed, indeed,’ he answered, with his nervous laugh. ‘Yes, my daughters

had quite a _vision_ as to night-caps. Doubtless ’twas linked in their

memory with some foolish, monstrous fable they had heard from one

of their attendants. ’Tis strange, but our little granddaughter has

inherited the fear and she refuses to kiss us if we are wearing one.’

Alas! There was no crack through which Madeleine could get in her

own personality! The Marquis got up and stumbled across the room to

Mademoiselle de Scudéry, and Montausier, having to give up his chair, sat

down by Madeleine. There was a cry of ‘Ah! here she comes!’

The door opened and a little girl of about seven years old walked into

the room, followed by a _gouvernante_ who stood respectfully in the

doorway. The child was dressed in a miniature Court dress, cut low and

square at the neck. She had a little pointed face, and eyes with a slight

outward squint. She made a beautiful curtsey, first to her grandmother

and then to the company.

‘My dearest treasure,’ Madame de Rambouillet cried in her beautiful husky

voice. ‘Come and greet your friend, Monsieur de Grasse.’

Every one had stopped talking and were looking at the child with varying

degrees of interest. Madeleine felt suddenly fiercely jealous of her;

she stole a glance at Mademoiselle de Scudéry, and saw on her face the

universal smile of tolerant amusement with which grown-up people regard

children. The child went up to Godeau, kissed his ring, and then busily

and deliberately found a foot-stool for herself, dragged it up to Madame

de Rambouillet’s bed, and sat down on it.

‘The little lady already has the _tabouret chez la reine_,’[2] said

Mademoiselle de Scudéry, smiling and bowing to Madame de Rambouillet. The

child, however, did not understand the witticism; she looked offended,

frowned, and said severely:—

‘I am working a _tabouret_ for myself,’ and then, as if to soften what

she evidently had meant for a snub, she added: ‘It has crimson flowers

on it, and a blue saint feeding birds.’

Montausier went into fits of proud laughter.

‘There is a bit of hagiology for you to interpret, Monsieur de Grasse,’

he cried triumphantly, suddenly in quite a good temper, and looking round

to see if the others were amused. Godeau looked interested and serious.

‘That must be a most rare and delicate _tabouret_, Mademoiselle,’ he

said; ‘do you know what the saint’s name is?’

‘No, I thank you,’ she answered politely, but wearily, and they all again

went into peals of laughter.

‘My love,’ said Madame de Rambouillet. ‘I am certain Monsieur de Grasse

and that lady,’ nodding towards Mademoiselle de Scudéry, ‘would be

enchanted by those delicious verses you wrote for my birthday, will you

recite them?’

But the child shook her head, backwards and forwards, the more she was

entreated, the more energetically she shook her head, evidently enjoying

the process for its own sake. Then she climbed on to her grandmother’s

bed and whispered something in her ear. Madame de Rambouillet shook with

laughter, and after they had whispered together for some minutes the

child left the room. Madame de Rambouillet then told the company that

Marie-Julie’s reason for not wishing to recite her poem was that she

had heard her father say that all _hommes de lettres_ were thieves and

were quite unprincipled about using each other’s writings, and she was

afraid that Mademoiselle de Scudéry or Monsieur de Grasse might, if they

heard her poem, publish it as their own. There was much laughter, and

Montausier was in ecstasies.

‘I am impatient for you to hear the poem,’ said Madame de Rambouillet.

‘It is quite delicious.’

‘Yes, my daughter promises to be a second Neuf-germain!’[3] said Madame

de Montausier, smiling.

‘What a Nemesis, that a mother who has inspired so many delicious verses,

and a father——’ began Mademoiselle de Scudéry, but just then the child

came back with her head disappearing into a large beplumed man’s hat, and

carrying a shepherd’s crook in her hand.

‘I am a Muse,’ she announced, and the company exchanged delighted,

bewildered glances.

‘Now, I will begin.’

‘Yes, pray do, my dear love,’ said Madame de Rambouillet, trying to

compose her face.

‘The initial letters form my grandmother’s name: Cathérine,’ she

explained, and then, taking her stand in the middle of the room, began to

declaim with great unction:—

‘Chérie, vous êtes aimable et

Aussi belle que votre perroquet,

Toujours souriante et douce.

Hélas! j’ai piqué mon pouce

En brodant pour votre jour de fête

Rien qu’une bourse qui n’est pas bête.

J’aime ma Grandmère, c’est ma chatte,

Nellie, mon petit chien, donne lui ta patte,

Et lèche la avec ta petite langue.’

She then made a little bow to the company, and sat down again on her

_tabouret_, quite undisturbed by the enthusiastic applause that had

followed her recitation.

‘Mademoiselle,’ began Godeau solemnly, ‘words fail me, to use the

delicious expression of Saint Amant, with which to praise your ravishing

verses as they deserve. But if the Abbé Ménage were here, I think he

might ask you if the _qui_ in ... let me see ... the sixth line,

refers to the _bourse_ or to the act of pricking your finger. Because

if, as I imagine, it is to the latter, the laws of our language demand

the insertion of a _ce_ before the _qui_, while the unwritten laws of

universal experience assert that the action of pricking one’s finger

should be called _bête_ not _pas bête_. We writers must be prepared for

this sort of ignoble criticism.’

‘Of course the _qui_ refers to _bourse_,’ said Madame de Montausier,

for the child was looking bewildered. ‘You will pardon me but what an

exceeding foolish question from a Member of the Academy! It was _bête_

to prick one’s finger, but who, with justice, could call _bête_ a

_bourse_ of most quaint and excellent design? Is it not so, _ma chatte_?’

The child nodded solemnly, and Monsieur de Grasse was profuse in his

apologies for his stupidity.

Madeleine had noticed that the only member of the company, except

herself, who had not been entranced by this performance, was Mademoiselle

de Scudéry. Though she smiled the whole time, and was profuse in her

compliments, yet she was evidently bored. Instead of pleasing Madeleine,

this shocked her, it also made her rather despise her, for being out of

it.

She turned to Montausier and said timidly:—

‘I should dearly love to see Mademoiselle _votre fille_ and the

Cardinal’s baby niece together. They would make a delicious pair.’ But

Montausier either really did not hear, or pretended not to, and Madeleine

had the horrible embarrassment of speaking to air.

‘Who is that _demoiselle_?’ the child suddenly cried in a shrill voice,

looking at Madeleine.

‘That is Mademoiselle Hoqueville, my love.’

‘Hoqueville! _what_ a droll name!’ and she went into peals of shrill

laughter. The grandparents and mother of the child smiled apologetically

at Madeleine, but she, in agony at being humiliated, as she considered,

before Mademoiselle de Scudéry, tried to improve matters by looking

haughty and angry. However, this remark reminded Madame de Rambouillet of

Madeleine’s existence, and she exclaimed:—

‘Oh! Mademoiselle Hoqueville, you have, as yet, seen naught of the hôtel.

Marie-Julie, my love, go and say _bon-jour_ to that lady and ask her if

she will accompany you to the _salle bleue_.’

The child obediently went over to Madeleine, curtseyed, and held out

her hand. Madeleine was not certain whether she ought to curtsey back

or merely bow without rising from the chair. She compromised in a cross

between the two, which made her feel extremely foolish. On being asked if

she would like to see _la salle bleue_, she had to say yes, and followed

the child out of the room.

She followed her through a little _cabinet_, and then they were in

the famous room, sung by so many poets, the scene of so many gay and

brilliant happenings.

Madeleine’s first feeling was one of intense relief at being freed from

the strain of the bedroom, then, as it were, she galvanised into activity

her demand upon life, and felt in despair at losing even a few moments of

Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s company. The child walked on in front humming

a little tune to herself. Madeleine felt she must pull herself together,

and make friends with her.

‘What rare and skilful verses those were you recited to us,’ she began,

her voice harshly breaking the silence of the huge room. The child looked

at her out of her crab-eyes, pursed up her mouth, and went on humming.

‘Do you dearly love your little dog?’

‘Haven’t got one.’ This was startling.

‘But you made mention of one in your poem,’ said Madeleine in an

aggrieved tone.

The child screamed with scornful laughter:—

‘She isn’t _mine_, she’s Aunt Angélique’s!’ she cried, and looked at

Madeleine as if she must be mad for having made such a mistake. There was

another pause. Madeleine sighed wearily and went to look at the famous

tapestry, the child followed her.

Its design consisted of groups of small pastoral figures disporting

themselves in a blue Arcady. In one group there was a shepherdess sitting

on a rustic bench, surrounded by shepherds; a nymph was offering her a

basket of flowers. The child pointed to the shepherdess: ‘That is my

grandmother, and that is me bringing her flowers, and that is my father,

and that is Monsieur Sarrasin, and that is my dear Maître Claude!’ ...

This was better. Madeleine made a violent effort to be suitably fantastic.

‘It may be when you are asleep you do in truth become that nymph and live

in the tapestry.’ The child stared at her, frowned, and continued her

catalogue:—

‘And that is my mother, and that is Aunt Angélique, and that is Madame

de Longueville, and that is Madame de Sablé, and that is Monsieur de la

Rochefoucauld, and that is my little friend Mademoiselle de Sévigné,’ and

so on.

When she had been through the list of her acquaintances, she wandered

off and began to play with a box of ivory puzzles. Madeleine, in a final

attempt to ingratiate herself, found for her some of the missing pieces,

at which her mouth began to tremble, and Madeleine realised that all the

pleasure lay in doing it by herself, so she left her, and with a heavy

heart crept back to the bedroom.

She found Madame Cornuel and Mademoiselle Legendre preparing to go, and

supposing they had already said good-bye, solemnly curtseyed to all the

company in turn. They responded with great friendliness and kindness,

but she suddenly noticed Madame Cornuel exchanging glances with her

step-daughter, and realised in a flash that by making her _adieux_ she

had been guilty of a provincialism. She smiled grimly to herself. What

did it matter?

Madame Cornuel dropped her in the rue Saint-Honoré, and she walked

quietly home.

She had not exchanged a single word with Mademoiselle de Scudéry.

CHAPTER X

AFTERWARDS

Madeleine walked up the petite rue du Paon, in at the baker’s door,

and upstairs. She still felt numbed, but knew that before her were the

pains of returning circulation; Madame Troqueville heard her come in

and ran out from the kitchen, full of smiles and questions. Madeleine

told her in a calm voice that it had all been delightful, praised the

agreeable manners of the Rambouillets, and described the treasures of the

_salle bleue_. She repeated the quaint sayings of the child, and Madame

Troqueville cried ‘_Quel amour!_ Oh, Madeleine, I would like you to have

just such another little daughter!’

Madeleine smiled wearily.

‘And what of Mademoiselle de Scu-tary?’ her mother asked rather nervously.

‘De Scudéry,’ corrected Madeleine, true to habit. ‘She was furiously

_spirituelle_ and very ... civil. I am a trifle tired.... I think I will

away and rest,’ and she dragged herself wearily off to her own room.

Madame Troqueville, who had watched her very unhappily, made as if she

would follow her, but thought better of it.

When Madeleine got into her room, she sat down on her bed, and clasped

her head. She could not, she would not think. Then, like a wave of

ecstasy there swept over her little points she had noticed about

Mademoiselle de Scudéry, but which had not at the time thrilled her

in the slightest. Her teeth were rather long; she had a mole on her

left cheek; she was not as grandly dressed as the others; the child

had snubbed her; Montausier had been very attentive to her; she was

a great celebrity; Madame de Rambouillet had teased her. This medley

of recollections, each and all of them made her feel quite faint with

pleasure, so desirable did they make her love appear. But then ... she

had not spoken to her ... she had been humiliated before her.... Oh! it

was not to be faced! Her teeth were rather long. Montausier had been

attentive to her ... oh, how thrilling! And yet ... she, Madeleine had

not even been introduced to her. The supernal powers had seemed to have

a scrupulous regard for her wishes. They had actually arranged that the

first meeting should be at the Hôtel de Rambouillet ... and she had

not even been introduced to her! Could it be possible that the Virgin

had played her a trick? Should she turn and rend in mad fury the whole

Heavenly Host? No; that would be accepting defeat once for all, and that

must not be, for the past as well as the future was malleable, and it was

only by emotionally accepting it that a thing became a fact. This strange

undercurrent of thought translated itself thus in her consciousness:

God and the Virgin must be trusted; they had only disclosed a tiny bit

of their design, what madness then, to turn against them, thus smashing

perhaps their perfect scheme for her happiness! Or perhaps her own

co-operation had not been adequate—she had perhaps not been instant

enough in dancing—but still ... but still ... the visit to the Hôtel de

Rambouillet was over, she had seen Mademoiselle de Scudéry, and was still

not one inch nearer to her heart’s desire. She _could_ not face it.

She came down to supper. Her father was silent and gloomy, shaking his

head and twisting his lips. His visit to _his_ lady had been a failure.

Was there ... could there be ... some mystical connection? And there

was Jacques still limping ... and he had given her that horrid bead

trimming.... _No, no, no_ ... these were insane, goblin ideas that must

be crushed.

Her mother was trying hard to be cheerful, and Jacques kept looking at

her anxiously. When supper was over she went up to her room, half hoping,

half fearing that he would follow.

Shortly there was a scratch at the door (with great difficulty she had

persuaded him to adopt the fashionable scratch—to knock was _bourgeois_).

He came in, and gave her a look with his bright eyes, at once

compassionate and whimsical. She felt herself dully hoping that he would

not ask why she was not wearing the bead trimming. He did not, but began

to tell her of his day, spent mostly at the Palais and a tavern. But all

the time he watched her; she listened languidly. ‘How went the _fête

galante_?’ he asked, after a pause.

‘It was furiously _galante_,’ she answered with a tragic smile. He walked

slowly up to her, half smiling all the time, sat down on her bed, and put

his arm around her.

‘You are cruelly unhappy, my poor one, I know. But ’twill pass, in time

all caprices yield to graver things.’

‘But it is no caprice!’ she cried passionately. ‘Oh, Jacques, it is hard

to make my meaning clear, but they be real live people with their own

pursuits ... they are all square like little fat boxes ... oh, how can I

make you understand?’

