Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists

by Hope Mirrlees

PART II

‘Cela t’amuse-t-il tant, me dit-il, d’édifier ainsi des systèmes?’

‘Rien ne m’amuse plus qu’une éthique, répondis-je, et je m’y contente l’esprit. Je ne goûte pas une joie que je ne l’y veuille attachée.’

‘Cela l’augmente-t-il?’

‘Non, dis-je, cela me la légitime.’

Certes, il m’a plu souvent qu’une doctrine et même qu’un système complet de pensées ordonnées justifiât à moi-même mes actes; mais parfois je ne l’ai pu considérer que comme l’abri de ma sensualité.

André Gide.

CHAPTER XII
THE FÊTE-DIEU

It was the Sunday of the octave of the Fête-Dieu—the Feast of Corpus Christi. God Himself had walked the streets like Agamemnon over purple draperies. The stench of the city had mingled with the perfume of a thousand lilies—to the Protestant mind, a symbol of the central doctrine of the day—Transubstantiation. Transubstantiation beaten out by the cold, throbbing logic of the Latin hymns of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and triumphantly confirmed at Bologna by the miraculous bleeding of the Host.

Seraphic logic and bleeding bread! A conjunction such as this hints at a secret vice of the cold and immaculate intellect. What if one came in a dark corner of one’s dreams upon a celestial spirit feeding upon carrion?

Past gorgeous altars, past houses still hung with arras, the Troquevilles walked to Mass. From time to time they met processions of children apeing the solemn doings of Thursday, led by tiny, mock priests, shrilly chanting the office of the day. Other children passed in the scanty clothing of little Saint John, leading lambs on pink or blue ribbons. Everything sparkled in the May sunshine, and the air was full of the scent of flowers.

Et introibo ad altare Dei: ad Deum qui lætificat juventutem meam—very shortly they would be hearing these words in Church. They were solemn, sunny words well suited to the day, but, like the day, to Madeleine they seemed but a mockery. Ad Deum qui lætificat juventutem meam—To God who makes glad my youth! Where was the kind God of the Semi-Pelagians, and what joy did she have in her youth?

They walked in silence to their destination—the smug bourgeois Church Saint-André-des-Arts. Its atmosphere and furniture did not lend themselves to religious ecstasy. Among the congregation there was whispering and tittering and bows of recognition. The gallants were looking at the belles, and the belles were trying not to look at the gallants. From marble tombs smirked many a petrified magistrate, to whose vacuous pomposity the witty commemorative art of the day had added by a wise elimination of the third dimension, a flat, mocking, decorative charm.

Suddenly the frivolity vanished from the atmosphere. Monsieur Troqueville, who had been alternately yawning and spitting, pulled himself together and put on what Jacques called his ‘Mass face’—one of critical solemnity which seemed to say: ‘Here I am with a completely unbiassed mind, quite unprejudiced, and a fine judicial gift for sifting evidence. I am quite willing to believe that you have the power of turning bread into the Body and Blood of Christ, but mind! no hocus-pocus, and not one tiny crumb left untransubstantiated!’

The clergy in the red vestments, symbolic in France of the Blessed Sacrament, preceded by solemn thurifer, marched in procession from the sacristy to the altar. And then began the Sacrifice of High Mass.

The Introit melted into the Kyrie, the Kyrie swelled into the Gloria in excelsis. The subdeacon sang the Epistle, the deacon sang the Gospel. The Gospel and Epistle solidified into the fine rigidity of the Creed.

Madeleine, quite unmoved by the solemn drama, was examining the creases in the neck of a fat merchant immediately in front of her. There were three real creases—the small half ones did not count—and as there were three lines in her Litany she might use them as a sort of Rosary. She felt that she must ‘tell’ the three creases before he turned his head.

‘Blessed Virgin, Mother of Our Lord, give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Guardian Angel that watchest over me, give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Blessed Saint Magdalene, give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry.’

Suddenly ... the sweet, nauseating smell of incense and the strange music of the Preface—an echo of the music of Paradise, so said the legend, caught in dreams by holy apostolic men.

Quia per incarnati Verbi mysterium nova inentis nostræ oculis lux tuæ claritatis infulsit: ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus per hunc in INVISIBILIUM AMOREM RAPIAMUR.

Dozens of times before had Madeleine heard these terse Latin words, but to-day, for the first time, she felt their significance. ‘Caught up to the love of invisible things’—rapiamur—a ghostly rape—the idea was beautiful and terrible. Suddenly a great longing swept over her for the still, significant life of the Spirit, for the shadowy lining of this bright, hard earth. Yet on earth itself strange lives had been led ... symbols, and bitter-sweet sacrifice, and little cells suddenly filled with the sound of great waters.

A ghostly rape ... she had a sudden vision of the nervous hands of the Almighty clutching tightly the yielding flesh of a thick, human body, as in a picture by the Flemish Rubens she had seen in the Luxembourg. Surely the body was that of the fat merchant with the wrinkled neck ... there ... sitting in front of her. Something is happening ... there are acolytes with lighted tapers ... a bell is ringing ... the central Mystery is being consummated. For one strange, poignant second Madeleine felt herself in a world of non-bulk and non-colour. She buried her face in her hands and, though her mind formed no articulate prayer, she worshipped the Unseen. Her mundane desires had, for the moment, dropped from her and their place was taken by her old ambition of one day being able to go up to the altar, strong in grace, a true penitent, to partake of the inestimable blessing of the Eucharist.

CHAPTER XIII
ROBERT PILOU’S SCREEN

When Mass was over, Madeleine walked home with her parents in absolute silence. She was terribly afraid of losing the flavour of her recent experience. She specially dreaded Jacques. He was such a scoffer; besides, at this moment, she felt a great distaste for the insincerity of her relationship with him. However, as it happened, he did not come in to dinner that day.

After dinner she went to her room and lay down on her bed, in the hopes of sleeping, and so guarding her religious emotion from the contamination of thoughts and desires—for, at the bottom of her heart, she knew quite well that her obsession was only dozing. Finally, she did fall asleep, and slept for some hours.

When she awoke, it was half-past four, and she realised with joy that she had nursed successfully the mystic atmosphere. She felt a need for space and fresh air, and hastily put on her pattens, mask, and cloak. As she came out of her room, her mother appeared from the parlour.

‘Madeleine—dear life—whither in the name of madness, are you bound? You cannot be contemplating walking alone? Why, ’twill soon be dusk! Jacques should shortly return, and he’ll accompany you!’

This was unbearable. In a perfect frenzy, lest the spell should be broken, Madeleine gathered up her petticoats and made a dash for the staircase.

‘Madeleine! Madeleine! Is the child demented? Come back! I command you!’

‘For God’s sake, let me be!’ screeched Madeleine furiously from half-way down the stairs. ‘Curse her! With her shrill importunity she has shattered the serenity of my humour!’ she muttered to herself, in the last stage of nervous irritation.

She had half a mind to go back and spend the rest of the afternoon in dinning into her mother that by her untimely interruption she had arrested a coup de Grâce, and come between her and her ultimate redemption. But pleasant though this would be, the soft sunshine of early June was more so, so she ran down the stairs and into the street.

At first she felt so irritated and ruffled that she feared the spell was broken for ever, but gradually it was renewed under the magical idleness of the Sunday afternoon. In a house opposite some one was playing a Saraband on the lute. From a neighbouring street came the voices and laughter of children—otherwise the whole neighbourhood seemed deserted.

Down the long rue des Augustins, that narrowed to a bright point towards the Seine, she wandered with wide, staring eyes, to meet something, she knew not what. Then up the quays she wandered, up and on, still in a trance.

Finally she took her stand on the Pont-Rouge, a little wooden bridge long since replaced. For some moments she gazed at the Seine urbanely flowing between the temperate tints of its banks, and flanked on its right by the long, gray gallery of the Louvre. Everything was shrouded in a delicate distance-lending haze; there was the Cité—miles and miles away it seemed—nuzzling into the water and dominated by the twin towers of Notre-Dame. They had caught the sun, and though unsubstantial, they still looked sturdy—like solid cubes of light. The uniform gray-greenness of everything—Seine and Louvre and Cité—and a quality in it all of decorative unreality, reminded Madeleine of a great, flat, gray-green picture by Mantegna of the death of Saint Sebastian, that she had seen in one of the Palaces.

The bell of Saint-Germain-des-Prés began to peal for Vespers. She started murmuring to herself the Vesper hymn—Lucis Creator:—

‘Ne mens gravata crimine.

Vitæ sit exul munere,

Dum nil perenne cogitat,

Seseque culpis illigat.’

‘Grant that the mind, borne down by the charge of guilt, be not an exile from the fulfilment of life, perennially pondering emptiness and binding itself by its transgressions.’

Yes, that was a prayer she had need of praying. ‘An exile from the fulfilment of life’—that was what she had always feared to be. An exile in the provinces, far from the full stream of life—but what was Paris itself but a backwater, compared with the City of God? ‘Perennially pondering emptiness’—yes, that was her soul’s only exercise. She had long ceased to ponder grave and pregnant matters. The time had come to review once more her attitude to God and man.

She had come lately to look upon God as a Being with little sense of sin, who had a mild partiality for attrition in His creatures, but who never demanded contrition. And the compact into which she had entered with Him was this: she was to offer Him a little lip-service, perform daily some domestic duties and pretend to Jacques she was in love with him; in return for this He (aided by her dances) was to procure for her the entrée into the inner circle of the Précieuses, and the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry! And the tenets of Jansenism—it was a long time since she had boldly faced them. What were they?

Every man is a tainted creature, fallen into an incurable and permanent habit of sinning. His every action, his every thought—beginning from the puny egotism of his babyhood—is a loathsome sin in the eyes of God. The only remedy for the diseased will that prompts these sinful thoughts and actions is the sovereign, infallible grace that God sends on those whom He has decided in His secret councils to raise to a state of triumphant purity. And what does this Grace engender? An agony of repentance, a loathing of things visible, and a burning longing for things invisible—in invisibilium amorem rapiamur, yes, that is the sublime and frigid fate of the true penitent.

And she had actually deceived herself so far as to think that the Arch-Enemy of sin manifested His goodness like a weak, earthly father by gratifying one’s worldly desires, one’s ‘concupiscence’ which Jansenius calls the ‘source of all the other vices’! No, His gifts to men were not these vain baubles, the heart’s desires, but Grace, the Eucharist, His perpetual Presence on the Altar—gigantic, austere benefits befitting this solemn abstract universe, in which angels are helping men in the fight for their immortal souls.

