SELF-IMPOSED SLAVERY
‘I knew you would have to pass this way, and I have been waiting for
you this half-hour,’ said Jacques. ‘Well, how went the encounter?’ That
Madeleine was not in despair was clear from the fact that she was willing
to talk about it.
‘Oh! Jacques, I cannot say. Mademoiselle de Scudéry was entertaining the
whole company with discourse, but when she did address a word to me I was
awkward and bashful—and—and—not over civil. Do you think she will hate
me?’ She waited anxiously for his answer.
‘Awkward, bashful, and not over civil!’ laughed Jacques. ‘What did you do
uncivil? Did you put out your tongue and hiccough in her face? _Oh_, that
you had! Or did you deliberately undress and then dance about naked? I
would that people were more inclined to such pleasant antics!’
‘In good earnest I did _not_,’ said Madeleine severely. ‘But I feigned
not to be interested when she talked, and averted my eyes from her as if
the sight of her worked on my stomach. Oh! what _will_ she think of me?’
‘Well, I don’t know, Chop,’ Jacques said dubiously; ‘it seems you used
arts to show yourself in such colours as ’twould be hard to like!’
‘Do people never take likings to bashful, surly people?’ she persisted.
‘I fear me they are apt to prefer smooth-spoken, courtly ones,’ he
answered with a smile. ‘But, take heart, Chop, you will meet with her
again, doubtless, when you must compel yourself to civility and to the
uttering of such _galanterie_ as the occasion furnishes, and then the
issue cannot choose but be successful. Descartes holds admiration to be
the mother of the other passions; an you arouse admiration the others
will follow of their own accord.’
‘’Tis easy to talk!’ wailed Madeleine, ‘but her visible presence works so
strangely upon me as to put me out of all my precepts, and I am driven to
unseemly stammering or to uncivil silence.’
‘_Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus Flamma demanat_, etcetera. Have
you been studying that most witty anatomy of the lover in the volume of
Catullus that I lent you?’ asked Jacques, rather mockingly.
‘Yes,’ said Madeleine, blushing. Then, after a pause,—
‘It seems that ... er ... er ... my father ... that this Ariane ... that,
in short, he has prospered in his suit of late?’
‘Has he? I am exceeding glad to hear it,’ said Jacques dryly. Then,
looking at her with his little inscrutable smile, he added: ‘You show a
most becoming filial interest in your father’s _roman_; ’tis as if you
held its issue to be tied up in some strange knot with the issue of your
own.’
How sinister he was looking! Madeleine stared at him with eyes of terror.
She tried to speak but no sound would come from her lips.
Suddenly his expression became once more kind and human.
‘Why, Chop,’ he cried, ‘there are no bounds set to your credulity! I
verily believe your understanding would be abhorrent of no fable or
fiction, let them be as monstrous as they will. In good earnest you are
in sore need of a dose of old Descartes!’
‘But, Jacques, I have of late been diligently studying him and yet it has
availed me nothing. My will has lost naught of its obliquity.’
‘How did you endeavour to straighten it ... _hein_?’ Jacques asked very
gently.
Madeleine hung her head and then confessed her theory about the Wax, and
how she had tried upon reality the plastic force of her will.
Jacques threw out his hands in despair.
‘Oh, Chop!’ he cried, ‘it is a sin to turn to such maniac uses the
cleanest, sweetest good sense that ever man has penned! That passage
about the wax is but a _figure_! The only way to compass what we wish is
to exercise our will first on our own passions until they will take what
ply we choose, and then to exercise it on the passions of others. Success
_lies in you_ but is not to be compassed by vain, foolish rites after the
manner of the heathen and the Christians. Why, you have made yourself a
slave, bound with the fetters of affrighting fancies that do but confound
the senses and scatter the understanding. The will is the only talisman.
Exercise yourself in the right using of it against your next meeting with
Mademoiselle de Scudéry, then when that meeting comes, at one word from
you the bashful humours—docile now—will cower behind your spleen, and
the mercurial ones will go dancing through your blood up to your brain,
whence they will let fall a torrent of conceits like sugar-plums raining
from the Palais Mazarin, and thus in Mademoiselle de Scudéry you will
arouse the mother of the passions—Admiration.’
They both laughed, and arm in arm—Madeleine with a serene look in her
eyes—made their way to the petite rue du Paon.