Jacques could not help laughing. ‘I’m sure, ’tis hateful of them to

be like boxes; though, in truth, for my part, I am to seek ... oh,

Madeleine, dear life, it’s dreadful to be miserable ... the cursed

_phantasia_, what tricks it plays us ... ’tis a mountebank, don’t heed it

but put your faith in the good old _bourgeois_ intellect,’ but Madeleine,

ignoring this comfort from Gassendi, moaned out,—

‘Oh! Jacques! I want to die ... you see, ’tis this way—they’ve got their

own lives and memories, folded up all tight around them. Oh! can no one

ever get to know any one else?’

He began to understand.

‘Indeed one can, but it takes time. One has to hew a path through the

blood, through the humours, up to the brain, and, once there, create the

Passion of Admiration. How can it be done at once?’

‘I can’t wait ... I can’t wait ... except things come at once I’ll

have none of them ... at least that’s not quite my meaning,’ she added

hurriedly, looking furtively round and crossing herself several times.

‘Oh! but I don’t feel that I am of a humour that can wait.... Oh! I feel

something sick and weak in me somewhere.’

‘It’s but those knavish old animal spirits playing tricks on the will,

but I think that it is only because one is young,’ and he would have

launched out on a philosophical dissertation, only Madeleine felt that

she could not stand it.

‘_Don’t_, Jacques!’ she screamed. ‘Talk about _me_, or I shall go mad!’

‘Well, then, recount to me the whole matter.’

‘Oh! there is nothing worth the telling, but they _would_ make dædal

pleasantries—pleasantries one fails to understand, except one have a

clue—and they would talk about people with whom I was not acquainted....

Oh! it seems past human compassing to make friends with a person except

one has known them all one’s life! How _could_ I utter my conceit if they

would converse of matters I did not understand?’ she repeated furiously.

Jacques smiled.

‘I admit,’ he said dryly, ‘to be show man of a troupe of marionettes is

an agreeable profession.’ She looked at him suspiciously for a second,

and then catching his hands, cried desperately:—

‘Is it beyond our powers ever to make a _new_ friend?’

‘That it is not, but it can’t be effected at once. I am sure that those

_Messieurs de Port-Royal_ would tell you that even Jesus Christ finds

’tis but a slow business worming His way into a person’s heart. There He

stands, knocking and knocking, and then——’ Madeleine saw that he was on

the point of becoming profane, and as her gods did not like profanity,

she crossed herself and cut in with:—

‘But even admitting one can’t come to any degree of intimacy with a

person at once, the _beginning_ of the intimacy must happen at once, and

I’m at a loss to know how the beginning can happen at once any more than

the whole thing.’

She had got into one of her tight knots of nerves, when she craved to be

reasoned with, if only for the satisfaction of confounding the reasons

offered her. Jacques clasped his head and laughed.

‘You put me in mind of the philosophy class and old Zeno! It’s this way,

two people meet, nothing takes place perhaps. They meet again, and one

gives a little look, it may be, that sets the bells of the other’s memory

pleasantly ringing, or says some little thing that tickles the humours of

the other, and thus a current is set up between them ... a fluid, which

gradually reaches the heart and solidifies into friendship.’

‘But then, there might never be the “little look,” or the “little word,”

and then ... there would be no friendship’ (she crossed herself) ‘ ... it

all seems at the mercy of Chance.’

‘Of chance ... and of harmony. ’Tis a matter beyond dispute that we are

more in sympathy with some souls than with others—

‘Il est des nœuds secrets, il est des sympathies,

Dont par le doux rapport les âmes assorties ...

you know these lines in _Rodogune_?’

‘And do you hold that sympathy can push its way past ... obstacles ...

such as bashfulness, for example?’

Jacques smiled.

‘In good earnest it can.’ Suddenly her nerves relaxed.

‘Then it is _not_ contrary to natural laws to make a new friend?’ she

cried joyfully.

‘That it is not. And who knows, the rôles may be reversed ere long and

we shall see old Mother Scudéry on her knees, while Chop plays the proud

spurner! What said that rude, harsh, untaught Grecian poetess whose naked

numbers brought a modest blush to your “precious” taste?

‘Who flees—she shall pursue;

Who spurns gifts—she shall offer them;

Who loves not—willy-nilly, she shall love.’

Madeleine gave a little sob of joy and flung her arms round Jacques’s

neck. Oh, he was right, he was right! Had she not herself feared that

immediate success would be _bourgeois_? ’Twould be breaking every law of

_galanterie_ were Sappho to yield without a struggle. It took Céladon

twelve stout volumes before he won his Astrée, and, as Jacques had

pointed out, Christ Himself, with all the armaments of Heaven at His

disposal, does not at once break through the ramparts of a Christian’s

heart. But yet ... but yet ... her relationship with Mademoiselle

de Scudéry that afternoon could not, with the most elastic poetic

licence, be described as that of ‘the nymph that flees, the faun that

pursues!’ Also ... she was not made of stuff stern enough to endure

repeated rebuffs and disappointments. Already, her nerves were worn

to breaking-point. A one-volumed romance was all her fortitude could

face.... God grant the course of true love to run smooth from now.

Jacques shortly left her, and she went to bed.

Outside Jacques ran into Madame Troqueville, who said she wished to speak

to him. They went into her room.

‘Jacques,’ she began, ‘I am uneasy about Madeleine. I greatly fear things

fell not out as she had hoped. Did she tell you aught of what took place?’

‘I think she is somewhat unhappy because they didn’t all call her

_tu_ right away ... oh, I had forgotten, she holds it _bourgeois_ to

_tutoier_,’ he answered, smiling. Madame Troqueville smiled a little too.

‘My poor child, she is of so impatient a humour, and expects so much,’

and she sighed. ‘Jacques, tell me about your uncle. Are you of opinion he

will make his way in Paris?’ She looked at him searchingly. Her eyes were

clear and cold like Madeleine’s.

Jacques blushed and frowned; he felt angry with her for asking him. But

her eyes were still fixed on his face.

‘How can I tell, aunt? It hangs on all ... on all these presidents and

people.’

Madame Troqueville gave a little shrug, and her lips curled into a tiny,

bitter smile. ‘I wonder why men always hold women to be blind, when in

reality their eyes are so exceeding sharp. Jacques, for my sake, and

for Madeleine’s, for the child’s future doth so depend on it, won’t

you endeavour to keep your uncle from ... from all these places.... I

know you take your pleasure together, and I am of opinion you have some

influence with him.’ Jacques was very embarrassed and very angry; it was

really, he felt, expecting too much of a young man to try and make him

responsible for his middle-aged uncle.

‘I fear I can do nothing, aunt. ’Tis no business of mine,’ he said

coldly, and they parted for the night.

CHAPTER XI

REBUILDING THE HOUSE OF CARDS

All next day Madeleine had the feeling of something near her which she

must, if she wished to live, push away, away, right out of her memory.

Her vanity was too vigilant to have allowed her to give to Jacques a

_full_ account of the scene at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. The fixed smile,

the failure to interest the Marquis, that awful exit, for instance, were

too indecent to be mentioned. Even her thoughts blushed at their memory,

and shuddered away from it—partly, perhaps, because at the back of her

consciousness there dwelt always the imaginary Sappho, so that to recall

these things was to be humiliated anew in her presence.

In fact, the whole scene at the Hôtel de Rambouillet must be forgotten,

and that quickly, for it had been a descent into that ruthless world of

reality in which Madeleine could not breathe. That world tyrannised over

by the co-sovereigns Cause and Effect, blown upon by sharp, rough winds,

and—most horrible of all—fretted with the counter-claims on happiness of

myriads of individuals just as ‘square’ and real as she. In such a world

how could she—with such frightful odds against her—hope for success, for

_here_ she was so impotent, merely a _gauche_ young girl of no position?

There were times, as I have shown, when she felt a _nostalgie_ for the

world of reality, as a safe fresh place, but now ... in God’s name, back

to her dreams.

* * * * *

Madeleine is entering the door of Sappho’s house. Sappho is lying on her

bed, surrounded by her demoiselles. (This time Madeleine visualises

her quite clearly. She is swarthy and plain.) When she sees Madeleine,

she gives a little blush, which caresses the motion of Madeleine’s

passions, and fills her with as sweet an expectancy as the rhythm of a

Saraband. Madeleine comes forward, and kissing her hand says, with the

most gallant air in the world: ‘I am well aware, Madame, that poets are

exempt from the tax to _la Dame Vérité_, and that they have set up in her

place another Sovereign. So when you gave me the other day the gracious

permission to wait on you, I had, I admit, a slight fear that you were

speaking as the subject of this sovereign, whose name, I believe, is

_le joli Mensonge_, and that by taking you at your word, I would prove

myself an eager, ignorant Scythian, unable to understand what is said,

and—more important still—what is not said, by the citizens of the polite

hemisphere. Madame, I would ten times rather earn such a reputation, I

would ten times rather be an unwelcome visitor, than to wait another day

before I saw you.’ It is a bold speech, and which, if made by any one

else would surely have aroused all Sappho’s pride and prudishness. At

first she colours and seems slightly confused, and then, she lets a smile

have its own way. She changes the subject, however.

‘Do you consider,’ she asks, ‘that the society of Lesbos compensates, if

I may use the expression, for the enamelled prairies and melodious brooks

of Bœotia? For my own part, I know few greater pleasures than to sojourn

in a rustic place with my lyre and a few chosen friends.’ These last two

words awake the lover’s gadfly, jealousy, and causes it to give Madeleine

a sharp sting.

‘I should imagine, Madame,’ she says coldly, ‘that by this means you must

carry Lesbos with you wherever you go, and although it is one of the most

agreeable spots on earth, this must deprive you of many of the delights

of travel.’

‘I see that you take me for a provincial of the metropolis,’ says Sappho

with a smile full of delicious raillery and in which Madeleine imagines

she detects a realising of her jealousy and a certain pleasure in it, so

that, in spite of herself, smiling also, she answers,—

‘One has but to read your ravishing verses, which are as fresh, as full

of pomp, and as flowery as a summer meadow, to know that your pleasure

in pastoral joys is as great as your pleasure in intercourse with _les

honnêtes gens_, and the other attractions of the town. And this is

combined with such marvellous talent that in your poetry, the trees

offer a pleasanter shade, the flowers a sweeter odour, the brooks a more

soothing lullaby than in earth’s most agreeable glades.’

‘If you hold,’ answers Sappho smiling, ‘that my verses make things fairer

than they really are, you cannot consider them really admirable, for

surely the closer art resembles nature the more excellent it becomes.’

‘Pardon me, Madame,’ says Madeleine, also smiling, ‘but we who believe

that there are gods and goddesses ten times fairer than the fairest

person on earth, must also believe that somewhere there exist for these

divine beings habitations ten times fairer than the fairest of earth’s

meadows. And you, Madame, have been carried to these habitations on the

wings of the Muses, and in your verses you describe the delicious visions

you have there beheld.’

Sappho cannot keep a look of gratification from lighting up her fine eyes.

‘You think, then, that I have visited the Elysian Fields?’ she asks.

‘Most certainly,’ rejoins Madeleine quickly. ‘Did I not call you the

other day, in the Palais de Cléomire, the Sybil of Cumæ?’ She pauses, and

draws just the eighth of an inch closer to Sappho. ‘As such, you are the

authorised guide to the Elysian Fields. May I hope that some day you will

be _my_ conductress there?’

‘Then, as well, I am the “appointed guide” to Avernus,’ says Sappho with

a delicious laugh. ‘Will you be willing to descend there also?’

‘With you as my guide ... yes,’ answers Madeleine.

There follows one of _ces beaux silences_, more gallant than the most

agreeable conversation: one of the silences during which the wings of

Cupid can almost be heard fluttering. Why does the presence of that

mignon god, all dimples and rose-buds, terrify mortals as well as delight

them?

* * * * *

Thus did Madeleine’s dreams quietly readjust themselves to their normal

state and scornfully tremble away from reality.

PART II

‘Cela t’amuse-t-il tant, me dit-il, d’édifier ainsi des

systèmes?’

‘Rien ne m’amuse plus qu’une éthique, répondis-je, et je m’y

contente l’esprit. Je ne goûte pas une joie que je ne l’y

veuille attachée.’

‘Cela l’augmente-t-il?’

‘Non, dis-je, cela me la légitime.’

Certes, il m’a plu souvent qu’une doctrine et même qu’un

système complet de pensées ordonnées justifiât à moi-même mes

actes; mais parfois je ne l’ai pu considérer que comme l’abri

de ma sensualité.

ANDRÉ GIDE.

CHAPTER XII

THE FÊTE-DIEU

It was the Sunday of the octave of the _Fête-Dieu_—the Feast of _Corpus

Christi._ God Himself had walked the streets like Agamemnon over purple

draperies. The stench of the city had mingled with the perfume of a

thousand lilies—to the Protestant mind, a symbol of the central doctrine

of the day—Transubstantiation. Transubstantiation beaten out by the

cold, throbbing logic of the Latin hymns of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and

triumphantly confirmed at Bologna by the miraculous bleeding of the Host.

Seraphic logic and bleeding bread! A conjunction such as this hints at a

secret vice of the cold and immaculate intellect. What if one came in a

dark corner of one’s dreams upon a celestial spirit feeding upon carrion?

Past gorgeous altars, past houses still hung with arras, the Troquevilles

walked to Mass. From time to time they met processions of children

apeing the solemn doings of Thursday, led by tiny, mock priests, shrilly

chanting the office of the day. Other children passed in the scanty

clothing of little Saint John, leading lambs on pink or blue ribbons.

Everything sparkled in the May sunshine, and the air was full of the

scent of flowers.

_Et introibo ad altare Dei: ad Deum qui lætificat juventutem meam_—very

shortly they would be hearing these words in Church. They were solemn,

sunny words well suited to the day, but, like the day, to Madeleine they

seemed but a mockery. _Ad Deum qui lætificat juventutem meam_—To God who

makes glad my youth! Where was the kind God of the Semi-Pelagians, and

what joy did _she_ have in her youth?

They walked in silence to their destination—the smug _bourgeois_

Church Saint-André-des-Arts. Its atmosphere and furniture did not lend

themselves to religious ecstasy. Among the congregation there was

whispering and tittering and bows of recognition. The gallants were

looking at the belles, and the belles were trying not to look at the

gallants. From marble tombs smirked many a petrified magistrate, to whose

vacuous pomposity the witty commemorative art of the day had added by

a wise elimination of the third dimension, a flat, mocking, decorative

charm.