Yes, this was the Catholic faith, this was the true and living God, to Whose throne she had dared to come with trivial requests and paltry bargainings.

She felt this evening an almost physical craving for perfect sincerity with herself, so without flinching she turned her scrutiny upon her love for Mademoiselle de Scudéry. There flashed into her mind the words of Jansenius upon the sin of Adam:—

‘What could Adam love after God, away from whom he had fallen? What could so sublime a spirit love but the sublimest thing after God Himself, namely—his own spirit?... This love, through which he wished, somehow, to take joy in himself, in as much as he could no longer take joy in God, in itself did not long suffice. Soon he apprehended its indigence, and that in it he would never find happiness.

‘Then, seeing that the way was barred that led back to God, the source of true felicity from which he had cut himself off, the want left in his nature precipitated him towards the creatures here below, and he wandered among them, hoping that they might satisfy the want. Thence come those bubbling desires, whose name is legion; those tight, cruel chains with which he is bound by the creatures he loves, that bondage, not only of himself but of all he imprisons by their love for him. Because, once again, in this love of his for all other things, it is above all himself that he holds dear. In all his frequent delights it is always—and this is a remnant of his ancient noble state—in himself that he professes to delight.’

How could she, knowing this passage, have deceived herself into imagining she could save her soul by love for a creature?

The words of Jansenius were confirmed by those of Saint Augustine:—

‘I lived in adultery away from Thee.... For the friendship of this world is adultery against Thee,’

and her own conscience confirmed them both, for it whispered that her obsession for Mademoiselle de Scudéry was nothing but a subtle development of her amour-propre, and what was more, had swollen to such dimensions as completely to blot out God from her universe.

Well, she stood condemned in all her desires and in all her activities!

What was to be done? With regard to one matter at least her duty was clear. She must confess to Jacques that she had lied to him when she said she loved him.

And Mademoiselle de Scudéry ... would she be called upon to chase her from her heart? Oh, the cruelty of it! The horse-face and the plain gray gown ... the wonderful invention in galanterie made by herself and the Grecian Sappho ... the delicious ‘light fire’ of expectancy ... the desirability of being loved in return ... the deep, deep roots it had taken in her heart. To see the figure in gray serge growing smaller and smaller as earth receded from her, and as her new amours—the ‘invisible things’—drew her up, and up with chill, shadowy arms—she couldn’t, she couldn’t face it!

In mental agony she leaned her elbows on the parapet of the bridge, and pressing her fingers against her eyes, she prayed passionately for guidance.

When she opened them, two gallants were passing.

‘Have you heard the mot Ninon made to the Queen of Sweden?’ one was asking.

‘No, what was it?’

‘Her Majesty asked her for a definition of the Précieuses, and Ninon said at once, “Madame, les Précieuses sont les Jansénistes de l’amour!” ’Twas prettily said, wasn’t it?’ They laughed, and were soon out of sight.

‘Les Précieuses sont les Jansénistes de l’amour!’ Madeleine laughed aloud, as there swept over her a flood of what she imagined to be divine illumination. Her prayer for guidance had been miraculously answered, and in a manner perfectly accordant with her own wishes. It was obviously a case of Robert Pilou’s sacred screen. ‘Profane history told by means of sacred prints becomes sacred history.’ A Précieuse need only have a knack of sacramentalism to become in the same way a Jansenist, for there was a striking resemblance between the two creeds. In their demands on their followers they had the same superb disregard for human weakness, and in both this disregard was coupled with a firm belief in original sin (for the contempt and loathing with which the Précieuses regarded the manners of all those ignorant of their code sprang surely from a belief in ‘original boorishness’ which in their eyes was indistinguishable from ‘original sin’), the only cure for which was their own particular form of grace. And the grace of the Précieuses, namely, l’air galant—that elusive social quality which through six or seven pages of Le Grand Cyrus, gracefully evades the definitions in which the agile authoress is striving to hold it, that quality without which the wittiest conversation is savourless, the most graceful compliment without fragrance, that quality which can be acquired by no amount of good-will or application, and which can be found in the muddiest poet and be lacking in the most elegant courtier—did it not offer the closest parallel to the mysterious grace of the Jansenists without which there was no salvation, and which was sometimes given in abundance to the greatest sinners and denied to the most virtuous citizens? And then—most striking analogy of all—the Précieuses’ conception of the true lover possessed just those qualities demanded from us by Saint Paul and the Jansenists. What finer symbol, for instance, of the perfect Christian could be found than that of the hero of the Astrée, Céladon, the perfect lover?

Yes, in spite of Saint Augustine’s condemnation of the men ‘who blushed for a solecism,’ she could sanctify her preciosity by making it the symbol of her spiritual development, and—oh, rapture—she could sanctify her obsession for Mademoiselle de Scudéry by making it definitely the symbol of her love for Christ, not merely a means of curing her amour-propre. Through her, she would learn to know Him. Had it not been said by Saint Augustine: ‘My sin was just this, that I sought for pleasure, grandeur, vanity, not in Him, but in His creatures,’ by which he surely meant that the love of the creature for the creature was not in itself a sin, it only became so when it led to forgetting the Creator.

So, with singular rapidity this time, ‘La folie de la Croix s’est atténuée.’

---

It was already twilight. In the Churches they would be celebrating Compline. The choir would be singing: ‘Jube, Domine, benedicere,’ and the priest would answer: ‘Noctem quietam et finem perfectum concedat nobis Dominus omnipotens.’

The criers of wafers were beginning their nocturnal song: ‘La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies!’ It was time to go home; her mother would be anxious; she must try very hard not to be so inconsiderate.

It was quite dark when she reached the petite rue du Paon. She found Madame Troqueville almost frantic with anxiety, so she flung her arms round her neck and whispered her contrition for her present lateness and her former ill-humour. Madame Troqueville pressed her convulsively and whispered back that she was never ill-humoured, and even if she were, it was no matter. In the middle of this scene in came Berthe, nodding and becking. ‘Ah! Mademoiselle is câline in her ways! She is skilled in wheedling her parents—a second Nausicaa!’

CHAPTER XIV
A DEMONSTRATION IN FAITH

The scruples with regard to having compromised with an uncompromising God which Madeleine entertained in spite of herself were silenced by the determination of settling things with Jacques. For a right action is a greater salve to conscience than a thousand good resolutions.

This determination gave her a double satisfaction, for she had realised that the relationship was also a sin against preciosity—and a very deadly sin to boot. For one thing, les honnêtes femmes must never love more than once, and then her shameful avowal that ‘she loved him very much, and that he might take his fill of kissing,’ would surely cause the belles who staked their reputation on never permitting a gallant to succeed in expressing his sentiments and who were beginning to shudder at even the ‘minor favours,’ such as the acceptance of presents and the discreetest signs of the chastest complacency, to fall into a swoon seven fathoms deep of indignation, horror, and scorn.

The retraction should be made that very evening, she decided; it was to be her Bethel, a spiritual stone set up as a covenant between herself and God. But Jacques did not come back to supper that evening, so it happened that she celebrated her new coup de grâce in a vastly more agreeable manner.

After supper she had gone into her own room and had begun idly to turn over the pages of Cyrus, and, as always happened, it soon awoke in her an agonising sense of the author’s charms, and a craving for closer communion with her than was afforded by the perusal of even these intimate pages. This closer communion could only be reached through a dance. In a second she was up and leaping:—

She has gone to a ‘Samedi’ where she finds a select circle of Sappho’s friends ... then by a great effort of will she checks herself. Is she a Jansenist or is she not? And if she is a Jansenist, is this dancing reconcilable with her tenets? As a means of moulding the future it certainly is not, for the future has been decided once and for all in God’s inscrutable councils. As a mere recreation, it is probably harmless. But is there no way of making it an integral part of her religious life? Yes, from the standpoint of Semi-Pelagianism it was a means of helping God to make the future, from the standpoint of Jansenism it can be a demonstration in faith, by which she tells God how safe her future is in His hands, and how certain she is of His goodness and mercy in the making of it.

Then, an extra sanctity can be given to its contents by the useful device of Robert Pilou’s screen—let the talk be as witty and gallant as you please, as long as every conceit has a mystical second meaning.

This settled, once more she started her dance.

---

Madeleine has gone to a ‘Samedi’ at Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s, where she finds a select circle of Sappho’s friends.

The talk drifts to the writings of ‘Callicrate,’ as the late Monsieur Voiture was called.

‘There is a certain verse of his from which an astute reader can deduce that he was not a Jansenist,’ says Madeleine, with a deliciously roguish smile. ‘Can any of the company quote this verse?’

A wave of amused interest passes over the room.

‘I did not know that Callicrate was a theologian,’ says Sappho.

‘A theologian, yes, for he was an admirable professor of love’s theory, but a real Christian, no, for he was but a feeble and faithless lover,’ answers Madeleine, looking straight into Sappho’s eyes. Sappho colours, and with a laugh which thrills Madeleine’s ear, with a tiny note of nervousness says:—

‘Well, Mademoiselle, prove your theory about Callicrate by quoting the verses you allude to, and if you cannot do so, we will exact a forfeit from you for being guilty of the crime of having aroused the delightful emotion of curiosity without the justification of being able to gratify it.’ The company turn their smiling eyes on Madeleine, who proceeds to quote the following lines:—

‘Ne laissez rien en vous capable de déplaire.

Faites-vous toute belle: et tachez de parfaire

L’ouvrage que les Dieux ont si fort avancé:’

‘Now these lines allow great power to le libre arbitre, and suppose a collaboration between the gods and mortals in the matter of the soul’s redemption, which would, I am sure, bring a frown to the brows of les Messieurs de Port-Royale.’

‘Sappho, I think it is we that must pay forfeits to Mademoiselle, not she to us, for she has vindicated herself in the most spirituel manner in the world,’ says Cléodamas.

‘Let her lay a task on each of us that must be performed within five minutes,’ suggests Philoxène.

‘Mademoiselle, what labours of Hercules are you going to impose on us?’ asks Sappho, smiling at Madeleine. Madeleine thinks for a moment and then says:—

‘Each of you must compose a Proposition Galante on the model of one of the Five.’

