Vient de trépasser! Lying stiff and cold and lonely, and Madeleine had never been able to tell her that she loved her.
Good God! There were awful possibilities!
She was haunted, too, by the fear that God had not deserted her, but had resolved in His implacable way that willy-nilly she must needs eventually receive His bitter gift of Salvation. That, struggle though she would, she would be slowly, grimly weaned from all that was sweet and desirable, and then in the twinkling of an eye caught up ‘to the love of Invisible Things.’ ‘One cannot resist the inward Grace;’ well, she, at least, would put up a good fight.
Then a wave of intense self-pity would break over her that the all-powerful God, who by raising His hand could cause the rivers to flow backwards to their sources, the sun to drop into the sea, when she approached Him with her prayer for the friendship of a poverty-stricken authoress—a prayer so paltry that it could be granted by an almost unconscious tremble of His will, by an effort scarcely strong enough to cause an Autumn leaf to fall—that this God should send her away empty-handed and heart-broken.
Yes, it was but a small thing she wanted, but how passionately, intensely she wanted it.
If things had gone as she had hoped, she would by now be known all over the town as the incomparable Sappho’s most intimate friend. In the morning she would go to her ruelle and they would discuss the lights and shades of their friendship; in the afternoon she would drive with her in le Cours la Reine, where all could note the happy intimacy between them; in the evening Sappho would read her what she had written that day, and to each, life would grow daily richer and sweeter. But actually she had been half a year in Paris and she and Sappho had not yet exchanged a word. No, the trials of Céladon and Phaon and other heroes of romance could not be compared to this, for they from the first possessed the estime of their ladies, and so what mattered the plots of rivals or temporary separations? What mattered even misunderstandings and quarrels? When one of the lovers in Cyrus is asked if there is something amiss between him and his mistress, he answers sadly:—
‘Je ne pense pas Madame que j’y sois jamais assez bien pour y pouvoir être mal.’
and that was her case—the hardest case of all. In the old sanguine days at Lyons, when the one obstacle seemed to be that of space, what would she have said if she had been told how far away she would still be from her desire after half a year in Paris?
One day, when wandering unhappily about the Île Notre-Dame, with eyes blind to the sobriety and majestic sweep of life that even the ignoble crowd of litigants and hawkers was unable to arrest in that island that is at once so central and so remote, she had met Marguerite Troguin walking with her tire-woman and a girl friend. She had come up to Madeleine and had told her with a giggle that they had secretly been buying books at the Galerie du Palais. ‘They are stowed away in there,’ she whispered, pointing to the large market-basket carried by the tire-woman, ‘Sercy’s Miscellany of Verse, and the Voyage à la Lune, and the Royaume de Coquetterie; if my mother got wind of it she’d burn the books and send me to bed,’ at which the friend giggled and the tire-woman smiled discreetly.
‘They told us at Quinet’s that the first volume of a new romance by Mademoiselle de Scudéry is shortly to appear. Oh, the pleasure I take in Cyrus, ’tis the prettiest romance ever written!’ Marguerite cried rapturously. ‘I have heard it said that Sappho in the Sixth volume is a portrait of herself, I wonder if ’tis true.’