Suddenly the frivolity vanished from the atmosphere. Monsieur

Troqueville, who had been alternately yawning and spitting, pulled

himself together and put on what Jacques called his ‘Mass face’—one of

critical solemnity which seemed to say: ‘Here I am with a completely

unbiassed mind, quite unprejudiced, and a fine judicial gift for

sifting evidence. I am quite willing to believe that you have the

power of turning bread into the Body and Blood of Christ, but mind! no

hocus-pocus, and not one tiny crumb left untransubstantiated!’

The clergy in the red vestments, symbolic in France of the Blessed

Sacrament, preceded by solemn thurifer, marched in procession from the

sacristy to the altar. And then began the Sacrifice of High Mass.

The _Introit_ melted into the _Kyrie_, the _Kyrie_ swelled into the

_Gloria in excelsis_. The subdeacon sang the Epistle, the deacon sang the

Gospel. The Gospel and Epistle solidified into the fine rigidity of the

Creed.

Madeleine, quite unmoved by the solemn drama, was examining the creases

in the neck of a fat merchant immediately in front of her. There were

three real creases—the small half ones did not count—and as there were

three lines in her Litany she might use them as a sort of Rosary. She

felt that she must ‘tell’ the three creases before he turned his head.

‘Blessed Virgin, Mother of Our Lord, give me the friendship of

Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Guardian Angel that watchest over me, give me

the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Blessed Saint Magdalene, give

me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry.’

Suddenly ... the sweet, nauseating smell of incense and the strange music

of the Preface—an echo of the music of Paradise, so said the legend,

caught in dreams by holy apostolic men.

_Quia per incarnati Verbi mysterium nova inentis nostræ oculis lux tuæ

claritatis infulsit: ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus per hunc in

INVISIBILIUM AMOREM RAPIAMUR._

Dozens of times before had Madeleine heard these terse Latin words, but

to-day, for the first time, she felt their significance. ‘Caught up to

the love of invisible things’—_rapiamur_—a ghostly rape—the idea was

beautiful and terrible. Suddenly a great longing swept over her for the

still, significant life of the Spirit, for the shadowy lining of this

bright, hard earth. Yet on earth itself strange lives had been led ...

symbols, and bitter-sweet sacrifice, and little cells suddenly filled

with the sound of great waters.

A ghostly rape ... she had a sudden vision of the nervous hands of the

Almighty clutching tightly the yielding flesh of a thick, human body,

as in a picture by the Flemish Rubens she had seen in the Luxembourg.

Surely the body was that of the fat merchant with the wrinkled neck ...

there ... sitting in front of her. Something is happening ... there

are acolytes with lighted tapers ... a bell is ringing ... the central

Mystery is being consummated. For one strange, poignant second Madeleine

felt herself in a world of non-bulk and non-colour. She buried her

face in her hands and, though her mind formed no articulate prayer, she

worshipped the Unseen. Her mundane desires had, for the moment, dropped

from her and their place was taken by her old ambition of one day being

able to go up to the altar, strong in grace, a true penitent, to partake

of the inestimable blessing of the Eucharist.

CHAPTER XIII

ROBERT PILOU’S SCREEN

When Mass was over, Madeleine walked home with her parents in absolute

silence. She was terribly afraid of losing the flavour of her recent

experience. She specially dreaded Jacques. He was such a scoffer;

besides, at this moment, she felt a great distaste for the insincerity of

her relationship with him. However, as it happened, he did not come in to

dinner that day.

After dinner she went to her room and lay down on her bed, in the hopes

of sleeping, and so guarding her religious emotion from the contamination

of thoughts and desires—for, at the bottom of her heart, she knew quite

well that her obsession was only dozing. Finally, she did fall asleep,

and slept for some hours.

When she awoke, it was half-past four, and she realised with joy that she

had nursed successfully the mystic atmosphere. She felt a need for space

and fresh air, and hastily put on her pattens, mask, and cloak. As she

came out of her room, her mother appeared from the parlour.

‘Madeleine—dear life—whither in the name of madness, are you bound? You

cannot be contemplating walking alone? Why, ’twill soon be dusk! Jacques

should shortly return, and he’ll accompany you!’

This was unbearable. In a perfect frenzy, lest the spell should be

broken, Madeleine gathered up her petticoats and made a dash for the

staircase.

‘Madeleine! Madeleine! Is the child demented? Come back! I command you!’

‘For God’s sake, _let me be_!’ screeched Madeleine furiously from

half-way down the stairs. ‘Curse her! With her shrill importunity she has

shattered the serenity of my humour!’ she muttered to herself, in the

last stage of nervous irritation.

She had half a mind to go back and spend the rest of the afternoon

in dinning into her mother that by her untimely interruption she had

arrested a _coup de Grâce_, and come between her and her ultimate

redemption. But pleasant though this would be, the soft sunshine of early

June was more so, so she ran down the stairs and into the street.

At first she felt so irritated and ruffled that she feared the spell was

broken for ever, but gradually it was renewed under the magical idleness

of the Sunday afternoon. In a house opposite some one was playing a

Saraband on the lute. From a neighbouring street came the voices and

laughter of children—otherwise the whole neighbourhood seemed deserted.

Down the long rue des Augustins, that narrowed to a bright point towards

the Seine, she wandered with wide, staring eyes, to meet something, she

knew not what. Then up the quays she wandered, up and on, still in a

trance.

Finally she took her stand on the Pont-Rouge, a little wooden bridge

long since replaced. For some moments she gazed at the Seine urbanely

flowing between the temperate tints of its banks, and flanked on its

right by the long, gray gallery of the Louvre. Everything was shrouded

in a delicate distance-lending haze; there was the Cité—miles and miles

away it seemed—nuzzling into the water and dominated by the twin towers

of Notre-Dame. They had caught the sun, and though unsubstantial, they

still looked sturdy—like solid cubes of light. The uniform gray-greenness

of everything—Seine and Louvre and Cité—and a quality in it all of

decorative unreality, reminded Madeleine of a great, flat, gray-green

picture by Mantegna of the death of Saint Sebastian, that she had seen in

one of the Palaces.

The bell of Saint-Germain-des-Prés began to peal for Vespers. She started

murmuring to herself the Vesper hymn—_Lucis Creator_:—

‘Ne mens gravata crimine.

Vitæ sit exul munere,

Dum nil perenne cogitat,

Seseque culpis illigat.’

‘Grant that the mind, borne down by the charge of guilt, be not an exile

from the fulfilment of life, perennially pondering emptiness and binding

itself by its transgressions.’

Yes, that was a prayer she had need of praying. ‘An exile from the

fulfilment of life’—that was what she had always feared to be. An exile

in the provinces, far from the full stream of life—but what was Paris

itself but a backwater, compared with the City of God? ‘Perennially

pondering emptiness’—yes, that was her soul’s only exercise. She had long

ceased to ponder grave and pregnant matters. The time had come to review

once more her attitude to God and man.

She had come lately to look upon God as a Being with little sense of sin,

who had a mild partiality for _attrition_ in His creatures, but who never

demanded _contrition_. And the compact into which she had entered with

Him was this: she was to offer Him a little lip-service, perform daily

some domestic duties and pretend to Jacques she was in love with him;

in return for this He (aided by her dances) was to procure for her the

entrée into the inner circle of the Précieuses, and the friendship of

Mademoiselle de Scudéry! And the tenets of Jansenism—it was a long time

since she had boldly faced them. What were they?

Every man is a tainted creature, fallen into an incurable and permanent

habit of sinning. His every action, his every thought—beginning from the

puny egotism of his babyhood—is a loathsome sin in the eyes of God. The

only remedy for the diseased will that prompts these sinful thoughts and

actions is the sovereign, infallible grace that God sends on those whom

He has decided in His secret councils to raise to a state of triumphant

purity. And what does this Grace engender? An agony of repentance,

a loathing of things visible, and a burning longing for things

invisible—_in invisibilium amorem rapiamur_, yes, that is the sublime and

frigid fate of the true penitent.

And she had actually deceived herself so far as to think that the

Arch-Enemy of sin manifested His goodness like a weak, earthly father by

gratifying one’s worldly desires, one’s ‘concupiscence’ which Jansenius

calls the ‘source of all the other vices’! No, His gifts to men were not

these vain baubles, the heart’s desires, but Grace, the Eucharist, His

perpetual Presence on the Altar—gigantic, austere benefits befitting this

solemn abstract universe, in which angels are helping men in the fight

for their immortal souls.

Yes, this was the Catholic faith, this was the true and living God, to

Whose throne she had dared to come with trivial requests and paltry

bargainings.

She felt this evening an almost physical craving for perfect sincerity

with herself, so without flinching she turned her scrutiny upon her love

for Mademoiselle de Scudéry. There flashed into her mind the words of

Jansenius upon the sin of Adam:—

‘What could Adam love after God, away from whom he had fallen?

What could so sublime a spirit love but the sublimest thing

after God Himself, namely—_his own_ spirit?... This love,

through which he wished, somehow, to take joy in himself, in

as much as he could no longer take joy in God, in itself did

not long suffice. Soon he apprehended its indigence, and that

in it he would never find happiness.

‘Then, seeing that the way was barred that led back to God, the

source of true felicity from which he had cut himself off, the

want left in his nature precipitated him towards the creatures

here below, and he wandered among them, hoping that _they_

might satisfy the want. Thence come those bubbling desires,

whose name is legion; those tight, cruel chains with which he

is bound by the creatures he loves, that bondage, not only of

himself but of all he imprisons by their love for him. Because,

once again, in this love of his for all other things, it is

above all _himself_ that he holds dear. In all his frequent

delights it is always—and this is a remnant of his ancient

noble state—in _himself_ that he professes to delight.’

How could she, knowing this passage, have deceived herself into imagining

she could save her soul by love for a creature?

The words of Jansenius were confirmed by those of Saint Augustine:—

‘I lived in adultery away from Thee.... For the friendship of

this world is adultery against Thee,’

and her own conscience confirmed them both, for it whispered that

her obsession for Mademoiselle de Scudéry was nothing but a subtle

development of her _amour-propre_, and what was more, had swollen to such

dimensions as completely to blot out God from her universe.

Well, she stood condemned in all her desires and in all her activities!

What was to be done? With regard to one matter at least her duty was

clear. She must confess to Jacques that she had lied to him when she

said she loved him.

And Mademoiselle de Scudéry ... would she be called upon to chase her

from her heart? Oh, the cruelty of it! The horse-face and the plain gray

gown ... the wonderful invention in _galanterie_ made by herself and

the Grecian Sappho ... the delicious ‘light fire’ of expectancy ... the

desirability of being loved in return ... the deep, deep roots it had

taken in her heart. To see the figure in gray serge growing smaller and

smaller as earth receded from her, and as her new _amours_—the ‘invisible

things’—drew her up, and up with chill, shadowy arms—_she couldn’t, she

couldn’t_ face it!

In mental agony she leaned her elbows on the parapet of the bridge,

and pressing her fingers against her eyes, she prayed passionately for

guidance.

When she opened them, two gallants were passing.

‘Have you heard the _mot_ Ninon made to the Queen of Sweden?’ one was

asking.

‘No, what was it?’

‘Her Majesty asked her for a definition of the Précieuses, and Ninon said

at once, “_Madame, les Précieuses sont les Jansénistes de l’amour!_”

’Twas prettily said, wasn’t it?’ They laughed, and were soon out of sight.

‘Les Précieuses sont les Jansénistes de l’amour!’ Madeleine laughed

aloud, as there swept over her a flood of what she imagined to be divine

illumination. Her prayer for guidance had been miraculously answered, and

in a manner perfectly accordant with her own wishes. It was obviously

a case of Robert Pilou’s sacred screen. ‘Profane history told by means

of sacred prints becomes sacred history.’ A Précieuse need only have a

knack of sacramentalism to become in the same way a Jansenist, for there

was a striking resemblance between the two creeds. In their demands on

their followers they had the same superb disregard for human weakness,

and in both this disregard was coupled with a firm belief in original sin

(for the contempt and loathing with which the Précieuses regarded the

manners of all those ignorant of their code sprang surely from a belief

in ‘original boorishness’ which in their eyes was indistinguishable from

‘original sin’), the only cure for which was their own particular form

of grace. And the grace of the Précieuses, namely, _l’air galant_—that

elusive social quality which through six or seven pages of _Le Grand

Cyrus_, gracefully evades the definitions in which the agile authoress is

striving to hold it, that quality without which the wittiest conversation

is savourless, the most graceful compliment without fragrance, that

quality which can be acquired by no amount of good-will or application,

and which can be found in the muddiest poet and be lacking in the most

elegant courtier—did it not offer the closest parallel to the mysterious

grace of the Jansenists without which there was no salvation, and which

was sometimes given in abundance to the greatest sinners and denied to

the most virtuous citizens? And then—most striking analogy of all—the

Précieuses’ conception of the true lover possessed just those qualities

demanded from us by Saint Paul and the Jansenists. What finer symbol, for

instance, of the perfect Christian could be found than that of the hero

of the _Astrée_, Céladon, the perfect lover?

Yes, in spite of Saint Augustine’s condemnation of the men ‘who blushed

for a solecism,’ she could sanctify her preciosity by making it the

symbol of her spiritual development, and—oh, rapture—she could sanctify

her obsession for Mademoiselle de Scudéry by making it definitely

the symbol of her love for Christ, not merely a means of curing her

_amour-propre_. Through _her_, she would learn to know Him. Had it not

been said by Saint Augustine: ‘_My sin was just this, that I sought for

pleasure, grandeur, vanity, not in Him, but in His creatures_,’ by which

he surely meant that the love of the creature for the creature was not in

_itself_ a sin, it only became so when it led to forgetting the Creator.

So, with singular rapidity this time, ‘La folie de la Croix s’est

atténuée.’

* * * * *

It was already twilight. In the Churches they would be celebrating

Compline. The choir would be singing: ‘_Jube, Domine, benedicere_,’ and

the priest would answer: ‘_Noctem quietam et finem perfectum concedat

nobis Dominus omnipotens_.’