The company is delighted with the idea, and Théodamas writes out the five original Propositions that the company may have their models before them, and proceeds to read them out:—

(1) Some of God’s commandments it is impossible for the Just to obey owing to the present state of their powers, in spite of the desire of doing so, and in spite of great efforts: and the Grace by which they might obey these commandments is lacking.

(2) That in the state of fallen nature, one never resists the interior grace.

(3) That to merit and demerit in the state of fallen nature, it is not necessary that man should have liberty opposed to necessity (to will), but that it suffices that he should have liberty opposed to constraint.

(4) That the Semi-Pelagians admitted the necessity of the inward grace preceding every action, even the inception of Faith, but that they were heretics in so far as they held that grace to be of such a nature that the will of man could either resist it or obey it.

(5) That it is a Semi-Pelagian error to say that the Founder of our faith died and shed His blood universally, for all men.

They all take out their tablets and begin to write. At the end of five minutes Madeleine tells them to stop.

‘I have taken the first as my model,’ says Sappho, ‘and indeed I have altered it only very slightly.’ The company begs to hear it.

‘No commandment of a lady is too difficult for an homme galant to obey, for to him every lady is full of grace, and this grace inspires him with powers more than human.’

Every one applauds, and expresses their appreciation of her wit.

‘And now,’ says Madeleine, ‘that our appetite has been so deliciously whetted—if I may use the expression—by Sappho, have the rest of the company got their ragoûts ready?’

Doralise looks at Théodamas, and Théodamas at Philoxène, and they laugh.

‘Mademoiselle, blindness is the penalty for looking on a goddess, and dumbness, I suppose, that of listening to two Muses. We are unable to pay our forfeits,’ says Théodamas, with a rueful smile.

‘Will not Mademoiselle rescue the Sorbonne galante from ignominy, and herself supply the missing propositions?’ says Sappho, throwing at Madeleine a glance, at once arch and challenging.

‘Yes! Yes!’ cries the company, ‘let the learned doctor herself compile the theology of Cupid!’

‘When Sappho commands, even the doctors of the Sorbonne obey,’ says Madeleine gallantly. ‘Well, then, I will go on to the second proposition in which I will change nothing but one word. “That in the state of fallen nature, man never resists the external grace.”’ The company laughs delightedly.

‘By the third I must admit to be vanquished,’ she continues, ‘the fourth is not unlike that of Sappho’s! “That courtiers, although they admit the necessity of feminine grace preceding every movement of their passions, are heretics in so far that they hold the wishes of ladies to be of such a nature that the will of man can either, as it chooses, resist or obey them.”’

‘Delicious!’ cries the company, ‘that is furiously well expressed, and a well-merited condemnation of Condé and his petits-maîtres.’

‘And now we come to the fifth, which calls for as much pruning as one of the famous Port-Royal pear-trees. “That it is an error of provincials and other barbarians to say that lovers burn with a universal flame, or that les honnêtes femmes give their favours to all men.”’ Loud applause follows.

‘Mademoiselle,’ says Théodamas, ‘you have converted me to Jansenism.’

‘Such a distinguished convert as the great Théodamas will certainly compensate the sect for all the bulls launched against it by the Holy Father,’ says Madeleine gallantly.

‘Well, I must admit that by one thing the Jansenists have certainly added to la douceur de la vie, and that is by what we may call their Miracle of the Graces,’ says Sappho.

‘What does Madame mean by “the Miracle of the Graces”?’ asks Madeleine, smiling.

‘I mean the multiplication of what till their day had been three Graces into at least four times that number. To have done so deserves, I think, to be called a miracle.’

‘The most miraculous—if I may use the expression—of the miracles recorded in the Lives of the Saints has always seemed to me the Miracle of the Beautiful City,’ says Madeleine innocently.

‘What miracle is that? My memory fails me, if I may use the expression,’ says Sappho, in a puzzled voice.

‘Madame, I scarcely believe that a lady so widely and exquisitely informed as Sappho of Lesbos in both what pertains to mortals and in what pertains to gods, in short in Homer and in Hesiod, should never have heard of the “Miracle of the Beautiful City,”’ says Madeleine, in mock surprise.

‘Then Mademoiselle—as you say you can scarcely believe it—you show yourself to be a lady of but little faith!’ says Sappho, her eye lighted by a delicious gleam of raillery.

‘I must confess that the miracle Mademoiselle mentions has—if I may use the expression—escaped my memory too,’ says Théodamas.

‘And ours,’ say Doralise and Philoxène.

‘So this company of all companies has never heard of the Miracle of the Beautiful City!’ cries Madeleine. ‘Well, I will recount it to you.

‘Once upon a time, in a far barbarian country, there lived a great saint. Everything about her was a miracle—her eyes, her hands, her figure, and her wit. One night an angel appeared to her and said: (I will not yet tell you the saint’s name), “Take your lyre” (I forgot to mention that the saint’s performance on this instrument was also a miracle, and a furiously agreeable one), “Take your lyre, and go and play upon it in the wilderness.” And the saint obeyed the angel’s command, though the wilderness was filled with lions and tigers and every other ferocious beast. But when the saint began to play they turned into ... doves and linnets.’ A tiny smile of comprehension begins to play round the eyes of the company. Madeleine goes on, quite gravely:—

‘But that was only a baby miracle beside that which followed. As the saint played, out of the earth began to spring golden palaces, surrounded by delicious gardens, towers of porphyry, magnificent temples, in short, all the agreeable monuments that go to the making of a great city, and of which, as a rule, Time is the only building contractor. But, in a few minutes, this great Saint built it merely by playing on her lyre. Madame, the city’s name was Pretty Wit, and the Saint’s name was ... can the company tell me?’ and she looks roguishly round.

‘It is a name of five letters, and its first letter is S and its last O,’ says Théodamas, with a smile.

---

Madeleine flung herself breathless and exhausted on her bed.

Deep down her conscience was wondering if she had achieved a genuine reconciliation between Preciosity and Jansenism.

CHAPTER XV
MOLOCH

The period that ensued was one of great happiness for Madeleine. It was spent in floating on her own interpretation of the Jansenists’ ‘full sea of grace,’ happy in the certainty, secure in the faith, that God in His own good time would grant her desires, and reverse the rôles of fugitive and pursuer. And being set free from the necessity of making her own future, ipso facto she was also released from the importunities of the gnat-like taboos and duties upon the doing or not doing of which had seemed to depend her future success.

She felt at peace with God and with man, and her family found her unusually gentle, calm, and sympathetic.

But Bethel was not yet raised. This was partly due to the inevitable torpor caused by an excess of faith. If it was God’s will that she should have an explanation with Jacques, He would furnish the occasion and the words.

So the evenings slipped by, and Madeleine continued to receive Jacques’s caresses with an automatic responsiveness.

Then, at a party at the Troguins, she met a benevolent though gouty old gentleman, in a black taffeta jerkin and black velvet breeches, and he was none other than Monsieur Conrart, perpetual secretary to the Academy, and self-constituted master of the ceremonies at the ‘Samedis’ of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Madeleine was introduced to him, and her demure attention to his discourse, her modest demeanour, and her discreet feminine intelligence pleased him extremely. She made no conscious effort to attract him, she just trusted God, and, to ring another change on her favourite quolibet, it was as if la Grâce confided to the Graces the secret of its own silent, automatic action. He grew very paternal, patted her on the knee with his fat, gouty hand, and focused his energies on the improvement of her mind instead of the collective mind of the company.

The end of it was that he promised to take her with him to the very next ‘Samedi.’

On the way home, she and Jacques went for a stroll in the Place Maubert, that favourite haunt of petits-bourgeois, where in pathetic finery they aired their puny pretensions to pass for honnêtes gens, or, more happily constituted, exercised their capacity for loud laughter and coarse wit, and the one privilege of their class, that of making love in public.

As a rule, Madeleine would rather have died than have been seen walking in the Place Maubert, but now, when her soul was floating on a sea of grace, so dazzlingly sunny, it mattered but little in which of the paths of earth her body chose to stray; however, this evening, her happiness was a little disturbed by an inward voice telling her that now was the time for enlightening Jacques with regard to her feelings towards him.

She looked at him; he was a lovable creature and she realised that she would sorely miss him. Then she remembered that on Saturday she was going to see Sappho, and in comparison with her the charm of pale, chestnut-haired young men lost all potency. She was going to see Sappho. God was very good!

They were threading their way between squares of box clipped in arabesque. It was sunset, and from a distant shrubbery there came the sounds of children at their play. The pungent smell of box, the voices of children playing at sunset; they brought to Madeleine a sudden whiff of the long, nameless nostalgia of childhood, a nostalgia for what? Perhaps for the vitæ munus (the fulfilment of life) of the Vesper hymn; well, on Saturday she would know the vitæ munus.

She seized Jacques’s arm and, with shining eyes, cried out: ‘Oh, God is exceeding merciful to His chosen! He keeps the promise in the Psalms, He “maketh glad our youth.” When I think on His great goodness ... I want ... I want ... Oh, words fail me! How comes it, Jacques, you do not see His footsteps everywhere upon the earth?’ She was trembling with exultation and her voice shook.

Jacques looked at her gently, and his face was troubled.

‘One cannot reveal Grace to another by words and argument,’ she went on, ‘each must feel it in his own soul, but let it once be felt, then never more will one be obnoxious to doubts on ghostly matters, willy-nilly one will believe to all eternity!’

They found a quiet little seat beside a fountain and sat down. After a moment’s silence Madeleine once more took up her Te Deum.

‘Matter for thanksgiving is never wanting, as inch by inch the veil is lifted from the eyes of one’s spirit to discover in time the whole fair prospect of God’s most amiable Providence. Oh, Jacques, why are you blind?’ His only answer was to kick the pebbles, his eyes fixed on the ground.

Then, in rather a constrained voice, he said: ‘I would rather put it thus; matter for pain is never wanting to him who stares at the world with an honest and unblinking eye. What sees he? Pain—pain—and again pain. It is harsh and incredible to suppose that ’twould be countenanced by a good God. What say you, Chop, to pain?’

Madeleine was pat with her answers from Jansenism—the perfection of man’s estate before the Fall, when there was granted him the culminating grace of free will, his misuse of it by his choice of sin, and its attendant, pain.

