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:—