The criers of wafers were beginning their nocturnal song: ‘_La joie! la

joie! Voilà des oublies!_’ It was time to go home; her mother would be

anxious; she must try very hard not to be so inconsiderate.

It was quite dark when she reached the petite rue du Paon. She found

Madame Troqueville almost frantic with anxiety, so she flung her arms

round her neck and whispered her contrition for her present lateness and

her former ill-humour. Madame Troqueville pressed her convulsively and

whispered back that she was never ill-humoured, and even if she were, it

was no matter. In the middle of this scene in came Berthe, nodding and

becking. ‘Ah! Mademoiselle is _câline_ in her ways! She is skilled in

wheedling her parents—a second Nausicaa!’

CHAPTER XIV

A DEMONSTRATION IN FAITH

The scruples with regard to having compromised with an uncompromising

God which Madeleine entertained in spite of herself were silenced by the

determination of settling things with Jacques. For a right action is a

greater salve to conscience than a thousand good resolutions.

This determination gave her a double satisfaction, for she had realised

that the relationship was also a sin against preciosity—and a very

deadly sin to boot. For one thing, _les honnêtes femmes_ must never love

more than once, and then her shameful avowal that ‘_she loved him very

much, and that he might take his fill of kissing_,’ would surely cause

the belles who staked their reputation on never permitting a gallant to

succeed in expressing his sentiments and who were beginning to shudder

at even the ‘minor favours,’ such as the acceptance of presents and the

discreetest signs of the chastest complacency, to fall into a swoon seven

fathoms deep of indignation, horror, and scorn.

The retraction should be made that very evening, she decided; it was to

be her Bethel, a spiritual stone set up as a covenant between herself and

God. But Jacques did not come back to supper that evening, so it happened

that she celebrated her new _coup de grâce_ in a vastly more agreeable

manner.

After supper she had gone into her own room and had begun idly to turn

over the pages of _Cyrus_, and, as always happened, it soon awoke in her

an agonising sense of the author’s charms, and a craving for closer

communion with her than was afforded by the perusal of even these

intimate pages. This closer communion could only be reached through a

dance. In a second she was up and leaping:—

_She has gone to a ‘Samedi’ where she finds a select circle of Sappho’s

friends_ ... then by a great effort of will she checks herself. Is

she a Jansenist or is she not? And if she _is_ a Jansenist, is this

dancing reconcilable with her tenets? As a means of moulding the future

it certainly is not, for the future has been decided once and for all

in God’s inscrutable councils. As a mere recreation, it is probably

harmless. But is there no way of making it an integral part of her

religious life? Yes, from the standpoint of Semi-Pelagianism it was a

means of helping God to make the future, from the standpoint of Jansenism

it can be _a demonstration in faith_, by which she tells God how safe her

future is in His hands, and how certain she is of His goodness and mercy

in the making of it.

Then, an extra sanctity can be given to its contents by the useful device

of Robert Pilou’s screen—let the talk be as witty and gallant as you

please, as long as every conceit has a mystical second meaning.

This settled, once more she started her dance.

* * * * *

_Madeleine has gone to a ‘Samedi’ at Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s, where she

finds a select circle of Sappho’s friends._

_The talk drifts to the writings of ‘Callicrate,’ as the late Monsieur

Voiture was called._

_‘There is a certain verse of his from which an astute reader can deduce

that he was not a Jansenist,’ says Madeleine, with a deliciously roguish

smile. ‘Can any of the company quote this verse?’_

_A wave of amused interest passes over the room._

_‘I did not know that Callicrate was a theologian,’ says Sappho._

_‘A theologian, yes, for he was an admirable professor of love’s theory,

but a real Christian, no, for he was but a feeble and faithless lover,’

answers Madeleine, looking straight into Sappho’s eyes. Sappho colours,

and with a laugh which thrills Madeleine’s ear, with a tiny note of

nervousness says_:—

_‘Well, Mademoiselle, prove your theory about Callicrate by quoting the

verses you allude to, and if you cannot do so, we will exact a forfeit

from you for being guilty of the crime of having aroused the delightful

emotion of curiosity without the justification of being able to gratify

it.’ The company turn their smiling eyes on Madeleine, who proceeds to

quote the following lines_:—

‘Ne laissez rien en vous capable de déplaire.

Faites-vous toute belle: et _tachez de parfaire_

_L’ouvrage que les Dieux ont si fort avancé_:’

_‘Now these lines allow great power to ~le libre arbitre~, and suppose a

collaboration between the gods and mortals in the matter of the soul’s

redemption, which would, I am sure, bring a frown to the brows of ~les

Messieurs de Port-Royale~.’_

_‘Sappho, I think it is we that must pay forfeits to Mademoiselle, not

she to us, for she has vindicated herself in the most ~spirituel~ manner

in the world,’ says Cléodamas._

_‘Let her lay a task on each of us that must be performed within five

minutes,’ suggests Philoxène._

_‘Mademoiselle, what labours of Hercules are you going to impose on us?’

asks Sappho, smiling at Madeleine. Madeleine thinks for a moment and then

says_:—

_‘Each of you must compose a ~Proposition Galante~ on the model of one of

the Five.’_

_The company is delighted with the idea, and Théodamas writes out the

five original Propositions that the company may have their models before

them, and proceeds to read them out_:—

(1) _Some of God’s commandments it is impossible for the Just

to obey owing to the present state of their powers, in spite of

the desire of doing so, and in spite of great efforts: and the

Grace by which they might obey these commandments is lacking._

(2) _That in the state of fallen nature, one never resists the

interior grace._

(3) _That to merit and demerit in the state of fallen nature,

it is not necessary that man should have liberty opposed to

necessity (to will), but that it suffices that he should have

liberty opposed to constraint._

(4) _That the Semi-Pelagians admitted the necessity of the

inward grace preceding every action, even the inception of

Faith, but that they were heretics in so far as they held that

grace to be of such a nature that the will of man could either

resist it or obey it._

(5) _That it is a Semi-Pelagian error to say that the Founder

of our faith died and shed His blood universally, for all men._

_They all take out their tablets and begin to write. At the end of five

minutes Madeleine tells them to stop._

_‘I have taken the first as my model,’ says Sappho, ‘and indeed I have

altered it only very slightly.’ The company begs to hear it._

_‘No commandment of a lady is too difficult for an ~homme galant~ to

obey, for to him every lady is full of grace, and this grace inspires him

with powers more than human.’_

_Every one applauds, and expresses their appreciation of her wit._

_‘And now,’ says Madeleine, ‘that our appetite has been so deliciously

whetted—if I may use the expression—by Sappho, have the rest of the

company got their ~ragoûts~ ready?_’

_Doralise looks at Théodamas, and Théodamas at Philoxène, and they laugh._

_‘Mademoiselle, blindness is the penalty for looking on a goddess, and

dumbness, I suppose, that of listening to two Muses. We are unable to pay

our forfeits,’ says Théodamas, with a rueful smile._

_‘Will not Mademoiselle rescue the Sorbonne ~galante~ from ignominy,

and herself supply the missing propositions?’ says Sappho, throwing at

Madeleine a glance, at once arch and challenging._

_‘Yes! Yes!’ cries the company, ‘let the learned doctor herself compile

the theology of Cupid!’_

_‘When Sappho commands, even the doctors of the Sorbonne obey,’ says

Madeleine gallantly. ‘Well, then, I will go on to the second proposition

in which I will change nothing but ~one~ word. “That in the state of

fallen nature, man never resists the ~external~ grace.”’ The company

laughs delightedly._

_‘By the third I must admit to be vanquished,’ she continues, ‘the fourth

is not unlike that of Sappho’s! “That courtiers, although they admit the

necessity of feminine grace preceding every movement of their passions,

are heretics in so far that they hold the wishes of ladies to be of such

a nature that the will of man can either, as it chooses, resist or obey

them.”’_

_‘Delicious!’ cries the company, ‘that is furiously well expressed, and a

well-merited condemnation of Condé and his petits-maîtres.’_

_‘And now we come to the fifth, which calls for as much pruning as one of

the famous Port-Royal pear-trees. “That it is an error of provincials and

other barbarians to say that lovers burn with a universal flame, or that

~les honnêtes femmes~ give their favours to ~all~ men.”’ Loud applause

follows._

_‘Mademoiselle,’ says Théodamas, ‘you have converted me to Jansenism.’_

_‘Such a distinguished convert as the great Théodamas will certainly

compensate the sect for all the bulls launched against it by the Holy

Father,’ says Madeleine gallantly._

_‘Well, I must admit that by one thing the Jansenists have certainly

added to ~la douceur de la vie~, and that is by what we may call their

Miracle of the Graces,’ says Sappho._

_‘What does Madame mean by “the Miracle of the Graces”?’ asks Madeleine,

smiling._

_‘I mean the multiplication of what till their day had been ~three~

Graces into ~at least~ four times that number. To have done so deserves,

I think, to be called a miracle.’_

_‘The most miraculous—if I may use the expression—of the miracles

recorded in the Lives of the Saints has always seemed to me the Miracle

of the Beautiful City,’ says Madeleine innocently._

_‘What miracle is that? My memory fails me, if I may use the expression,’

says Sappho, in a puzzled voice._

_‘Madame, I scarcely believe that a lady so widely and exquisitely

informed as Sappho of Lesbos in both what pertains to mortals and in what

pertains to gods, in short in Homer and in Hesiod, should never have

heard of the “Miracle of the Beautiful City,”’ says Madeleine, in mock

surprise._

_‘Then Mademoiselle—as you say you can scarcely believe it—you show

yourself to be a lady of but little faith!’ says Sappho, her eye lighted

by a delicious gleam of raillery._

_‘I must confess that the miracle Mademoiselle mentions has—if I may use

the expression—escaped ~my~ memory too,’ says Théodamas._

_‘And ours,’ say Doralise and Philoxène._

_‘So ~this~ company of all companies has never heard of the Miracle of

the Beautiful City!’ cries Madeleine. ‘Well, I will recount it to you._

_‘Once upon a time, in a far barbarian country, there lived a great

saint. Everything about her was a miracle—her eyes, her hands, her

figure, and her wit. One night an angel appeared to her and said: (I will

not yet tell you the saint’s name), “Take your lyre” (I forgot to mention

that the saint’s performance on this instrument was also a miracle, and

a furiously agreeable one), “Take your lyre, and go and play upon it in

the wilderness.” And the saint obeyed the angel’s command, though the

wilderness was filled with lions and tigers and every other ferocious

beast. But when the saint began to play they turned into ... doves and

linnets.’ A tiny smile of comprehension begins to play round the eyes of

the company. Madeleine goes on, quite gravely_:—

_‘But that was only a baby miracle beside that which followed. As the

saint played, out of the earth began to spring golden palaces, surrounded

by delicious gardens, towers of porphyry, magnificent temples, in short,

all the agreeable monuments that go to the making of a great city, and

of which, as a rule, Time is the only building contractor. But, in a few

minutes, this great Saint built it merely by playing on her lyre. Madame,

the city’s name was Pretty Wit, and the Saint’s name was ... can the

company tell me?’ and she looks roguishly round._

_‘It is a name of five letters, and its first letter is S and its last

O,’ says Théodamas, with a smile._

* * * * *

Madeleine flung herself breathless and exhausted on her bed.

Deep down her conscience was wondering if she had achieved a genuine

reconciliation between Preciosity and Jansenism.

CHAPTER XV

MOLOCH

The period that ensued was one of great happiness for Madeleine. It was

spent in floating on her own interpretation of the Jansenists’ ‘full sea

of grace,’ happy in the certainty, secure in the faith, that God in His

own good time would grant her desires, and reverse the rôles of fugitive

and pursuer. And being set free from the necessity of making her own

future, _ipso facto_ she was also released from the importunities of the

gnat-like taboos and duties upon the doing or not doing of which had

seemed to depend her future success.

She felt at peace with God and with man, and her family found her

unusually gentle, calm, and sympathetic.

But Bethel was not yet raised. This was partly due to the inevitable

torpor caused by an excess of faith. If it was God’s will that she should

have an explanation with Jacques, He would furnish the occasion and the

words.

So the evenings slipped by, and Madeleine continued to receive Jacques’s

caresses with an automatic responsiveness.

Then, at a party at the Troguins, she met a benevolent though gouty old

gentleman, in a black taffeta jerkin and black velvet breeches, and he

was none other than Monsieur Conrart, perpetual secretary to the Academy,

and self-constituted master of the ceremonies at the ‘_Samedis_’ of

Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Madeleine was introduced to him, and her demure

attention to his discourse, her modest demeanour, and her discreet

feminine intelligence pleased him extremely. She made no conscious effort

to attract him, she just trusted God, and, to ring another change on her

favourite _quolibet_, it was as if _la Grâce_ confided to the Graces the

secret of its own silent, automatic action. He grew very paternal, patted

her on the knee with his fat, gouty hand, and focused his energies on the

improvement of _her_ mind instead of the collective mind of the company.

The end of it was that he promised to take her with him to the very next

‘_Samedi_.’

On the way home, she and Jacques went for a stroll in the Place Maubert,

that favourite haunt of _petits-bourgeois_, where in pathetic finery

they aired their puny pretensions to pass for _honnêtes gens_, or, more

happily constituted, exercised their capacity for loud laughter and

coarse wit, and the one privilege of their class, that of making love in

public.

As a rule, Madeleine would rather have died than have been seen walking

in the Place Maubert, but now, when her soul was floating on a sea of

grace, so dazzlingly sunny, it mattered but little in which of the paths

of earth her body chose to stray; however, this evening, her happiness

was a little disturbed by an inward voice telling her that now was the

time for enlightening Jacques with regard to her feelings towards him.

She looked at him; he was a lovable creature and she realised that she

would sorely miss him. Then she remembered that on Saturday she was

going to see Sappho, and in comparison with her the charm of pale,

chestnut-haired young men lost all potency. She was going to see Sappho.

God was very good!

They were threading their way between squares of box clipped in

arabesque. It was sunset, and from a distant shrubbery there came the

sounds of children at their play. The pungent smell of box, the voices of

children playing at sunset; they brought to Madeleine a sudden whiff of

the long, nameless nostalgia of childhood, a nostalgia for what? Perhaps

for the _vitæ munus_ (the fulfilment of life) of the Vesper hymn; well,

on Saturday she would know the _vitæ munus_.