Jacques was silent for a moment, and then he said:—

‘I can conceive of no scale of virtues wherein room is found for a lasting, durable, and unremitted anger, venting itself on the progeny of its enemy unto the tenth and twentieth-thousand generation. Yet, such an anger was cherished by your God, towards the children of Adam. Nor in any scale of virtues is there place for the pregnant fancy of an artificer, who having for his diversion moulded a puppet out of mud, to show, forsooth, the cunning of his hand, makes that same puppet sensible to pain and to affliction. Why, ’tis a subtle malice of which even the sponsors of Pandora were guiltless! Then his ignoble chicanery! With truly kingly magnanimity he cedes to the puppet the franchise of free will; but mark what follows! The puppet, guileless and trusting, proceeds to enjoy its freedom, when lo! down on its head descends the thunder-bolt, that it may know free will must not be exercised except in such manner as is accordant with the purposes of the giver. The pettifogging attorney!

‘Yes, your God is bloodier than Moloch, more perfectly tyrant than Jove, more crafty and dishonest than Mercury.

‘Have you read the fourth book of Virgil’s Æneid? In it I read a tragedy more pungent than the cozenage of Dido—that of a race of mortals, quick in their apprehensions, tender in their affections, sensible to the dictates of conscience and of duty, who are governed by gods, ferocious and malign, as far beneath them in the scale of creation as are the roaring lions of the Libyan desert. And were I not possessed by the certainty that your faith is but a monstrous fiction, my wits would long ere now have left me in comparing the rare properties of good men with those of your low Hebrew idol.’

Madeleine looked at him curiously. This was surely a piece of prepared rhetoric, not a spontaneous outburst. So she was not the only person who in her imagination spouted eloquence to an admiring audience!

Although she had no arguments with which to meet his indictment, her faith, not a whit disturbed, continued comfortably purring in her heart. But as she did not wish to snub his outburst by silence—her mood was too benevolent—she said:—

‘Do you hold, then, that there is no good power behind the little accidents of life?’

‘The only good power lies in us ourselves, ’tis the Will that Descartes writes of—a magic sword like to the ones in Amadis, a delicate, sure weapon, not rusting in the armoury of a tyrannical god, but ready to the hand of every one of us to wield it when we choose. Les hommes de volonté—they form the true noblesse d’épée, and can snap their fingers at Hozier and his heraldries,’ he paused, then said very gently, ‘Chop, I sometimes fear that in your wild chase after winged horses you may be cozened out of graver and more enduring blessings, which, though they be not as rare and pretty as chimeras....’

‘Because you choose to stick on them the name of chimeras,’ Madeleine interrupted with some heat, ‘it does not a whit alter their true nature. Though your mind may be too narrow to stable a winged horse, that is no hindrance to its finding free pasturage in the mind of God, of which the universe is the expression. And even if they should be empty cheats—which they are not—do you not hold the Duc de Liancourt was worthy of praise in that by a cunningly painted perspective he has given the aspect of a noble park watered by a fair river to his narrow garden in the Rue de Seine?’

‘Why, if we be on the subject of painted perspectives,’ said Jacques, ‘it is reported that the late cardinal in his villa at Rueil had painted on a wall at the end of his Citronière the Arch of Constantine. ’Twas a life-size cheat and so cunning an imitation of nature was shown in the painting of sky and hills between the arches, that foolish birds, thinking to fly through have dashed themselves against the wall. Chop, it would vex me sorely to see you one of these birds!’

A frightened shadow came into Madeleine’s eyes, and she furtively crossed herself. Then, once more, she smiled serenely.

For several moments they were silent, and then Jacques said hesitatingly:—

‘Dear little Chop ... I would have you deal quite frankly with me, and tell me if you mean it when you say you love me. There are moments when a doubt ... I must know the truth, Chop!’

In an almost miraculous manner the way had been made easy for her confession, and ... she put her arms round his neck (in the Place Maubert you could do these things) and feverishly assured him that she loved him with all her heart.

CHAPTER XVI
A VISIT TO THE ABBAYE OF PORT-ROYAL

Madeleine’s bitter self-reproaches for her own weakness were of no avail. She had to acknowledge once and for all that she had not the force to stand out against another personality and tell them in cold blood things they would not like. She could hedge and be lukewarm—as when Jacques wished to be formally affianced—but once she had got into a false position she could not, if the feelings of others were involved, extricate herself in a strong, straightforward way. Would God be angry that she had not set up the Bethel she had promised? No, because it was the true God she was worshipping now, not merely the projection of her own barbarous superstitions.

At any rate, to be on the safe side, she would go and visit Mère Agnès Arnauld at the Abbaye de Port-Royal (a thing she should have done long ago) for that would certainly please Him. So she wrote asking if she might come, and got back a cordial note, fixing Wednesday afternoon for the interview.

In spite of her exalted mood, she did not look forward to the meeting: ‘I hate having my soul probed,’ she told herself in angry anticipation. She could not have explained what hidden motive it was that forced her on Wednesday to make up her face with Talc, scent herself heavily with Ambre, and deck herself out in all her most worldly finery.

As it was a long walk to the Abbaye of Port-Royal—one had to traverse the whole of the Faubourg Saint-Jacques—Madame Troqueville insisted on Jacques accompanying her, and waiting for her, during the interview, at the abbaye gates.

They set out at about half-past two. Jacques seemed much tickled by the whole proceeding, and said that he longed for the cap of invisibility that, unseen, he might assist at the interview.

‘You’ll be a novice ere many months have passed!’ he said, with a mischievous twinkle, ‘what will you wager that you won’t?’

‘All in this world and the next,’ Madeleine answered passionately.

‘As you will, time will show,’ and he nodded his head mysteriously.

‘Jacques, do not be so fantastical. Why, in the name of madness, should I turn novice just because I visited a nun? Jacques, do you hear me? I bid you to retract your words!’

‘And if I were to retract them, what would it boot you? They would still be true. You’ll turn nun and never clap eyes again on old Dame Scudéry!’ and he shrieked with glee. Madeleine paled under her rouge.

‘So you would frustrate my hopes, and stick a curse on me?’ she said in a voice trembling with fury. ‘I’ll have none of your escort, let my mother rail as she will, I’ll not be seen with one of your make; what are you but my father’s bawd? Seek him out and get you to your low revellings, I’ll on my way alone!’ and carrying her head very high, she strutted on by herself.

‘Why, Chop, you have studied rhetoric in the Halles, the choiceness of your language would send old Scudéry gibbering back to her native Parnassus!’ he called after her mockingly, then, suddenly conscience-stricken, he ran up to her and said, trying to take her hand: ‘Why, Chop, ’tis foolishness to let raillery work on you so strangely! All said and done, what power have my light words to act upon your future? I am no prophet. But as you give such credence to my words why then I’ll say with solemn emphasis that you will never be a novice, for no nuns would be so foolish as to let a whirlwind take the veil. No, you’ll be cloistered all your days with Mademoiselle de Scudéry, and with no other living soul will you hold converse. Why, there’s a pleasant, frigid, prophecy for you, are you content?’

Madeleine relented sufficiently to smile at him and let him take her hand, but she remained firm in her resolve to forgo his further escort, so with a shrug he left her, and went off on his own pursuits.

As Madeleine passed through the Porte Saint-Jacques, she seemed to leave behind her all the noisy operations of man and to enter the quiet domain of God and nature. On either side of her were orchards and monasteries in which, leisurely, slowly, souls and fruit were ripening. Over the fields of hay the passing wind left its pale foot-prints. Peace had returned to her soul.

Soon she was ringing the bell of the Abbaye of Port-Royal—that alembic of grace, for ever at its silent work of distilling from the warm passions of human souls, the icy draught of holiness—that mysterious depository of the victims of the Heavenly Rape.

She was shown into a waiting-room, bare and scrupulously clean. On the wall hung crayon sketches by Moustier of the various benefactors of the House. Madeleine gazed respectfully at this gallery of blonde ladies, simpering above their plump décolletage. They were inscribed with such distinguished names as Madame la Princesse de Guémené; Elizabeth de Choiseul-Praslin; Dame Anne Harault de Chéverni; Louise-Marie de Gonzagues de Clèves, Queen of Poland, who, the inscription said, had been a pupil of the House, and whom Madeleine knew to be an eminent Précieuse.

Some day would another drawing be added to the collection? A drawing wherein would be portrayed a plain, swarthy woman in classic drapery, whose lyre was supported by a young fair virgin gazing up at her, and underneath these words:—

Madeleine de Scudéry and Madeleine Troqueville, twin-stars of talent, piety, and love, who, in their declining years retreated to this House that they might sanctify the great love one bore the other, by the contemplation of the love of Jesus.

Madeleine’s eyes filled with tears. Then a lay-sister came in and said she would conduct her to the parloir.

It was a great bare room, its only ornament a crucifix, and behind the grille there sat a motionless figure—the Mother Superior, Mère Agnès Arnauld. Her face, slightly tanned and covered with clear, fine wrinkles, seemed somehow to have been carved out of a very hard substance, and this, together with the austere setting of her white veil, gave her the look of one of the Holy Women in a picture by Mantegna. Her hazel eyes were clear and liquid and child-like.

When Madeleine reached the grille, she smiled charmingly, and said in a beautiful, caressing voice: ‘Dear little sister, I have desired to see you this long time.’

Madeleine mumbled some inaudible reply. She tried to grasp the mystical fact that that face, these hands, that torso behind the grille had been built up tissue by tissue by the daily bread of the Eucharist into the actual flesh of God Himself. It seemed almost incredible!

Why was the woman staring at her so fixedly? She half expected her to break the silence with some reference to Mademoiselle de Scudéry, so certain was she that to these clear eyes her inmost thoughts lay naked to view.

At last, the beautiful voice began again: ‘It would seem you have now taken up your abode in Paris. Do you like the city?’

‘Exceeding well,’ Madeleine murmured.

‘Exceeding well—yes—exceeding well,’ Mère Agnès repeated after her, with a vague smile.

Suddenly Madeleine realised that the intensity of her gaze was due to absent-mindedness, and that she stared at things without seeing them. All the same, she felt that if this pregnant silence were to continue much longer she would scream; she gave a nervous little giggle and began to fiddle with her hands.

‘And what is your manner of passing the time? Have you visited any of the new buildings?’

The woman was evidently at a loss for something to say, why, in the name of madness, didn’t she play her part and make inquiries about the state of her disciple’s soul? Madeleine began to feel quite offended.

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I have seen the Palais Mazarin and I have visited the Hôtel de Rambouillet.’

