Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists

by Hope Mirrlees

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.