She seized Jacques’s arm and, with shining eyes, cried out: ‘Oh, God is

exceeding merciful to His chosen! He keeps the promise in the Psalms,

He “maketh glad our youth.” When I think on His great goodness ... I

want ... I want ... Oh, words fail me! How comes it, Jacques, you do not

see His footsteps everywhere upon the earth?’ She was trembling with

exultation and her voice shook.

Jacques looked at her gently, and his face was troubled.

‘One cannot reveal Grace to another by words and argument,’ she went on,

‘each must _feel_ it in his own soul, but let it once be felt, then never

more will one be obnoxious to doubts on ghostly matters, willy-nilly one

will believe to all eternity!’

They found a quiet little seat beside a fountain and sat down. After a

moment’s silence Madeleine once more took up her _Te Deum_.

‘Matter for thanksgiving is never wanting, as inch by inch the veil is

lifted from the eyes of one’s spirit to discover in time the whole fair

prospect of God’s most amiable Providence. Oh, Jacques, _why_ are you

blind?’ His only answer was to kick the pebbles, his eyes fixed on the

ground.

Then, in rather a constrained voice, he said: ‘I would rather put it

thus; matter for _pain_ is never wanting to him who stares at the world

with an honest and unblinking eye. What sees he? Pain—pain—and again

pain. It is harsh and incredible to suppose that ’twould be countenanced

by a _good_ God. What say you, Chop, to pain?’

Madeleine was pat with her answers from Jansenism—the perfection of man’s

estate before the Fall, when there was granted him the culminating grace

of free will, his misuse of it by his choice of sin, and its attendant,

pain.

Jacques was silent for a moment, and then he said:—

‘I can conceive of no scale of virtues wherein room is found for a

lasting, durable, and unremitted anger, venting itself on the progeny

of its enemy unto the tenth and twentieth-thousand generation. Yet,

such an anger was cherished by your God, towards the children of Adam.

Nor in any scale of virtues is there place for the pregnant fancy of an

artificer, who having for his diversion moulded a puppet out of mud,

to show, forsooth, the cunning of his hand, makes that same puppet

sensible to pain and to affliction. Why, ’tis a subtle malice of which

even the sponsors of Pandora were guiltless! Then his ignoble chicanery!

With truly kingly magnanimity he cedes to the puppet the franchise of

free will; but mark what follows! The puppet, guileless and trusting,

proceeds to enjoy its freedom, when lo! down on its head descends the

thunder-bolt, that it may know free will must not be exercised except

in such manner as is accordant with the purposes of the giver. The

pettifogging attorney!

‘Yes, your God is bloodier than Moloch, more perfectly tyrant than Jove,

more crafty and dishonest than Mercury.

‘Have you read the fourth book of Virgil’s _Æneid_? In it I read a

tragedy more pungent than the cozenage of Dido—that of a race of mortals,

quick in their apprehensions, tender in their affections, sensible to the

dictates of conscience and of duty, who are governed by gods, ferocious

and malign, as far beneath them in the scale of creation as are the

roaring lions of the Libyan desert. And were I not possessed by the

certainty that your faith is but a monstrous fiction, my wits would long

ere now have left me in comparing the rare properties of good men with

those of your low Hebrew idol.’

Madeleine looked at him curiously. This was surely a piece of prepared

rhetoric, not a spontaneous outburst. So she was not the only person who

in her imagination spouted eloquence to an admiring audience!

Although she had no arguments with which to meet his indictment, her

faith, not a whit disturbed, continued comfortably purring in her heart.

But as she did not wish to snub his outburst by silence—her mood was too

benevolent—she said:—

‘Do you hold, then, that there is no good power behind the little

accidents of life?’

‘The only good power lies in us ourselves, ’tis the Will that Descartes

writes of—a magic sword like to the ones in _Amadis_, a delicate, sure

weapon, not rusting in the armoury of a tyrannical god, but ready to

the hand of every one of us to wield it when we choose. _Les hommes de

volonté_—they form the true _noblesse d’épée_, and can snap their fingers

at Hozier and his heraldries,’ he paused, then said very gently, ‘Chop,

I sometimes fear that in your wild chase after winged horses you may be

cozened out of graver and more enduring blessings, which, though they be

not as rare and pretty as chimeras....’

‘Because you choose to stick on them the name of chimeras,’ Madeleine

interrupted with some heat, ‘it does not a whit alter their true nature.

Though your mind may be too narrow to stable a winged horse, that is no

hindrance to its finding free pasturage in the mind of God, of which the

universe is the expression. And even if they should be empty cheats—which

they are _not_—do you not hold the Duc de Liancourt was worthy of praise

in that by a cunningly painted perspective he has given the aspect of a

noble park watered by a fair river to his narrow garden in the Rue de

Seine?’

‘Why, if we be on the subject of painted perspectives,’ said Jacques,

‘it is reported that the late cardinal in his villa at Rueil had painted

on a wall at the end of his _Citronière_ the Arch of Constantine. ’Twas

a life-size cheat and so cunning an imitation of nature was shown in

the painting of sky and hills between the arches, that foolish birds,

thinking to fly through have dashed themselves against the wall. Chop, it

would vex me sorely to see you one of these birds!’

A frightened shadow came into Madeleine’s eyes, and she furtively crossed

herself. Then, once more, she smiled serenely.

For several moments they were silent, and then Jacques said hesitatingly:—

‘Dear little Chop ... I would have you deal quite frankly with me, and

tell me if you mean it when you say you love me. There are moments when a

doubt ... I _must_ know the truth, Chop!’

In an almost miraculous manner the way had been made easy for her

confession, and ... she put her arms round his neck (in the Place Maubert

you could do these things) and feverishly assured him that she loved him

with all her heart.

CHAPTER XVI

A VISIT TO THE ABBAYE OF PORT-ROYAL

Madeleine’s bitter self-reproaches for her own weakness were of no

avail. She had to acknowledge once and for all that she had not the

force to stand out against another personality and tell them in cold

blood things they would not like. She could hedge and be lukewarm—as

when Jacques wished to be formally affianced—but once she had got into a

false position she could not, if the feelings of others were involved,

extricate herself in a strong, straightforward way. Would God be angry

that she had not set up the Bethel she had promised? No, because it was

the true God she was worshipping now, not merely the projection of her

own barbarous superstitions.

At any rate, to be on the safe side, she would go and visit Mère Agnès

Arnauld at the Abbaye de Port-Royal (a thing she should have done long

ago) for that would certainly please Him. So she wrote asking if she

might come, and got back a cordial note, fixing Wednesday afternoon for

the interview.

In spite of her exalted mood, she did not look forward to the meeting:

‘I hate having my soul probed,’ she told herself in angry anticipation.

She could not have explained what hidden motive it was that forced her

on Wednesday to make up her face with Talc, scent herself heavily with

Ambre, and deck herself out in all her most worldly finery.

As it was a long walk to the Abbaye of Port-Royal—one had to traverse

the whole of the Faubourg Saint-Jacques—Madame Troqueville insisted on

Jacques accompanying her, and waiting for her, during the interview, at

the abbaye gates.

They set out at about half-past two. Jacques seemed much tickled by the

whole proceeding, and said that he longed for the cap of invisibility

that, unseen, he might assist at the interview.

‘You’ll be a novice ere many months have passed!’ he said, with a

mischievous twinkle, ‘what will you wager that you won’t?’

‘All in this world and the next,’ Madeleine answered passionately.

‘As you will, time will show,’ and he nodded his head mysteriously.

‘Jacques, do not be so fantastical. Why, in the name of madness, should I

turn novice just because I visited a nun? Jacques, do you hear me? I bid

you to retract your words!’

‘And if I were to retract them, what would it boot you? They would still

be true. You’ll turn nun and never clap eyes again on old Dame Scudéry!’

and he shrieked with glee. Madeleine paled under her rouge.

‘So you would frustrate my hopes, and stick a curse on me?’ she said in a

voice trembling with fury. ‘I’ll have none of your escort, let my mother

rail as she will, I’ll not be seen with one of your make; what are you

but my father’s bawd? Seek him out and get you to your low revellings,

I’ll on my way alone!’ and carrying her head very high, she strutted on

by herself.

‘Why, Chop, you have studied rhetoric in the Halles, the choiceness

of your language would send old Scudéry gibbering back to her

native Parnassus!’ he called after her mockingly, then, suddenly

conscience-stricken, he ran up to her and said, trying to take her hand:

‘Why, Chop, ’tis foolishness to let raillery work on you so strangely!

All said and done, what power have my light words to act upon your

future? I am no prophet. But as you give such credence to my words why

then I’ll say with solemn emphasis that you will _never_ be a novice,

for no nuns would be so foolish as to let a whirlwind take the veil. No,

you’ll be cloistered all your days with Mademoiselle de Scudéry, and with

no other living soul will you hold converse. Why, there’s a pleasant,

frigid, prophecy for you, are you content?’

Madeleine relented sufficiently to smile at him and let him take her

hand, but she remained firm in her resolve to forgo his further escort,

so with a shrug he left her, and went off on his own pursuits.

As Madeleine passed through the Porte Saint-Jacques, she seemed to leave

behind her all the noisy operations of man and to enter the quiet domain

of God and nature. On either side of her were orchards and monasteries in

which, leisurely, slowly, souls and fruit were ripening. Over the fields

of hay the passing wind left its pale foot-prints. Peace had returned to

her soul.

Soon she was ringing the bell of the Abbaye of Port-Royal—that alembic of

grace, for ever at its silent work of distilling from the warm passions

of human souls, the icy draught of holiness—that mysterious depository of

the victims of the Heavenly Rape.

She was shown into a waiting-room, bare and scrupulously clean. On the

wall hung crayon sketches by Moustier of the various benefactors of the

House. Madeleine gazed respectfully at this gallery of blonde ladies,

simpering above their plump _décolletage_. They were inscribed with

such distinguished names as Madame la Princesse de Guémené; Elizabeth

de Choiseul-Praslin; Dame Anne Harault de Chéverni; Louise-Marie de

Gonzagues de Clèves, Queen of Poland, who, the inscription said, had been

a pupil of the House, and whom Madeleine knew to be an eminent Précieuse.

Some day would another drawing be added to the collection? A drawing

wherein would be portrayed a plain, swarthy woman in classic drapery,

whose lyre was supported by a young fair virgin gazing up at her, and

underneath these words:—

_Madeleine de Scudéry and Madeleine Troqueville, twin-stars of talent,

piety, and love, who, in their declining years retreated to this House

that they might sanctify the great love one bore the other, by the

contemplation of the love of Jesus._

Madeleine’s eyes filled with tears. Then a lay-sister came in and said

she would conduct her to the _parloir_.

It was a great bare room, its only ornament a crucifix, and behind the

grille there sat a motionless figure—the Mother Superior, Mère Agnès

Arnauld. Her face, slightly tanned and covered with clear, fine wrinkles,

seemed somehow to have been carved out of a very hard substance, and

this, together with the austere setting of her white veil, gave her the

look of one of the Holy Women in a picture by Mantegna. Her hazel eyes

were clear and liquid and child-like.

When Madeleine reached the grille, she smiled charmingly, and said in a

beautiful, caressing voice: ‘Dear little sister, I have desired to see

you this long time.’

Madeleine mumbled some inaudible reply. She tried to grasp the mystical

fact that that face, these hands, that torso behind the grille had been

built up tissue by tissue by the daily bread of the Eucharist into the

actual flesh of God Himself. It seemed almost incredible!

Why was the woman staring at her so fixedly? She half expected her to

break the silence with some reference to Mademoiselle de Scudéry, so

certain was she that to these clear eyes her inmost thoughts lay naked to

view.

At last, the beautiful voice began again: ‘It would seem you have now

taken up your abode in Paris. Do you like the city?’

‘Exceeding well,’ Madeleine murmured.

‘Exceeding well—yes—exceeding well,’ Mère Agnès repeated after her, with

a vague smile.

Suddenly Madeleine realised that the intensity of her gaze was due to

absent-mindedness, and that she stared at things without seeing them. All

the same, she felt that if this pregnant silence were to continue much

longer she would scream; she gave a nervous little giggle and began to

fiddle with her hands.

‘And what is your manner of passing the time? Have you visited any of the

new buildings?’

The woman was evidently at a loss for something to say, why, in the name

of madness, didn’t she play her part and make inquiries about the state

of her disciple’s soul? Madeleine began to feel quite offended.

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I have seen the Palais Mazarin and I have visited

the Hôtel de Rambouillet.’

‘Ah, yes, the Hôtel de Rambouillet. My cousins report it to be a very

noble fabric. Some day when the family is in the country you may be able

to see the apartments, which are adorned, I am told, in a most rare and

costly manner.’

So she took it for granted that Madeleine had only seen the outside! It

was annoying, but it was no use enlightening her, because, even if she

listened, she would not be in the least impressed.

There was another pause, then Mère Agnès turned on her a quick, kind

glance, and said:—

‘Talk to me of yourself!’

‘What manner of things shall I tell you?’ Madeleine asked nervously.

‘What of theology? Do you still fret yourself over seeming

incongruities?’ she asked with a little twinkle.

‘No,’ Madeleine answered with a blush, ‘most of my doubts have been

resolved.’

‘’Tis well, dear child, for abstracted speculation is but an oppilation

to the free motion of the spirit. ’Tis but a faulty instrument, the

intellect, even for the observing of the _works_ of God, how little apt

is it then, for the apprehension of God Himself? But the spirit is the

sea of glass, wherein is imaged in lucid colours and untrembling outlines

the Golden City where dwells the Lamb. Grace will be given to you, my

child, to gaze into that sea where all is clear.’

She spoke in a soft, level, soothing voice. Her words were a confirmation

of what Madeleine had tried to express to Jacques the other day in the

garden of the Place Maubert, but suddenly—she could not have said why—she

found herself echoing with much heat those very theories of his that had

seemed so absurd to her then.