‘Ah, yes, the Hôtel de Rambouillet. My cousins report it to be a very noble fabric. Some day when the family is in the country you may be able to see the apartments, which are adorned, I am told, in a most rare and costly manner.’

So she took it for granted that Madeleine had only seen the outside! It was annoying, but it was no use enlightening her, because, even if she listened, she would not be in the least impressed.

There was another pause, then Mère Agnès turned on her a quick, kind glance, and said:—

‘Talk to me of yourself!’

‘What manner of things shall I tell you?’ Madeleine asked nervously.

‘What of theology? Do you still fret yourself over seeming incongruities?’ she asked with a little twinkle.

‘No,’ Madeleine answered with a blush, ‘most of my doubts have been resolved.’

‘’Tis well, dear child, for abstracted speculation is but an oppilation to the free motion of the spirit. ’Tis but a faulty instrument, the intellect, even for the observing of the works of God, how little apt is it then, for the apprehension of God Himself? But the spirit is the sea of glass, wherein is imaged in lucid colours and untrembling outlines the Golden City where dwells the Lamb. Grace will be given to you, my child, to gaze into that sea where all is clear.’

She spoke in a soft, level, soothing voice. Her words were a confirmation of what Madeleine had tried to express to Jacques the other day in the garden of the Place Maubert, but suddenly—she could not have said why—she found herself echoing with much heat those very theories of his that had seemed so absurd to her then.

‘But how comes it that God is good? He commands us to forgive, while He Himself has need of unceasing propitiation and the blood of His Son to forgive the Fall of Adam. And verily ’tis a cruel, barbarous, and most unworthy motion to “visit the sins of the fathers upon the children”; a man must put on something of a devil before he can act thus. He would seem to demand perfection in us while He Himself is moved by every passion,’ and she looked at Mère Agnès half frightened, half defiant.

Mère Agnès, with knitted brows, remained silent for a moment. Then she said hesitatingly and as if thinking aloud:—

‘The ways of God to man are, in truth, a great mystery. But I think we are too apt to forget the unity of the Trinity. Our Lord was made man partly to this end, that His Incarnation might be the instrument of our learning to know the Father through the Son, that the divine mercy and love, hitherto revealed but in speculative generals, might be turned into particulars proportioned to our finite understandings. Thus, if such mysteries as the Creation, the Preservation, nay, even the Redemption, be too abstracted, too speculative to be apprehended by our affections, then let us ponder the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, the tender words to the woman of Samaria, the command to “suffer the little children to come unto Him,” for they are types of the other abstracted mercies, and teach us to acknowledge that God is of that nature, which knows no conjunctions but those of justice and mercy. Yes, my child, all your doubts find their resolution in the life of Jesus. I mind me when I was a girl, in the garden of the Palais, the arborist du roy—as he was called—grew certain rare flowers from the Orient to serve as patterns to the Queen and her ladies for their embroidery. But when it was determined to build the Place Dauphine the garden had to go, and with it these strange blossoms. But the Queen commanded the arborist to make her a book of coloured plates wherein should be preserved the form and colour of the Orient flowers. And this was done, so patterns were not wanting after all to the Queen and her ladies for their broidery. Thus, for a time ‘our eyes did see, and our ears did hear, and our hands did handle’ our divine Pattern and then He ascended into Heaven, but, in His great mercy He has left a book wherein in clear, enduring pigments are limned the pictures of His life, that we too might be furnished with patterns for our broidery. Read the Gospels, dear child, read them diligently, and, above all, hearken to them when they are read in the presence of the Host, for at such times the operation of their virtue is most sure.’

She paused, and then, as if following up some hidden line of thought, continued:—

‘Sometimes it has seemed to me that even sin couches mercy. Grace has been instrumental to great sins blossoming into great virtues, and——’

‘Thus, one might say, “Blessed are the proud, for they shall become meek; blessed are the concupiscent, for they shall become pure of heart,”’ eagerly interposed Madeleine, her eyes bright with pleasure over the paradox.

‘Perhaps,’ said Mère Agnès, smiling a little. ‘I am glad you are so well acquainted with the Sermon on the Mount. As I have said, there is no instrument apter to the acquiring of grace than a diligent reading of the Gospels; the late Bishop of Geneva was wont to insist on this with my sister and myself. But bear in mind the consent and union of design between the holy Life on earth and the divine existence in Eternity, if one is pricked out with love and justice, so also is the other. We should endeavour to read the Gospels with the apocalyptic eye of Saint John, for it was the peculiar virtue of this Evangelist that in the narration of particulars he never permitted the immersion of generals. The action of his Gospel is set in Eternity. I have ever held that Spanish Catholicism and the teaching of the Jesuit Fathers are wont to deal too narrowly with particulars, whereas our own great teachers—I speak in all veneration and humility—Doctor Jansen, nay, even our excellent and beloved Saint Cyran, in that their souls were like to huge Cherubim, stationary before the Throne of God, were apt to ignore the straitness of most mortal minds, and to demand that their disciples should reach with one leap of contemplation the very heart of eternity instead of leading them there by the gentle route of Jesus’ diurnal acts on earth.’

She paused. Madeleine’s cheeks were flushed, and her eyes bright. She had completely yielded to the charm of Mère Agnès’s personality and to the hypnotic sway of the rich, recondite phraseology which the Arnaulds proudly called ‘la langue de notre maison.’

‘By what sign can we recognise true grace?’ she asked, after some moments of silence.

‘I think its mark is an appetite of fire for the refection of spiritual things. Thus, if an angel appeared to you, bearing in one hand a cornucopia of earthly blessings, and in the other, holiness—not, mind, certain salvation, but just holiness—and bade you make your choice, without one moment of hesitation you would choose holiness. Which would you choose?’ and she looked at Madeleine gently and rather whimsically.

‘I would choose the cornucopia,’ said Madeleine in a low voice.

There was a pause, and then with a very tender light in her eyes, Mère Agnès said: ‘I wish you could become acquainted with one of our young sisters—Sœur Jacqueline de Sainte-Euphémie Pascal—but she is at Port-Royal des Champs. She was born with every grace of the understanding, and affections most sensible to earthly joys and vanities, but in her sacrifice she has been as unflinching as Abraham. Hers is a rare spirit.’

Madeleine felt a sudden wave of jealousy pass over her for this paragon.

‘What is her age?’ she asked resentfully.

‘Sœur Jacqueline de Sainte-Euphémie? She must be in her twenty-eighth year, I should say. Courage, you have yet many years in which to overtake her,’ and she looked at Madeleine with considerable amusement. With the intuitive insight, which from time to time flashed across her habitual abstractedness, she had divined the motive of Madeleine’s question.

‘When she was twelve years old,’ she went on, ‘she was smitten by the smallpox, which shore her of all her comeliness. On her recovery she wrote some little verses wherein she thanked God that He had spared her life and taken her beauty. Could you have done that? Alas, when I was young I came exceeding short of it in grace. I mind me, when I was some ten years old, being deeply incensed against God, in that He had not made me “Madame de France”! My soul was a veritable well of vanity and amour-propre.’

‘So is mine!’ cried Madeleine, with eager pride.

Again Mère Agnès looked much amused.

‘My child, ’tis a strange cause for pride! And bear in mind, I am the last creature to take as your pattern. No one more grievously than I did ever fall away from the Grace of Baptism. Since when, notwithstanding all the privileges and opportunities of religion afforded by a cloistered life and the conversation of the greatest divines of our day, I have not weaned myself from the habit of sinning. But one thing I have attained by the instrument of Grace, and that is a “hunger and thirst after righteousness” that springs from the very depths of my soul. I tell you this, that you may be of good courage, for, believe me, my soul was of an exceeding froward and inductile complexion.’

‘Did you always love Our Lord with a direct and particular love?’ Madeleine asked.

‘I cannot call to mind the time when I did not. Do you love Him thus?’

‘No.’

‘Well, so senseless and ungrateful is our natural state that even love for Christ, which would seem as natural and spontaneous a motion of our being as is a child’s love of its mother, is absent from our hearts, before the operation of Grace. But, come, you are a Madeleine, are you not? A Madeleine who cannot love! The Church has ordained that all Christians should bear the name of a saint whom they should imitate in his or her particular virtue. And the virtue particular to Saint Madeleine was that she “loved much.” Forget not your great patron saint in your devotions and she will intercede for you. And in truth when I was young, I was wont to struggle against my love for Him and tried to flee from Him with an eagerness as great as that with which I do now pursue Him. And I think, dear child, ’twill fall out thus with you.’

Madeleine was deeply moved. Mère Agnès’s words, like the tales of a traveller, had stirred in her soul a wanderlust. It felt the lure of the Narrow Way, and was longing to set off on its pilgrimage. For the moment, she did not shrink from “the love of invisible things,” but would actually have welcomed the ghostly, ravishing arms.

‘Oh, tell me, tell me, what I can do to be holy?’ she cried imploringly.

‘You can do nothing, my child, but “watch and pray.” It lies not in us to be holy. Except our soul be watered by Grace, it is as barren as the desert, but be of good cheer, for some day the “desert shall blossom like the rose.” “Watch and pray” and desire, for sin is but the flagging of the desire for holiness. Grace will change your present fluctuating motions towards holiness into an adamant of desire that neither the tools of earth can break nor the chemistry of Hell resolve. Pray without ceasing for Grace, dear child, and I will pray for you too. And if, after a searching examination of your soul, you are sensible of being in the state necessary to the acceptance of the Blessed Sacrament, a mysterious help will be given you of which I cannot speak. Have courage, all things are possible to Grace.’

With tears in her eyes, Madeleine thanked her and bade her good-bye.

As she walked down the rue Saint-Jacques, the tall, delicately wrought gates of the Colleges were slowly clanging behind the little unwilling votaries of Philosophy and Grammar, but the other inhabitants of the neighbourhood were just beginning to enjoy themselves, and all was noise and colour. Old Latin songs, sung perhaps by Abelard and Thomas Aquinas, mingled with the latest ditty of the Pont-Neuf. Here, a half-tipsy theologian was expounding to a harlot the Jesuits’ theory of ‘Probabilism,’ there a tiny page was wrestling with a brawny quean from the Halles aux vins. Bells were pealing from a score of churches; in a dozen different keys viols and lutes and guitars were playing sarabands; hawkers were crying their wares, valets were swearing; and there were scarlet cloaks and green jerkins and yellow hose. And all the time that quiet artist, the evening light of Paris, was softening the colours, flattening the architecture, and giving to the whole scene an aspect remote, classical, unreal.

