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.