‘But how comes it that God is good? He commands _us_ to forgive, while He

Himself has need of unceasing propitiation and the blood of His Son to

forgive the Fall of Adam. And verily ’tis a cruel, barbarous, and most

unworthy motion to “visit the sins of the fathers upon the children”;

a _man_ must put on something of a devil before he can act thus. He

would seem to demand perfection in us while He Himself is moved by every

passion,’ and she looked at Mère Agnès half frightened, half defiant.

Mère Agnès, with knitted brows, remained silent for a moment. Then she

said hesitatingly and as if thinking aloud:—

‘The ways of God to man are, in truth, a great mystery. But I think we

are too apt to forget the unity of the Trinity. Our Lord was made man

partly to this end, that His Incarnation might be the instrument of our

learning to know the Father through the Son, that the divine mercy and

love, hitherto revealed but in speculative generals, might be turned into

particulars proportioned to our finite understandings. Thus, if such

mysteries as the Creation, the Preservation, nay, even the Redemption, be

too abstracted, too speculative to be apprehended by our affections, then

let us ponder the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, the tender words to

the woman of Samaria, the command to “suffer the little children to come

unto Him,” for they are types of the other abstracted mercies, and teach

us to acknowledge that God is of that nature, which knows no conjunctions

but those of justice and mercy. Yes, my child, all your doubts find their

resolution in the life of Jesus. I mind me when I was a girl, in the

garden of the Palais, the _arborist du roy_—as he was called—grew certain

rare flowers from the Orient to serve as patterns to the Queen and her

ladies for their embroidery. But when it was determined to build the

Place Dauphine the garden had to go, and with it these strange blossoms.

But the Queen commanded the _arborist_ to make her a book of coloured

plates wherein should be preserved the form and colour of the Orient

flowers. And this was done, so patterns were not wanting after all to the

Queen and her ladies for their broidery. Thus, for a time ‘our eyes did

see, and our ears did hear, and our hands did handle’ our divine Pattern

and then He ascended into Heaven, but, in His great mercy He has left a

book wherein in clear, enduring pigments are limned the pictures of His

life, that we too might be furnished with patterns for our broidery. Read

the Gospels, dear child, read them diligently, and, above all, hearken to

them when they are read in the presence of the Host, for at such times

the operation of their virtue is most sure.’

She paused, and then, as if following up some hidden line of thought,

continued:—

‘Sometimes it has seemed to me that even sin couches mercy. Grace has

been instrumental to great sins blossoming into great virtues, and——’

‘Thus, one might say, “Blessed are the proud, for they shall become meek;

blessed are the concupiscent, for they shall become pure of heart,”’

eagerly interposed Madeleine, her eyes bright with pleasure over the

paradox.

‘Perhaps,’ said Mère Agnès, smiling a little. ‘I am glad you are so well

acquainted with the Sermon on the Mount. As I have said, there is no

instrument apter to the acquiring of grace than a diligent reading of

the Gospels; the late Bishop of Geneva was wont to insist on this with

my sister and myself. But bear in mind the consent and union of design

between the holy Life on earth and the divine existence in Eternity, if

one is pricked out with love and justice, so also is the other. We should

endeavour to read the Gospels with the apocalyptic eye of Saint John, for

it was the peculiar virtue of this Evangelist that in the narration of

particulars he never permitted the immersion of generals. The action of

his Gospel is set in Eternity. I have ever held that Spanish Catholicism

and the teaching of the Jesuit Fathers are wont to deal too narrowly with

particulars, whereas our own great teachers—I speak in all veneration

and humility—Doctor Jansen, nay, even our excellent and beloved Saint

Cyran, in that their souls were like to huge Cherubim, stationary before

the Throne of God, were apt to ignore the straitness of most mortal

minds, and to demand that their disciples should reach with one leap of

contemplation the very heart of eternity instead of leading them there by

the gentle route of Jesus’ diurnal acts on earth.’

She paused. Madeleine’s cheeks were flushed, and her eyes bright. She

had completely yielded to the charm of Mère Agnès’s personality and to

the hypnotic sway of the rich, recondite phraseology which the Arnaulds

proudly called ‘_la langue de notre maison_.’

‘By what sign can we recognise true grace?’ she asked, after some moments

of silence.

‘I think its mark is an appetite of fire for the refection of spiritual

things. Thus, if an angel appeared to you, bearing in one hand a

cornucopia of earthly blessings, and in the other, holiness—not, mind,

certain salvation, but just holiness—and bade you make your choice,

without one moment of hesitation you would choose holiness. Which would

_you_ choose?’ and she looked at Madeleine gently and rather whimsically.

‘I would choose the cornucopia,’ said Madeleine in a low voice.

There was a pause, and then with a very tender light in her eyes,

Mère Agnès said: ‘I wish you could become acquainted with one of

our young sisters—Sœur Jacqueline de Sainte-Euphémie Pascal—but she

is at Port-Royal des Champs. She was born with every grace of the

understanding, and affections most sensible to earthly joys and vanities,

but in her sacrifice she has been as unflinching as Abraham. Hers is a

rare spirit.’

Madeleine felt a sudden wave of jealousy pass over her for this paragon.

‘What is her age?’ she asked resentfully.

‘Sœur Jacqueline de Sainte-Euphémie? She must be in her twenty-eighth

year, I should say. Courage, you have yet many years in which to overtake

her,’ and she looked at Madeleine with considerable amusement. With the

intuitive insight, which from time to time flashed across her habitual

abstractedness, she had divined the motive of Madeleine’s question.

‘When she was twelve years old,’ she went on, ‘she was smitten by the

smallpox, which shore her of all her comeliness. On her recovery she

wrote some little verses wherein she thanked God that He had spared her

life and taken her beauty. Could _you_ have done that? Alas, when I was

young I came exceeding short of it in grace. I mind me, when I was some

ten years old, being deeply incensed against God, in that He had not

made me “Madame de France”! My soul was a veritable well of vanity and

_amour-propre_.’

‘So is mine!’ cried Madeleine, with eager pride.

Again Mère Agnès looked much amused.

‘My child, ’tis a strange cause for pride! And bear in mind, I am the

_last_ creature to take as your pattern. No one more grievously than I

did ever fall away from the Grace of Baptism. Since when, notwithstanding

all the privileges and opportunities of religion afforded by a cloistered

life and the conversation of the greatest divines of our day, I have not

weaned myself from the habit of sinning. But one thing I _have_ attained

by the instrument of Grace, and that is a “hunger and thirst after

righteousness” that springs from the very depths of my soul. I tell you

this, that you may be of good courage, for, believe me, my soul was of an

exceeding froward and inductile complexion.’

‘Did you always love Our Lord with a direct and particular love?’

Madeleine asked.

‘I cannot call to mind the time when I did not. Do you love Him thus?’

‘No.’

‘Well, so senseless and ungrateful is our natural state that even love

for Christ, which would seem as natural and spontaneous a motion of our

being as is a child’s love of its mother, is absent from our hearts,

before the operation of Grace. But, come, you are a Madeleine, are you

not? A Madeleine who cannot love! The Church has ordained that all

Christians should bear the name of a saint whom they should imitate

in his or her particular virtue. And the virtue particular to Saint

Madeleine was that she “loved much.” Forget not your great patron saint

in your devotions and she will intercede for you. And in truth when I was

young, I was wont to struggle against my love for Him and tried to flee

from Him with an eagerness as great as that with which I do now pursue

Him. And I think, dear child, ’twill fall out thus with you.’

Madeleine was deeply moved. Mère Agnès’s words, like the tales of a

traveller, had stirred in her soul a _wanderlust_. It felt the lure of

the Narrow Way, and was longing to set off on its pilgrimage. For the

moment, she did not shrink from “the love of invisible things,” but would

actually have welcomed the ghostly, ravishing arms.

‘Oh, tell me, tell me, what I can do to be holy?’ she cried imploringly.

‘You can do nothing, my child, but “watch and pray.” It lies not in _us_

to be holy. Except our soul be watered by Grace, it is as barren as the

desert, but be of good cheer, for some day the “desert shall blossom like

the rose.” “Watch and pray” and _desire_, for sin is but the flagging

of the desire for holiness. Grace will change your present fluctuating

motions towards holiness into an adamant of desire that neither the

tools of earth can break nor the chemistry of Hell resolve. Pray without

ceasing for Grace, dear child, and I will pray for you too. And if, after

a searching examination of your soul, you are sensible of being in the

state necessary to the acceptance of the Blessed Sacrament, a mysterious

help will be given you of which I cannot speak. Have courage, all things

are possible to Grace.’

With tears in her eyes, Madeleine thanked her and bade her good-bye.

As she walked down the rue Saint-Jacques, the tall, delicately wrought

gates of the Colleges were slowly clanging behind the little unwilling

votaries of Philosophy and Grammar, but the other inhabitants of the

neighbourhood were just beginning to enjoy themselves, and all was

noise and colour. Old Latin songs, sung perhaps by Abelard and Thomas

Aquinas, mingled with the latest ditty of the Pont-Neuf. Here, a

half-tipsy theologian was expounding to a harlot the Jesuits’ theory of

‘Probabilism,’ there a tiny page was wrestling with a brawny quean from

the _Halles aux vins_. Bells were pealing from a score of churches; in a

dozen different keys viols and lutes and guitars were playing sarabands;

hawkers were crying their wares, valets were swearing; and there were

scarlet cloaks and green jerkins and yellow hose. And all the time that

quiet artist, the evening light of Paris, was softening the colours,

flattening the architecture, and giving to the whole scene an aspect

remote, classical, unreal.

Down the motley street marched Madeleine with unseeing eyes, a passionate

prayer for grace walling up in her heart.

Then she thought of Mère Agnès herself. Her rôle of a wise teacher,

exhorting young disciples from suave spiritual heights, seemed to her

a particularly pleasant one. Though genuinely humble, she was _very_

grown-up. How delightful to be able to smile in a tender amused way at

the confessions of youth, and to call one “dear child” in a deep, soft

voice, without being ridiculous!

Ere she had reached the Porte Saint-Jacques she was murmuring over some

of Mère Agnès’s words, but it was not Mère Agnès who was saying them,

but she herself to Madame de Rambouillet’s granddaughter when grown up.

A tender smile hovered on her lips, her eyes alternately twinkled and

filled with tears: ‘Courage, dear child, I have experienced it all, I

know, I know!’

CHAPTER XVII

‘HYLAS, THE MOCKING SHEPHERD’

She reached home eager to tell them all about her visit.

Her father and Jacques were playing at spillikins and her mother was

spinning.

‘She is a marvellous personage,’ she cried out, ‘her sanctity is almost

corporeal and subject to sense. And she has the most fragrant humility,

she talked of herself as though there were no more froward and wicked

creature on the earth than she!’

‘Maybe there is not!’ said Jacques, and Monsieur Troqueville chuckled

delightedly. Madeleine flushed and her lips grew tight.

‘Do not be foolish, Jacques. The whole world acknowledges her to be an

exceeding pious and holy woman,’ said Madame Troqueville, with a warning

glance at Jacques, which seemed to say: ‘In the name of Heaven, forbear!

This new _vision_ of the child’s is tenfold less harmful and fantastical

than the other.’

Madeleine watched Jacques grimacing triumphantly at her father as he

deftly extricated spillikin after spillikin. He was entirely absorbed in

the idiotic game. How could one be serious and holy with such a frivolous

companion?

‘Pray tell us more of Mère Agnès, my sweet. What were her opening words?’

said Madame Troqueville, trying to win Madeleine back to good humour, but

Madeleine’s only answer was a cold shrug.

For one thing, without her permission they were playing with _her_

spillikins. She had a good mind to snatch them away from them! And how

dare Jacques be so at home in _her_ house? He said he was in love with

her, did he? Yet her entry into the room did not for one moment distract

his attention from spillikins.

‘Yes, tell us more of her Christian humility,’ said Jacques, as he drew

away the penultimate spillikin. ‘I’ll fleece you of two crowns for that,’

he added in an aside to Monsieur Troqueville.

‘They are all alike in that,’ he went on, ‘humility is part of their

inheritance from the early Christians, who, being Jews and slaves and

such vermin, had needs be humble except they wished to be crucified by

the Romans for impudence. And though their creeping homilies have never

ousted the fine old Roman virtue pride, yet pious Christians do still

affect humility, and ’tis a stinking pander to——’

‘Jacques, Jacques,’ expostulated Madame Troqueville, and Monsieur

Troqueville, shaking his head, and blowing out his cheeks, said severely:—

‘Curb your tongue, my boy! You do but show your ignorance. Humility is a

most excellent virtue, if it were not, then why was it preached by Our

Lord? Resolve me in that!’ and he glared triumphantly at Jacques.

‘Why, uncle, when you consider the base origin of——’

‘Jacques, I beseech you, no more!’ interposed Madame Troqueville, very

gently but very firmly, so Jacques finished his sentence in a comic

grimace.

After a pause, he remarked, ‘Chapuzeau retailed to me the other day a

_naïveté_ he had heard in a monk’s Easter sermon. The monk had said that

inasmuch as near all the most august events in the Scriptures had had a

mountain for their setting, it followed that no one could lead a truly

holy life in a valley, and from this premise he deduced——’

‘In that _naïveté_ there is a spice of truth,’ Monsieur Troqueville cut

in, in a serious, interested voice. ‘I mind me, when I was a young man, I

went to the Pyrenees, where my spirit was much vexed by the sense of my

own sinfulness.’

‘I’ faith, it must have been but hypochondria, there can have been no

true cause for remorse,’ said Jacques innocently.

Monsieur Troqueville looked at him suspiciously, cleared his throat, and

went on: ‘I mind me, I would pass whole nights in tears and prayer, until

at last there was revealed to me a strange and excellent truth, to wit,

that the spirit is immune against the sins of the flesh. To apprehend

this truth is a certain balm to the conscience, and, as I said, ’twas on

a mountain that it was revealed to me,’ and he looked round with solemn

triumph.

Madame Troqueville and Madeleine exchanged glances of unutterable

contempt and boredom, but Jacques wagged his head and said gravely that

it was a mighty convenient truth.

‘Ay, is it not? Is it not?’ cried Monsieur Troqueville, his eyes almost

starting out of his head with eagerness, triumph, and hope of further

praise. ‘Many a time and oft have I drawn comfort from it.’