Down the motley street marched Madeleine with unseeing eyes, a passionate prayer for grace walling up in her heart.

Then she thought of Mère Agnès herself. Her rôle of a wise teacher, exhorting young disciples from suave spiritual heights, seemed to her a particularly pleasant one. Though genuinely humble, she was very grown-up. How delightful to be able to smile in a tender amused way at the confessions of youth, and to call one “dear child” in a deep, soft voice, without being ridiculous!

Ere she had reached the Porte Saint-Jacques she was murmuring over some of Mère Agnès’s words, but it was not Mère Agnès who was saying them, but she herself to Madame de Rambouillet’s granddaughter when grown up. A tender smile hovered on her lips, her eyes alternately twinkled and filled with tears: ‘Courage, dear child, I have experienced it all, I know, I know!’

CHAPTER XVII
‘HYLAS, THE MOCKING SHEPHERD’

She reached home eager to tell them all about her visit.

Her father and Jacques were playing at spillikins and her mother was spinning.

‘She is a marvellous personage,’ she cried out, ‘her sanctity is almost corporeal and subject to sense. And she has the most fragrant humility, she talked of herself as though there were no more froward and wicked creature on the earth than she!’

‘Maybe there is not!’ said Jacques, and Monsieur Troqueville chuckled delightedly. Madeleine flushed and her lips grew tight.

‘Do not be foolish, Jacques. The whole world acknowledges her to be an exceeding pious and holy woman,’ said Madame Troqueville, with a warning glance at Jacques, which seemed to say: ‘In the name of Heaven, forbear! This new vision of the child’s is tenfold less harmful and fantastical than the other.’

Madeleine watched Jacques grimacing triumphantly at her father as he deftly extricated spillikin after spillikin. He was entirely absorbed in the idiotic game. How could one be serious and holy with such a frivolous companion?

‘Pray tell us more of Mère Agnès, my sweet. What were her opening words?’ said Madame Troqueville, trying to win Madeleine back to good humour, but Madeleine’s only answer was a cold shrug.

For one thing, without her permission they were playing with her spillikins. She had a good mind to snatch them away from them! And how dare Jacques be so at home in her house? He said he was in love with her, did he? Yet her entry into the room did not for one moment distract his attention from spillikins.

‘Yes, tell us more of her Christian humility,’ said Jacques, as he drew away the penultimate spillikin. ‘I’ll fleece you of two crowns for that,’ he added in an aside to Monsieur Troqueville.

‘They are all alike in that,’ he went on, ‘humility is part of their inheritance from the early Christians, who, being Jews and slaves and such vermin, had needs be humble except they wished to be crucified by the Romans for impudence. And though their creeping homilies have never ousted the fine old Roman virtue pride, yet pious Christians do still affect humility, and ’tis a stinking pander to——’

‘Jacques, Jacques,’ expostulated Madame Troqueville, and Monsieur Troqueville, shaking his head, and blowing out his cheeks, said severely:—

‘Curb your tongue, my boy! You do but show your ignorance. Humility is a most excellent virtue, if it were not, then why was it preached by Our Lord? Resolve me in that!’ and he glared triumphantly at Jacques.

‘Why, uncle, when you consider the base origin of——’

‘Jacques, I beseech you, no more!’ interposed Madame Troqueville, very gently but very firmly, so Jacques finished his sentence in a comic grimace.

After a pause, he remarked, ‘Chapuzeau retailed to me the other day a naïveté he had heard in a monk’s Easter sermon. The monk had said that inasmuch as near all the most august events in the Scriptures had had a mountain for their setting, it followed that no one could lead a truly holy life in a valley, and from this premise he deduced——’

‘In that naïveté there is a spice of truth,’ Monsieur Troqueville cut in, in a serious, interested voice. ‘I mind me, when I was a young man, I went to the Pyrenees, where my spirit was much vexed by the sense of my own sinfulness.’

‘I’ faith, it must have been but hypochondria, there can have been no true cause for remorse,’ said Jacques innocently.

Monsieur Troqueville looked at him suspiciously, cleared his throat, and went on: ‘I mind me, I would pass whole nights in tears and prayer, until at last there was revealed to me a strange and excellent truth, to wit, that the spirit is immune against the sins of the flesh. To apprehend this truth is a certain balm to the conscience, and, as I said, ’twas on a mountain that it was revealed to me,’ and he looked round with solemn triumph.

Madame Troqueville and Madeleine exchanged glances of unutterable contempt and boredom, but Jacques wagged his head and said gravely that it was a mighty convenient truth.

‘Ay, is it not? Is it not?’ cried Monsieur Troqueville, his eyes almost starting out of his head with eagerness, triumph, and hope of further praise. ‘Many a time and oft have I drawn comfort from it.’

‘I have ever held you to be a Saint Augustin manqué, uncle. When you have leisure, you would do well to write your confessions—they would afford most excellent and edifying reading,’ and Jacques’s eyes as he said this were glittering slits of wickedness.

After supper the two, mumbling some excuse about an engagement to friends, put on their cloaks and went out, and Madeleine, wishing to be alone with her thoughts, went to her own room.

She recalled Mère Agnès’s words, and, as they had lain an hour or so dormant in her mind, they came out tinted with the colour of her desires. Why, what was her exhortation to see behind the ‘particulars’ of the Gospels the ‘generals’ of Eternity, but a vindication of Madeleine’s own method of sanctifying her love for Mademoiselle de Scudéry by regarding it as a symbol of her love of Christ? Yes, Mère Agnès had implicitly advised the making of a Robert Pilou screen. Profane history told by means of sacred woodcuts becomes sacred history, was, in Mère Agnès’s words, to read history ‘with the apocalyptic eye of Saint John,’ it was to see ‘generals’ behind ‘particulars.’

But supposing ... supposing the ‘generals’ should come crashing through the ‘particulars,’ like a river in spate that bursts its dam? And supposing God were to relieve her of her labour? In the beginning of time, He—the Dürer of the skies—on cubes of wood, hewn from the seven trees of Paradise, had cut in pitiless relief the story of the human soul. The human soul, pursuing a desire that ever evades its grasp, while behind it, swift, ineluctable, speed ‘invisible things,’ their hands stretched out to seize it by the hair.

What if from the design cut on these cubes he were to engrave the pictures of her life, that, gummed with holy resin on the screen of the heavens, they might show forth to men in ‘particulars proportioned to their finite minds,’ the ‘generals’ cut by the finger of God?

Mère Agnès had said: ‘I was wont to struggle against my love for Him with an eagerness as great as that with which I do now pursue Him. And I think, dear child, ’twill fall out thus with you.’ ‘Who flees, she shall pursue; who spurns gifts, she shall offer them; who loves not, willy-nilly she shall love.’ Was the Sapphic Ode an assurance, not that one day Mademoiselle de Scudéry would love her, but that she herself would one day love Christ? What if she had read the omens wrong, what if they all pointed to the Heavenly Rape? How could she ever have dreamed that grace would be the caterer for her earthly desires—Grace, the gadfly, goading the elect willy-nilly along the grim Roman road of redemption that, undeviating and ruthless, cuts through forests, pierces mountains, and never so much as skirts the happy meadows? That she herself was one of the elect, she was but too sure.

‘Sortir du siècle’—where had she heard the expression? Oh, of course! It was in La Fréquente Communion, and was used for the embracing of the monastic life. The alternative offered to Gennadius had been to ‘sortir du siècle ou de subir le joug de la pénitence publique.’ Madeleine shuddered ... either, by dropping out of this witty, gallant century, to forgo the vitæ munus or else ... to suffer public humiliation ... could she bear another public humiliation such as the one at the Hôtel de Rambouillet? Her father had been humiliated before Ariane ... Jacques had been partly responsible.... Hylas, hélas! ... the Smithy of Vulcan ... was she going mad?

In the last few hours by some invisible cannon a breach had been made in her faith.

CHAPTER XVIII
A DISAPPOINTMENT

By Friday, Madeleine was in a fever of nervousness. In the space of twenty-four hours, she would know God’s policy with regard to herself. Oh! could He not be made to realise that to deprive her of just this one thing she craved for would be a fatal mistake? Until she was sure of the love of Mademoiselle de Scudéry she had no energy or emotion to spare for other things. She reverted to her old litany:—‘Blessed Virgin, Mother of our Lord, give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’ and so on, which she repeated dozens of times on end.

This time to-morrow it would have happened; she would know about it all. Oh, how could she escape from remembering this, and the impossibility of fitting a dream into time? Any agony would be better than this sitting gazing at the motionless curtain of twenty-four hours that lay between herself and her fate. Oh, for the old days at Lyons! Then, she had had the whole of Eternity in which to hope; now, she had only twenty-four hours, for in their hard little hands lay the whole of time; before and after lay Eternity.

Madame Troguin had looked in in the morning and chattered of the extravagance of the Précieuses of her quarter. One young lady, for instance, imagined herself madly enamoured of Céladon of the Astrée, and had been found in the attire of a shepherdess sitting by the Seine, and weeping bitterly.

‘I am glad that our girls have some sense, are not you?’ she had said to Madame Troqueville, who had replied with vehement loyalty to Madeleine, that she was indeed. ‘They say that Mademoiselle de Scudéry—the writer of romances—is the fount of all these visions. She has no fortune whatever, I believe, albeit her influence is enormous both at the Court and in the Town.’

Any reference to Sappho’s eminence had a way of setting Madeleine’s longing madly ablaze. This remark rolled over and over in her mind, and it burnt more furiously every minute. She rushed to her room and groaned with longing, then fell on her knees and prayed piteously, passionately:—

‘Give me the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Give it me, dear Christ, take everything else, but give me that.’ And indeed this longing had swallowed up all the others from which it had grown—desire for a famous ruelle, for a reputation for esprit, for the entrée to the fashionable world. She found herself (in imagination) drawing a picture to Sappho of the Indian Islands and begging her to fly there with her.

