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!