‘I have ever held you to be a Saint Augustin _manqué_, uncle. When you

have leisure, you would do well to write your confessions—they would

afford most excellent and edifying reading,’ and Jacques’s eyes as he

said this were glittering slits of wickedness.

After supper the two, mumbling some excuse about an engagement to

friends, put on their cloaks and went out, and Madeleine, wishing to be

alone with her thoughts, went to her own room.

She recalled Mère Agnès’s words, and, as they had lain an hour or so

dormant in her mind, they came out tinted with the colour of her desires.

Why, what was her exhortation to see behind the ‘particulars’ of the

Gospels the ‘generals’ of Eternity, but a vindication of Madeleine’s own

method of sanctifying her love for Mademoiselle de Scudéry by regarding

it as a symbol of her love of Christ? Yes, Mère Agnès had implicitly

advised the making of a Robert Pilou screen. _Profane history told by

means of sacred woodcuts becomes sacred history_, was, in Mère Agnès’s

words, to read history ‘with the apocalyptic eye of Saint John,’ it was

to see ‘generals’ behind ‘particulars.’

But supposing ... supposing the ‘generals’ should come crashing through

the ‘particulars,’ like a river in spate that bursts its dam? And

supposing God were to relieve her of her labour? In the beginning of

time, He—the Dürer of the skies—on cubes of wood, hewn from the seven

trees of Paradise, had cut in pitiless relief the story of the human

soul. The human soul, pursuing a desire that ever evades its grasp, while

behind it, swift, ineluctable, speed ‘invisible things,’ their hands

stretched out to seize it by the hair.

What if from the design cut on these cubes he were to engrave the

pictures of her life, that, gummed with holy resin on the screen of the

heavens, they might show forth to men in ‘particulars proportioned to

their finite minds,’ the ‘generals’ cut by the finger of God?

Mère Agnès had said: ‘I was wont to struggle against my love for Him

with an eagerness as great as that with which I do now pursue Him. And

I think, dear child, ’twill fall out thus with you.’ ‘Who flees, she

shall pursue; who spurns gifts, she shall offer them; who loves not,

willy-nilly she shall love.’ Was the Sapphic Ode an assurance, not that

one day Mademoiselle de Scudéry would love her, but that she herself

would one day love Christ? What if she had read the omens wrong, what

if they all pointed to the Heavenly Rape? How could she ever have

dreamed that grace would be the caterer for her earthly desires—Grace,

the gadfly, goading the elect willy-nilly along the grim Roman road of

redemption that, undeviating and ruthless, cuts through forests, pierces

mountains, and never so much as skirts the happy meadows? That she

herself was one of the elect, she was but too sure.

‘_Sortir du siècle_’—where had she heard the expression? Oh, of course!

It was in _La Fréquente Communion_, and was used for the embracing of the

monastic life. The alternative offered to Gennadius had been to ‘sortir

du siècle ou de subir le joug de la pénitence publique.’ Madeleine

shuddered ... either, by dropping out of this witty, gallant century,

to forgo the _vitæ munus_ or else ... to suffer public humiliation ...

could she bear another public humiliation such as the one at the Hôtel de

Rambouillet? Her father had been humiliated before Ariane ... Jacques had

been partly responsible.... _Hylas, hélas!_ ... the Smithy of Vulcan ...

was she going mad?

In the last few hours by some invisible cannon a breach had been made in

her faith.

CHAPTER XVIII

A DISAPPOINTMENT

By Friday, Madeleine was in a fever of nervousness. In the space of

twenty-four hours, she would know God’s policy with regard to herself.

Oh! could He not be made to realise that to deprive her of just this one

thing she craved for would be a fatal mistake? Until she was _sure_ of

the love of Mademoiselle de Scudéry she had no energy or emotion to spare

for other things. She reverted to her old litany:—‘Blessed Virgin, Mother

of our Lord, give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’ and so

on, which she repeated dozens of times on end.

_This time to-morrow it would have happened; she would know about

it all._ Oh, how could she escape from remembering this, and the

impossibility of fitting a dream into time? Any agony would be better

than this sitting gazing at the motionless curtain of twenty-four hours

that lay between herself and her fate. Oh, for the old days at Lyons!

Then, she had had the whole of Eternity in which to hope; now, she had

only twenty-four hours, for in their hard little hands lay the whole of

time; before and after lay Eternity.

Madame Troguin had looked in in the morning and chattered of the

extravagance of the Précieuses of her quarter. One young lady, for

instance, imagined herself madly enamoured of Céladon of the _Astrée_,

and had been found in the attire of a shepherdess sitting by the Seine,

and weeping bitterly.

‘I am glad that our girls have some sense, are not you?’ she had said to

Madame Troqueville, who had replied with vehement loyalty to Madeleine,

that she was indeed. ‘They say that Mademoiselle de Scudéry—the writer

of romances—is the fount of all these _visions_. She has no fortune

whatever, I believe, albeit her influence is enormous both at the Court

and in the Town.’

Any reference to Sappho’s eminence had a way of setting Madeleine’s

longing madly ablaze. This remark rolled over and over in her mind, and

it burnt more furiously every minute. She rushed to her room and groaned

with longing, then fell on her knees and prayed piteously, passionately:—

‘Give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Give it me, dear

Christ, take everything else, but _give me that_.’ And indeed this

longing had swallowed up all the others from which it had grown—desire

for a famous _ruelle_, for a reputation for _esprit_, for the entrée

to the fashionable world. She found herself (in imagination) drawing a

picture to Sappho of the Indian Islands and begging her to fly there with

her.

At last Saturday came, and with it, at about ten in the morning, a valet

carrying a letter addressed to Madeleine in a small, meticulous writing.

It ran thus:—

‘MADEMOISELLE,—A malady so tedious and unpoetical, that had it

not been given the entrée to the society of _les mots honnêtes_

by being mentioned by several Latin poets, and having by its

intrinsic nature a certain claim to royalty, for it shares

with the Queen the power of granting “Le Tabouret”; a malady,

I say, which were it not for these saving graces I would never

dare to mention to one who like yourself embodies its two

most powerful enemies—Youth and Beauty—has taken me prisoner.

Mademoiselle’s quick wit has already, doubtless, solved my

little enigma and told herself with a tear, I trust, rather

than a dimple, that the malady which has so cruelly engaged me

to my chair is called—and it must indeed have been a stoic that

thus named it!—La Goutte! Rarely has this unwelcome guest timed

his visit with a more tantalising inopportuneness, or has shown

himself more ungallant than to-day when he keeps a poor poet

from the inspiration of beauty and beauty from its true mate,

wit. But over one circumstance at least it bears no sway: that

circumstance is that I remain, Mademoiselle, Your sincere and

humble servitor,

‘CONRART.’

In all this fustian Madeleine’s ‘quick wit’ did not miss the fact that

lay buried in it, hard and sharp, that she was not to be taken to

Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s that afternoon. She laughed. It had so palpably

been all along the only possible climax. Of course. This moment had

always been part of her sum of experience. All her life, her prayers, and

placations had been but the remedies of a man with a mortal disease. As

often in moments of intense suffering, she was struck by the strangeness

of being contained by the four walls of a room, queer things were behind

these walls, she felt, if she could only penetrate them.

Berthe ambled in under pretext of fetching something, looking _espiègle_

and inquisitive.

‘Good news, Mademoiselle?’ she asked. But Madeleine growled at her like

an angry animal, and with lips stretched from her teeth, driving her

nails into her palms, she tore into her own room.

Once there, she burst into a passion of tears, banging her head against

the wall and muttering, ‘I hate God, I hate God!’ So He considered, did

He, that ‘no one could resist the workings of the inward Grace’? Pish

for the arrogant theory; _she_ would disprove it, once and for all.

Jacques was right. He was a wicked and a cruel God. All the Jansenist

casuistry was incapable of saving Him from the diabolic injustice

involved in the First Proposition:—

‘Some of God’s Commandments it is impossible for the just to

fulfil.’

In plain words, the back is _not_ made for the burden. Oh, the

cold-blooded torturer! And the Jansenists with their intransigeant

consistency, their contempt of compromise, were worthy of their terrible

Master.

So, forsooth, He imagined that by plucking, feather by feather, the

wings of her hopes, He could win her, naked and bleeding, to Him and His

service? She would prove Him wrong, she would rescind His decrees and

resolve the chain of predestination. No, _her_ soul would never be ‘tamed

with frets and weariness,’ _she_ would never ‘pursue, nor offer gifts,’

and, willy-nilly, _she_ would never love, from the design on His cubes of

wood no print of _her_ life would be taken.

And then the sting of the disappointment pricked her afresh, and again

she burst into a passion of tears.

Pausing for breath, she caught sight of the Crucifix above her bed. A

feeling of actual physical loathing seized her for her simpering Saviour,

with His priggish apophthegms and His horrid Cross to which He took such

a delight in nailing other people. She tore down the Crucifix, and made

her fingers ache in her attempt to break it. And then, with an ingenuity

which in ordinary circumstances she never applied to practical details,

she broke it in the door.

A smothered laugh disclosed Berthe crouching by the wall, her face more

than usually suggestive of a comic mask. Madeleine was seized by a

momentary fear lest she should prove a spy of the sinister ‘Compagnie

du Saint-Sacrement’—that pack of spiritual bloodhounds that ran all

heretics relentlessly to earth—and she remembered with a shudder the

fate of Claude Petit and le Sieur d’Aubreville. But after all, _nothing_

could hurt her now, so she flung the broken fragments in her face and

‘_tutoied_’ her back to the kitchen.

She went and looked at her face in the glass. Her eyes were tired and

swollen and heavy, and she noted with pleasure the tragic look in them.

Then a sense of the catastrophe broke over her again in all its previous

force and she flung herself upon her bed and once more sobbed and sobbed.

Madame Troqueville, when she came in laden with fish and vegetables

from the Halles, was told by Berthe with mysterious winks that she had

better go to Mademoiselle Madeleine. She was not in the least offended by

Madeleine’s unwonted treatment of her, and too profoundly cynical to be

shocked by her sacrilege or impressed by her misery. With a chuckle for

youth’s intenseness she had shuffled silently back to her work.

Madame Troqueville flew to Madeleine. Her entry was Madeleine’s cue for a

fresh outburst. She would not be cheated of her due of crying and pity;

she owed herself many, many more tears.

Madame Troqueville took her in her arms in an agony of anxiety. At first

Madeleine kicked and screamed, irritated at the possibility of her mother

trying to alleviate the facts. Then she yielded to the comfort of her

presence and sobbed out that Conrart could not take her to Mademoiselle

de Scudéry.

How gladly would Madame Troqueville have accepted this explanation at its

face value! A disappointment about a party was such a poignant sorrow in

youth and one to which all young people were subject. But although she

welcomed hungrily any sign of normality in her child, deep down she knew

that _this_ grief was not normal.

‘But, my angel,’ she began gently, ‘Monsieur Conrart will take you some

other time.’

‘But I can’t wait!’ Madeleine screamed angrily; ‘all my hopes are utterly

miscarried.’

Madame Troqueville smiled, and stroked her hair.

‘’Tis foolish to rouse one’s spleen, and waste one’s strength over

trifles, for ’twill not make nor mend them, and it works sadly on your

health.’

Madeleine had been waiting for this. She ground her teeth and gave a

series of short, sharp screams of tearless rage.

‘For my sake, my angel, for my sake, forbear!’ implored her mother.

‘I shall scream and scream all my life,’ she hissed. ‘’Tis my concern and

no one else’s. Ba-ah, ou-ow,’ and it ended off in a series of shrill,

nervous, persistent ‘ee’s.’

Madame Troqueville sighed wearily, and sat silent for some minutes.

There was a lull in the sobbing, and then Madame Troqueville began,

very gently, ‘Dear, dear child, if you could but learn the great art of

_indifference_. I know that....’

But Madeleine interrupted with a shrill scream of despair.

‘Hush, dear one, hush! Oh, my pretty one, if I could but make life for

you, but ’tis not in my power. All I can do is to love you. But if only

you would believe me ... hush! my sweet, let me say my say ... if _only_

you would believe me, to cultivate indifference is the one means of

handselling life.’

‘But I _can’t_!’

‘Try, my dearest heart, try. My dear, I have but little to give you _in

any way_, for I cannot help you with religion, in that—you may think

this strange, and it may be wicked—I have always had but little faith in

these matters; and I am not wise nor learned, so I cannot help you with

the balm of Philosophy, which they say is most powerful to heal, but one

thing I have learned and that is to be supremely indifferent—in _most_

matters. Oh, dear treasure....’

‘But I _want_, I _want_, I _want_ things!’ cried Madeleine.

Madame Troqueville smiled sadly, and for some moments sat in silence,

stroking Madeleine’s hair, then she began tentatively,—

‘At times I feel ... that “_petite-oie_,” as you called it, frightened

me, my sweet. It caused me to wonder if you were not apt to throw away

matters of moment for foolish trifles. Do you remember how you pleased

old Madame Pilou by telling her that she was not like the dog in the

fable, that lost its bone by trying to get its reflection, well....’

‘I said it because I thought it would please her, one must needs talk

in a homely, rustic fashion to such people. Oh, let me be! let me be!’

To have her own words used against her was more than she could bear;

besides, her mother had suggested, by the way she had spoken, that there

was more behind this storm than mere childish disappointment at the

postponement of a party, and Madeleine shrank from her obsession being

known. I think she feared that it was, perhaps, rather ridiculous.

Madame Troqueville gazed at her anxiously for some minutes, and then

said,—

‘I wonder if _Sirop de Roses_ is a strong enough purge for you. Perhaps

you need another course of steel in wine; and I have heard this new

remedy they call “Orviétan” is an excellent infusion, I saw some in the

rue Dauphine at the Sign of the Sun. I will send Berthe at once to get

you some.’

CHAPTER XIX

THE PLEASURES OF DESPAIR

The disappointment had indeed been a shattering blow, and its effects

lasted much longer than the failure at the Hôtel de Rambouillet.

