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.