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?