For then her vanity or, which is the same thing, her instinct of

self-preservation, had not allowed her to acknowledge that she had been

a social failure. But this disappointment was a hard fact against whose

fabric saving fancy beat its wings in vain. Sometimes she would play with

the thought of suicide, but would shrink back from it as the final blow

to all her hopes. For, supposing she should wake up in the other world,

and find the old longing gnawing still, like Céladon, when he wakes up

in the Palace of Galathée? She would picture herself floating invisible

round Mademoiselle de Scudéry, unable to leave any footprint on her

consciousness, and although this had a certain resemblance to her present

state, as long as they were both in this world, there must always be a

little hope. And then, supposing that the first knowledge that flashed

on her keener, freer senses when she had died was that if only she had

persevered a year longer, perhaps only a month longer, the friendship

of Mademoiselle de Scudéry would have been hers! She took some comfort

from the clammy horror of the thought. For, after all, as long as she was

alive there must always be left a few grains of hope ... while _she_ was

alive ... but what if one night she should be wakened by the ringing of a

bell in the street, and running to the window see by the uncertain light

of the lantern he held in one hand, a _macabre_ figure, looking like one

of the Kings in the pack of cards with which Death plays against Life for

mortal men, the stiff folds of his old-world garment embroidered with

skulls and tears and cross-bones! And what would he be singing as he rang

his bell?:—

‘Priez Dieu pour l’âme de la Demoiselle de Scudéry qui vient de

trépasser.’

Vient de trépasser! Lying stiff and cold and lonely, and Madeleine had

never been able to tell her that she loved her.

Good God! There were awful possibilities!

She was haunted, too, by the fear that God had _not_ deserted her, but

had resolved in His implacable way that willy-nilly she must needs

eventually receive His bitter gift of Salvation. That, struggle though

she would, she would be slowly, grimly weaned from all that was sweet and

desirable, and then in the twinkling of an eye caught up ‘to the love of

Invisible Things.’ ‘One cannot resist the inward Grace;’ well, she, at

least, would put up a good fight.

Then a wave of intense self-pity would break over her that the

all-powerful God, who by raising His hand could cause the rivers to

flow backwards to their sources, the sun to drop into the sea, when she

approached Him with her prayer for the friendship of a poverty-stricken

authoress—a prayer so paltry that it could be granted by an almost

unconscious tremble of His will, by an effort scarcely strong enough

to cause an Autumn leaf to fall—that this God should send her away

empty-handed and heart-broken.

Yes, it was but a small thing she wanted, but how passionately, intensely

she wanted it.

If things had gone as she had hoped, she would by now be known all over

the town as the incomparable Sappho’s most intimate friend. In the

morning she would go to her _ruelle_ and they would discuss the lights

and shades of their friendship; in the afternoon she would drive with her

in le Cours la Reine, where all could note the happy intimacy between

them; in the evening Sappho would read her what she had written that day,

and to each, life would grow daily richer and sweeter. But actually she

had been half a year in Paris and she and Sappho had not yet exchanged

a word. No, the trials of Céladon and Phaon and other heroes of romance

could not be compared to this, for they from the first possessed the

_estime_ of their ladies, and so what mattered the plots of rivals or

temporary separations? What mattered even misunderstandings and quarrels?

When one of the lovers in _Cyrus_ is asked if there is something amiss

between him and his mistress, he answers sadly:—

‘Je ne pense pas Madame que j’y sois jamais assez bien pour y

pouvoir être mal.’

and that was her case—the hardest case of all. In the old sanguine days

at Lyons, when the one obstacle seemed to be that of space, what would

she have said if she had been told how far away she would still be from

her desire after half a year in Paris?

One day, when wandering unhappily about the Île Notre-Dame, with eyes

blind to the sobriety and majestic sweep of life that even the ignoble

crowd of litigants and hawkers was unable to arrest in that island that

is at once so central and so remote, she had met Marguerite Troguin

walking with her tire-woman and a girl friend. She had come up to

Madeleine and had told her with a giggle that they had secretly been

buying books at the Galerie du Palais. ‘They are stowed away in there,’

she whispered, pointing to the large market-basket carried by the

tire-woman, ‘Sercy’s _Miscellany of Verse_, and the _Voyage à la Lune_,

and the _Royaume de Coquetterie_; if my mother got wind of it she’d

burn the books and send me to bed,’ at which the friend giggled and the

tire-woman smiled discreetly.

‘They told us at Quinet’s that the first volume of a new romance by

Mademoiselle de Scudéry is shortly to appear. Oh, the pleasure I take

in _Cyrus_, ’tis the prettiest romance ever written!’ Marguerite cried

rapturously. ‘I have heard it said that Sappho in the Sixth volume is a

portrait of herself, I wonder if ’tis true.’

‘It is, indeed, and an excellent portrait at that, save that the original

is ten times wittier and more _galante_,’ Madeleine found herself

answering with an important air, touched with condescension.

‘Are you acquainted with her?’ the two girls asked in awed voices.

‘Why, yes, I am well acquainted with her, she has asked me to attend her

_Samedis_.’

And afterwards she realised with a certain grim humour that could she

have heard this conversation when she was at Lyons she would have

concluded that all had gone as she had hoped.

During this time she did not dance, because that would be a confession

that hope was not dead. That it should be dead she was firmly resolved,

seeing that, although genuinely miserable, she took a pleasure in nursing

this misery as carefully as she had nursed the atmosphere of her second

_coup de grâce_. By doing so, she felt that she was hurting something

or some one—what or who she could not have said—but something outside

herself; and the feeling gave her pleasure. All through this terrible

time she would follow her mother about like a whimpering dog, determined

that she should be spared none of her misery, and Madame Troqueville’s

patience and sympathy were unfailing.

Jacques, too, rose to the occasion. He lost for the time all his

mocking ways, nor would he try to cheer her up with talk of ‘some other

Saturday,’ knowing that it would only sting her into a fresh paroxysm

of despair, but would sit and hold her hand and curse the cruelty of

disappointment. Monsieur Troqueville also realised the gravity of the

situation. On the rare occasions when the fact that some one was unhappy

penetrated through his egotism, he was genuinely distressed. He would

bring her little presents—a Portuguese orange, or some Savoy biscuits,

or a new print—and would repeat over and over again: ‘’Tis a melancholy

business! A melancholy business!’ One day, however, he added gloomily:

‘’Tis the cruellest fate, for these high circles would have been the fit

province for Madeleine and for me,’ at which Madeleine screamed out in

a perfect frenzy: ‘There’s _no_ similarity between him and me! _none!_

NONE! NONE!’ and poor Monsieur Troqueville was hustled out of the room,

while Jacques and her mother assured her that she was not in the least

like her father.

Monsieur Troqueville seemed very happy about something at that time.

Berthe told Madeleine that she had found hidden in a chest, a _galant_ of

ribbons, a pair of gay garters, an embroidered handkerchief, and a cravat.

‘He is wont to peer at them when Madame’s back is turned, and, to speak

truth, he seems as proud of them as Mademoiselle was of the bravery

she bought at the Fair!’ and she went on to say that by successful

eavesdropping she had discovered that he had won them as a wager.

‘It seems that contrary to the expectations of his comrades he has taken

the fancy of a pretty maid! He! He! Monsieur’s a rare scoundrel!’ but

Madeleine seemed to take no interest in the matter.

The only thing in which she found a certain relief was in listening to

Berthe’s tales about her home. Berthe could talk by the hour about the

sayings and doings of her young brothers and sisters, to whom she was

passionately devoted. And Madeleine could listen for hours, for Berthe

was so remote from her emotionally that she felt no compulsion to din her

with her own misery, and she felt no rights on her sympathy, as she did

on her mother’s, whom she was determined should not be spared a crumb of

her own anguish. In her childhood, her imagination had been fascinated by

an object in the house of an old lady they had known. It was a small box,

in which was a tiny grotto, made of moss and shells and little porcelain

flowers, out of which peeped a variegated porcelain fauna—tiny foxes and

squirrels and geese, and blue and green birds; beside a glass Jordan, on

which floated little boats, stood a Christ and Saint John the Baptist,

and over their heads there hung from a wire a white porcelain dove. To

many children smallness is a quality filled with romance, and Madeleine

used to crave to walk into this miniature world and sail away, away,

away, down the glass river to find the tiny cities that she felt sure lay

hidden beyond the grotto; in Berthe’s stories she felt a similar charm

and lure.

She would tell how her little brother Albert, when minding the sheep of a

stern uncle, fell asleep one hot summer afternoon, and on waking up found

that two of the lambs were missing.

‘Then, poor, pretty man, he fell to crying bitterly, for any loss to his

pocket my uncle takes but ill, when lo! on a sudden, there stood before

him a damsel of heroic stature, fair as the _fleurs de lys_ on a royal

banner, in antic tire and her hair clipped short like a lad’s, and quoth

she, smiling: “Petit paysan, voilà tes agneaux!” and laying the two lost

lambs by his side, she vanished. And in telling what had befallen him he

called her just “the good Shepherdess,” but the _curé_ said she could be

no other than Jeanne, la Pucelle, plying, as in the days before she took

to arms, the business of a shepherdess.’

Then she would tell of the little, far-away inn kept by her father,

with its changing, motley company; of the rustic mirth on the _Nuit des

Rois_; of games of Colin-maillard in the garret sweet with the smell of

apples; of winter nights round the fire when tales were told of the Fairy

Magloire, brewer of love-potions; of the _sotret_, the fairy barber of

Lorraine, who curled the hair of maidens for wakes and marriages, or (if

the _curé_ happened to drop in) more guileless legends of the pretty

prowess of the _petit Jésus_.

Madeleine saw it all as if through the wrong end of a telescope—tiny and

far-away.

CHAPTER XX

FRESH HOPE

One afternoon Madame Troqueville called Madeleine in an eager voice.

Madeleine listlessly came to her.

‘I have a piece of news for you,’ she said, looking at her with smiling

eyes.

‘What is it?... Doubtless some one has invited us to a Comedy,’ she said

wearily.

‘No! I came back by the Île and there I chanced on Monsieur Conrart

walking with a friend’—Madeleine went deadly white—‘And I went up and

accosted him. He has such a good-natured look! I told him how grievously

chagrined you had been when his project came to naught of driving you to

wait upon Mademoiselle de Scudéry, indeed I told him it had worked on you

so powerfully you had fallen ill.’

‘You didn’t! Oh! Oh! Oh! ’Tis not possible you told him that!’ wailed

Madeleine, her eyes suddenly filling with tears.

‘But come, my dear heart, where was the harm?’ Madeleine covered her face

with her hands and writhed in nervous agony, giving little short, sharp

moans.

‘Oh! Oh! I would liefer have _died_.’

‘Come, my heart, don’t be so fantastical, he was so concerned about it,

and you haven’t yet heard the pleasantest part of my news!’

‘What?’ asked Madeleine breathlessly, while wild hopes darted through her

mind, such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry having confessed a secret passion

for her to Conrart.

‘This Saturday, he is coming in his coach to fetch you to wait on her!’

Madeleine received the news with a welter of different emotions—wriggling

self-consciousness, mortification at the thought of Conrart knowing, and

perhaps telling Mademoiselle de Scudéry, how much she cared, excitement

bubbling up through apprehension, premature shyness, and a little regret

for having to discard her misery, to which she had become thoroughly

accustomed. She trembled with excitement, but did not speak.

‘Are you pleased?’ her mother asked, taking her hands. She felt rather

proud of herself, for she disliked taking the field even more than

Madeleine did, and she had had to admonish herself sharply before making

up her mind to cross the road and throw herself on Conrart’s mercy.

‘Oh! yes ... yes ... I think I am,’ and Madeleine laughed nervously.

Then she kissed her mother and ran away. In a few minutes she came back

looking as if she wanted to say something.

‘What’s amiss, my dear life?’ Madeleine drew a hissing breath through her

teeth and shut her eyes, blushing crimson.

‘Er ... did ... er ... did he seem to find it odd, what you told him

about my falling ill, and all that?’

‘Dearest heart, here is no matter for concern. You see I was constrained

to make mention of your health that it should so work on his pity that he

should feel constrained to acquit himself towards you and——’

‘Yes, but what did you say?’

‘I said _naught_, my dear, that in any way he could take ill. I did but

acquaint him with the eagerness with which you had awaited the visit and

with the bitterness of your chagrin when you heard it was not to be.’

‘But I thought you said that you’d said somewhat concerning—er—my making

myself ill?’

‘Well, and what if I did? You little goose, you——’

‘Yes, but what did you say?’

‘How can I recall my precise words? But I give you my word they were such

that none could take amiss.’

‘Oh! But _what_ did you say?’ Madeleine’s face was all screwed up with

nerves, and she twisted her fingers.

‘Oh! Madeleine, dear!’ sighed her mother wearily. ‘What a pother about

nothing! I said that chagrin had made you quite ill, and he was moved to

compassion. Was there aught amiss in that?’

‘Oh, no, doubtless not. But ... er ... I hope he won’t acquaint

Mademoiselle de Scudéry with the extent of my chagrin!’

‘Well, and what if he did? She would in all likelihood be greatly

flattered!’

‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! do you think he will? I’d _kill_ myself if I thought he

had!’

Madame Troqueville gave up trying to reduce Madeleine’s emotions to

reason, and said soothingly, ‘I’m certain, my dearest, he’ll do nothing

of the kind, I dare swear it has already escaped his memory.’ And

Madeleine was comforted.

She ran into her own room, her emotions all in a whirl, and flung herself

on her bed.

Then she sprang up, and, after all these leaden-footed weeks, she was

again dancing.

PART III

Ainsi de ce désir que le primitif croyait être une des forces

de l’univers et d’où il fit sortir tout son panthéon, le

musulman a fait Allâh, l’être parfait auquel il s’abandonne.

De même que le primitif logeait dans la cuiller promenée

processionnellement son désir de voir l’eau abreuver la

terre, ainsi le musulman croit qu’Allâh réalise la perfection

en dehors de lui. Sous une forme plus abstraite l’argument

ontologique de Descartes conclura de l’idée du parfait à

son existence, sans s’apercevoir qu’il y a là, non pas un

raisonnement, un argument, mais une imagination. Et cependant,

à bien entendre les paroles des grands croyants, c’est en eux

qu’ils portent ce dieu: il n’est que la conscience de l’effort

continuel qui est en nous. La grâce du Janséniste n’est autre

que cet effort intérieur.’

DOUTTÉ—_Magie et Religion_.