But Madeleine interrupted a discussion that threatened to wander far away from the one aspect of the question in which she was interested.
‘If I take your meaning, Descartes doesn’t teach one how to compass what one wishes, he only teaches us how to be virtuous?’
Monsieur Troqueville gave a sudden wild tavern guffaw, and rubbing his hands delightedly, cried, ‘Pitiful dull reading, Jacques, hein?’
‘You took his book for a manual of love-potions, did you?’ Jacques said in a low voice, with a hard, mocking glint in his eyes.
He had divined her thought, and Madeleine blushed. Then his face softened, and he said gently,—
‘I will get you his works, nor will it be out of your gain to read them diligently.’
CHAPTER XXII
BEES-WAX
As he had promised, Jacques brought her the works of Descartes, and she turned eagerly to their pages. Here, surely, she would find food sweeter to her palate than the bitter catechu of Jansenism which she had spewed from her mouth with scorn and loathing.
But to her intense annoyance, she found the third maxim in the Discourse on Method to be as follows:—