At last Saturday came, and with it, at about ten in the morning, a valet carrying a letter addressed to Madeleine in a small, meticulous writing. It ran thus:—

‘Mademoiselle,—A malady so tedious and unpoetical, that had it not been given the entrée to the society of les mots honnêtes by being mentioned by several Latin poets, and having by its intrinsic nature a certain claim to royalty, for it shares with the Queen the power of granting “Le Tabouret”; a malady, I say, which were it not for these saving graces I would never dare to mention to one who like yourself embodies its two most powerful enemies—Youth and Beauty—has taken me prisoner. Mademoiselle’s quick wit has already, doubtless, solved my little enigma and told herself with a tear, I trust, rather than a dimple, that the malady which has so cruelly engaged me to my chair is called—and it must indeed have been a stoic that thus named it!—La Goutte! Rarely has this unwelcome guest timed his visit with a more tantalising inopportuneness, or has shown himself more ungallant than to-day when he keeps a poor poet from the inspiration of beauty and beauty from its true mate, wit. But over one circumstance at least it bears no sway: that circumstance is that I remain, Mademoiselle, Your sincere and humble servitor,

‘Conrart.’

In all this fustian Madeleine’s ‘quick wit’ did not miss the fact that lay buried in it, hard and sharp, that she was not to be taken to Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s that afternoon. She laughed. It had so palpably been all along the only possible climax. Of course. This moment had always been part of her sum of experience. All her life, her prayers, and placations had been but the remedies of a man with a mortal disease. As often in moments of intense suffering, she was struck by the strangeness of being contained by the four walls of a room, queer things were behind these walls, she felt, if she could only penetrate them.

Berthe ambled in under pretext of fetching something, looking espiègle and inquisitive.

‘Good news, Mademoiselle?’ she asked. But Madeleine growled at her like an angry animal, and with lips stretched from her teeth, driving her nails into her palms, she tore into her own room.

Once there, she burst into a passion of tears, banging her head against the wall and muttering, ‘I hate God, I hate God!’ So He considered, did He, that ‘no one could resist the workings of the inward Grace’? Pish for the arrogant theory; she would disprove it, once and for all. Jacques was right. He was a wicked and a cruel God. All the Jansenist casuistry was incapable of saving Him from the diabolic injustice involved in the First Proposition:—

‘Some of God’s Commandments it is impossible for the just to fulfil.’

In plain words, the back is not made for the burden. Oh, the cold-blooded torturer! And the Jansenists with their intransigeant consistency, their contempt of compromise, were worthy of their terrible Master.

So, forsooth, He imagined that by plucking, feather by feather, the wings of her hopes, He could win her, naked and bleeding, to Him and His service? She would prove Him wrong, she would rescind His decrees and resolve the chain of predestination. No, her soul would never be ‘tamed with frets and weariness,’ she would never ‘pursue, nor offer gifts,’ and, willy-nilly, she would never love, from the design on His cubes of wood no print of her life would be taken.

And then the sting of the disappointment pricked her afresh, and again she burst into a passion of tears.

Pausing for breath, she caught sight of the Crucifix above her bed. A feeling of actual physical loathing seized her for her simpering Saviour, with His priggish apophthegms and His horrid Cross to which He took such a delight in nailing other people. She tore down the Crucifix, and made her fingers ache in her attempt to break it. And then, with an ingenuity which in ordinary circumstances she never applied to practical details, she broke it in the door.

A smothered laugh disclosed Berthe crouching by the wall, her face more than usually suggestive of a comic mask. Madeleine was seized by a momentary fear lest she should prove a spy of the sinister ‘Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement’—that pack of spiritual bloodhounds that ran all heretics relentlessly to earth—and she remembered with a shudder the fate of Claude Petit and le Sieur d’Aubreville. But after all, nothing could hurt her now, so she flung the broken fragments in her face and ‘tutoied’ her back to the kitchen.

She went and looked at her face in the glass. Her eyes were tired and swollen and heavy, and she noted with pleasure the tragic look in them. Then a sense of the catastrophe broke over her again in all its previous force and she flung herself upon her bed and once more sobbed and sobbed.

Madame Troqueville, when she came in laden with fish and vegetables from the Halles, was told by Berthe with mysterious winks that she had better go to Mademoiselle Madeleine. She was not in the least offended by Madeleine’s unwonted treatment of her, and too profoundly cynical to be shocked by her sacrilege or impressed by her misery. With a chuckle for youth’s intenseness she had shuffled silently back to her work.

Madame Troqueville flew to Madeleine. Her entry was Madeleine’s cue for a fresh outburst. She would not be cheated of her due of crying and pity; she owed herself many, many more tears.

Madame Troqueville took her in her arms in an agony of anxiety. At first Madeleine kicked and screamed, irritated at the possibility of her mother trying to alleviate the facts. Then she yielded to the comfort of her presence and sobbed out that Conrart could not take her to Mademoiselle de Scudéry.

How gladly would Madame Troqueville have accepted this explanation at its face value! A disappointment about a party was such a poignant sorrow in youth and one to which all young people were subject. But although she welcomed hungrily any sign of normality in her child, deep down she knew that this grief was not normal.

‘But, my angel,’ she began gently, ‘Monsieur Conrart will take you some other time.’

‘But I can’t wait!’ Madeleine screamed angrily; ‘all my hopes are utterly miscarried.’

Madame Troqueville smiled, and stroked her hair.

‘’Tis foolish to rouse one’s spleen, and waste one’s strength over trifles, for ’twill not make nor mend them, and it works sadly on your health.’

Madeleine had been waiting for this. She ground her teeth and gave a series of short, sharp screams of tearless rage.

‘For my sake, my angel, for my sake, forbear!’ implored her mother.

‘I shall scream and scream all my life,’ she hissed. ‘’Tis my concern and no one else’s. Ba-ah, ou-ow,’ and it ended off in a series of shrill, nervous, persistent ‘ee’s.’

Madame Troqueville sighed wearily, and sat silent for some minutes.

There was a lull in the sobbing, and then Madame Troqueville began, very gently, ‘Dear, dear child, if you could but learn the great art of indifference. I know that....’

But Madeleine interrupted with a shrill scream of despair.

‘Hush, dear one, hush! Oh, my pretty one, if I could but make life for you, but ’tis not in my power. All I can do is to love you. But if only you would believe me ... hush! my sweet, let me say my say ... if only you would believe me, to cultivate indifference is the one means of handselling life.’

‘But I can’t!’

‘Try, my dearest heart, try. My dear, I have but little to give you in any way, for I cannot help you with religion, in that—you may think this strange, and it may be wicked—I have always had but little faith in these matters; and I am not wise nor learned, so I cannot help you with the balm of Philosophy, which they say is most powerful to heal, but one thing I have learned and that is to be supremely indifferent—in most matters. Oh, dear treasure....’

‘But I want, I want, I want things!’ cried Madeleine.

Madame Troqueville smiled sadly, and for some moments sat in silence, stroking Madeleine’s hair, then she began tentatively,—

‘At times I feel ... that “petite-oie,” as you called it, frightened me, my sweet. It caused me to wonder if you were not apt to throw away matters of moment for foolish trifles. Do you remember how you pleased old Madame Pilou by telling her that she was not like the dog in the fable, that lost its bone by trying to get its reflection, well....’

‘I said it because I thought it would please her, one must needs talk in a homely, rustic fashion to such people. Oh, let me be! let me be!’ To have her own words used against her was more than she could bear; besides, her mother had suggested, by the way she had spoken, that there was more behind this storm than mere childish disappointment at the postponement of a party, and Madeleine shrank from her obsession being known. I think she feared that it was, perhaps, rather ridiculous.

Madame Troqueville gazed at her anxiously for some minutes, and then said,—

‘I wonder if Sirop de Roses is a strong enough purge for you. Perhaps you need another course of steel in wine; and I have heard this new remedy they call “Orviétan” is an excellent infusion, I saw some in the rue Dauphine at the Sign of the Sun. I will send Berthe at once to get you some.’

CHAPTER XIX
THE PLEASURES OF DESPAIR

The disappointment had indeed been a shattering blow, and its effects lasted much longer than the failure at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. For then her vanity or, which is the same thing, her instinct of self-preservation, had not allowed her to acknowledge that she had been a social failure. But this disappointment was a hard fact against whose fabric saving fancy beat its wings in vain. Sometimes she would play with the thought of suicide, but would shrink back from it as the final blow to all her hopes. For, supposing she should wake up in the other world, and find the old longing gnawing still, like Céladon, when he wakes up in the Palace of Galathée? She would picture herself floating invisible round Mademoiselle de Scudéry, unable to leave any footprint on her consciousness, and although this had a certain resemblance to her present state, as long as they were both in this world, there must always be a little hope. And then, supposing that the first knowledge that flashed on her keener, freer senses when she had died was that if only she had persevered a year longer, perhaps only a month longer, the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry would have been hers! She took some comfort from the clammy horror of the thought. For, after all, as long as she was alive there must always be left a few grains of hope ... while she was alive ... but what if one night she should be wakened by the ringing of a bell in the street, and running to the window see by the uncertain light of the lantern he held in one hand, a macabre figure, looking like one of the Kings in the pack of cards with which Death plays against Life for mortal men, the stiff folds of his old-world garment embroidered with skulls and tears and cross-bones! And what would he be singing as he rang his bell?:—

‘Priez Dieu pour l’âme de la Demoiselle de Scudéry qui vient de trépasser.’

Vient de trépasser! Lying stiff and cold and lonely, and Madeleine had never been able to tell her that she loved her.

Good God! There were awful possibilities!

She was haunted, too, by the fear that God had not deserted her, but had resolved in His implacable way that willy-nilly she must needs eventually receive His bitter gift of Salvation. That, struggle though she would, she would be slowly, grimly weaned from all that was sweet and desirable, and then in the twinkling of an eye caught up ‘to the love of Invisible Things.’ ‘One cannot resist the inward Grace;’ well, she, at least, would put up a good fight.

Then a wave of intense self-pity would break over her that the all-powerful God, who by raising His hand could cause the rivers to flow backwards to their sources, the sun to drop into the sea, when she approached Him with her prayer for the friendship of a poverty-stricken authoress—a prayer so paltry that it could be granted by an almost unconscious tremble of His will, by an effort scarcely strong enough to cause an Autumn leaf to fall—that this God should send her away empty-handed and heart-broken.

Yes, it was but a small thing she wanted, but how passionately, intensely she wanted it.

If things had gone as she had hoped, she would by now be known all over the town as the incomparable Sappho’s most intimate friend. In the morning she would go to her ruelle and they would discuss the lights and shades of their friendship; in the afternoon she would drive with her in le Cours la Reine, where all could note the happy intimacy between them; in the evening Sappho would read her what she had written that day, and to each, life would grow daily richer and sweeter. But actually she had been half a year in Paris and she and Sappho had not yet exchanged a word. No, the trials of Céladon and Phaon and other heroes of romance could not be compared to this, for they from the first possessed the estime of their ladies, and so what mattered the plots of rivals or temporary separations? What mattered even misunderstandings and quarrels? When one of the lovers in Cyrus is asked if there is something amiss between him and his mistress, he answers sadly:—

‘Je ne pense pas Madame que j’y sois jamais assez bien pour y pouvoir être mal.’

and that was her case—the hardest case of all. In the old sanguine days at Lyons, when the one obstacle seemed to be that of space, what would she have said if she had been told how far away she would still be from her desire after half a year in Paris?

One day, when wandering unhappily about the Île Notre-Dame, with eyes blind to the sobriety and majestic sweep of life that even the ignoble crowd of litigants and hawkers was unable to arrest in that island that is at once so central and so remote, she had met Marguerite Troguin walking with her tire-woman and a girl friend. She had come up to Madeleine and had told her with a giggle that they had secretly been buying books at the Galerie du Palais. ‘They are stowed away in there,’ she whispered, pointing to the large market-basket carried by the tire-woman, ‘Sercy’s Miscellany of Verse, and the Voyage à la Lune, and the Royaume de Coquetterie; if my mother got wind of it she’d burn the books and send me to bed,’ at which the friend giggled and the tire-woman smiled discreetly.

‘They told us at Quinet’s that the first volume of a new romance by Mademoiselle de Scudéry is shortly to appear. Oh, the pleasure I take in Cyrus, ’tis the prettiest romance ever written!’ Marguerite cried rapturously. ‘I have heard it said that Sappho in the Sixth volume is a portrait of herself, I wonder if ’tis true.’

‘It is, indeed, and an excellent portrait at that, save that the original is ten times wittier and more galante,’ Madeleine found herself answering with an important air, touched with condescension.

‘Are you acquainted with her?’ the two girls asked in awed voices.

‘Why, yes, I am well acquainted with her, she has asked me to attend her Samedis.’

And afterwards she realised with a certain grim humour that could she have heard this conversation when she was at Lyons she would have concluded that all had gone as she had hoped.

During this time she did not dance, because that would be a confession that hope was not dead. That it should be dead she was firmly resolved, seeing that, although genuinely miserable, she took a pleasure in nursing this misery as carefully as she had nursed the atmosphere of her second coup de grâce. By doing so, she felt that she was hurting something or some one—what or who she could not have said—but something outside herself; and the feeling gave her pleasure. All through this terrible time she would follow her mother about like a whimpering dog, determined that she should be spared none of her misery, and Madame Troqueville’s patience and sympathy were unfailing.

Jacques, too, rose to the occasion. He lost for the time all his mocking ways, nor would he try to cheer her up with talk of ‘some other Saturday,’ knowing that it would only sting her into a fresh paroxysm of despair, but would sit and hold her hand and curse the cruelty of disappointment. Monsieur Troqueville also realised the gravity of the situation. On the rare occasions when the fact that some one was unhappy penetrated through his egotism, he was genuinely distressed. He would bring her little presents—a Portuguese orange, or some Savoy biscuits, or a new print—and would repeat over and over again: ‘’Tis a melancholy business! A melancholy business!’ One day, however, he added gloomily: ‘’Tis the cruellest fate, for these high circles would have been the fit province for Madeleine and for me,’ at which Madeleine screamed out in a perfect frenzy: ‘There’s no similarity between him and me! none! NONE! NONE!’ and poor Monsieur Troqueville was hustled out of the room, while Jacques and her mother assured her that she was not in the least like her father.

Monsieur Troqueville seemed very happy about something at that time. Berthe told Madeleine that she had found hidden in a chest, a galant of ribbons, a pair of gay garters, an embroidered handkerchief, and a cravat.

‘He is wont to peer at them when Madame’s back is turned, and, to speak truth, he seems as proud of them as Mademoiselle was of the bravery she bought at the Fair!’ and she went on to say that by successful eavesdropping she had discovered that he had won them as a wager.

‘It seems that contrary to the expectations of his comrades he has taken the fancy of a pretty maid! He! He! Monsieur’s a rare scoundrel!’ but Madeleine seemed to take no interest in the matter.

The only thing in which she found a certain relief was in listening to Berthe’s tales about her home. Berthe could talk by the hour about the sayings and doings of her young brothers and sisters, to whom she was passionately devoted. And Madeleine could listen for hours, for Berthe was so remote from her emotionally that she felt no compulsion to din her with her own misery, and she felt no rights on her sympathy, as she did on her mother’s, whom she was determined should not be spared a crumb of her own anguish. In her childhood, her imagination had been fascinated by an object in the house of an old lady they had known. It was a small box, in which was a tiny grotto, made of moss and shells and little porcelain flowers, out of which peeped a variegated porcelain fauna—tiny foxes and squirrels and geese, and blue and green birds; beside a glass Jordan, on which floated little boats, stood a Christ and Saint John the Baptist, and over their heads there hung from a wire a white porcelain dove. To many children smallness is a quality filled with romance, and Madeleine used to crave to walk into this miniature world and sail away, away, away, down the glass river to find the tiny cities that she felt sure lay hidden beyond the grotto; in Berthe’s stories she felt a similar charm and lure.

She would tell how her little brother Albert, when minding the sheep of a stern uncle, fell asleep one hot summer afternoon, and on waking up found that two of the lambs were missing.

‘Then, poor, pretty man, he fell to crying bitterly, for any loss to his pocket my uncle takes but ill, when lo! on a sudden, there stood before him a damsel of heroic stature, fair as the fleurs de lys on a royal banner, in antic tire and her hair clipped short like a lad’s, and quoth she, smiling: “Petit paysan, voilà tes agneaux!” and laying the two lost lambs by his side, she vanished. And in telling what had befallen him he called her just “the good Shepherdess,” but the curé said she could be no other than Jeanne, la Pucelle, plying, as in the days before she took to arms, the business of a shepherdess.’

Then she would tell of the little, far-away inn kept by her father, with its changing, motley company; of the rustic mirth on the Nuit des Rois; of games of Colin-maillard in the garret sweet with the smell of apples; of winter nights round the fire when tales were told of the Fairy Magloire, brewer of love-potions; of the sotret, the fairy barber of Lorraine, who curled the hair of maidens for wakes and marriages, or (if the curé happened to drop in) more guileless legends of the pretty prowess of the petit Jésus.

Madeleine saw it all as if through the wrong end of a telescope—tiny and far-away.

CHAPTER XX
FRESH HOPE

One afternoon Madame Troqueville called Madeleine in an eager voice. Madeleine listlessly came to her.

‘I have a piece of news for you,’ she said, looking at her with smiling eyes.

‘What is it?... Doubtless some one has invited us to a Comedy,’ she said wearily.

‘No! I came back by the Île and there I chanced on Monsieur Conrart walking with a friend’—Madeleine went deadly white—‘And I went up and accosted him. He has such a good-natured look! I told him how grievously chagrined you had been when his project came to naught of driving you to wait upon Mademoiselle de Scudéry, indeed I told him it had worked on you so powerfully you had fallen ill.’

‘You didn’t! Oh! Oh! Oh! ’Tis not possible you told him that!’ wailed Madeleine, her eyes suddenly filling with tears.

‘But come, my dear heart, where was the harm?’ Madeleine covered her face with her hands and writhed in nervous agony, giving little short, sharp moans.

‘Oh! Oh! I would liefer have died.’

‘Come, my heart, don’t be so fantastical, he was so concerned about it, and you haven’t yet heard the pleasantest part of my news!’

‘What?’ asked Madeleine breathlessly, while wild hopes darted through her mind, such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry having confessed a secret passion for her to Conrart.

‘This Saturday, he is coming in his coach to fetch you to wait on her!’

Madeleine received the news with a welter of different emotions—wriggling self-consciousness, mortification at the thought of Conrart knowing, and perhaps telling Mademoiselle de Scudéry, how much she cared, excitement bubbling up through apprehension, premature shyness, and a little regret for having to discard her misery, to which she had become thoroughly accustomed. She trembled with excitement, but did not speak.

‘Are you pleased?’ her mother asked, taking her hands. She felt rather proud of herself, for she disliked taking the field even more than Madeleine did, and she had had to admonish herself sharply before making up her mind to cross the road and throw herself on Conrart’s mercy.

‘Oh! yes ... yes ... I think I am,’ and Madeleine laughed nervously. Then she kissed her mother and ran away. In a few minutes she came back looking as if she wanted to say something.

‘What’s amiss, my dear life?’ Madeleine drew a hissing breath through her teeth and shut her eyes, blushing crimson.

‘Er ... did ... er ... did he seem to find it odd, what you told him about my falling ill, and all that?’

‘Dearest heart, here is no matter for concern. You see I was constrained to make mention of your health that it should so work on his pity that he should feel constrained to acquit himself towards you and——’

‘Yes, but what did you say?’

‘I said naught, my dear, that in any way he could take ill. I did but acquaint him with the eagerness with which you had awaited the visit and with the bitterness of your chagrin when you heard it was not to be.’

‘But I thought you said that you’d said somewhat concerning—er—my making myself ill?’

‘Well, and what if I did? You little goose, you——’

‘Yes, but what did you say?’

‘How can I recall my precise words? But I give you my word they were such that none could take amiss.’

‘Oh! But what did you say?’ Madeleine’s face was all screwed up with nerves, and she twisted her fingers.

‘Oh! Madeleine, dear!’ sighed her mother wearily. ‘What a pother about nothing! I said that chagrin had made you quite ill, and he was moved to compassion. Was there aught amiss in that?’

‘Oh, no, doubtless not. But ... er ... I hope he won’t acquaint Mademoiselle de Scudéry with the extent of my chagrin!’

‘Well, and what if he did? She would in all likelihood be greatly flattered!’

‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! do you think he will? I’d kill myself if I thought he had!’

Madame Troqueville gave up trying to reduce Madeleine’s emotions to reason, and said soothingly, ‘I’m certain, my dearest, he’ll do nothing of the kind, I dare swear it has already escaped his memory.’ And Madeleine was comforted.

She ran into her own room, her emotions all in a whirl, and flung herself on her bed.

Then she sprang up, and, after all these leaden-footed weeks, she was again dancing.