‘I must own to considering it a matter rather for rejoicing than commiseration that so noble an organ as the heart should at last be free from a grievous miasma that has gone a long way to bringing its reputation into ill-odour. I regard Descartes not as the Heart’s enemy but rather as its benefactor, as the venerable Teiresias who comes at the call of the noble Œdipus, desirous of discovering wherein lies the cause of his country’s suffering. Teiresias tells him that the cause is none other than the monarch’s favourite page, a pretty boy called Love. Whereupon the magnanimous Œdipus, attached though he is to this boy by all the tenderest bonds of love and affection, wreathes him in garlands and pelts him with rose-buds across the border. Then once more peace and plenty return to that fair kingdom, and les honnêtes gens are no longer ashamed of calling themselves subjects of its King.’
As she finishes this speech, Sappho’s eye catches that of Madeleine, and they smile at each other.
‘Why, Madame,’ cries Théodamas, laughing, ‘the inhabitant of so mean an alley as that in which Descartes has established Love, must needs, to earn his bread, stoop to the meanest offices, therefore we may consider that Descartes was in the right when he laid down that one of the functions of Love is to soulager l’estomac.’
CHAPTER XXIII
MADEMOISELLE DE SCUDÉRY’S SATURDAY
For the next few days Madeleine danced and desired and repeated mechanically to herself: ‘I will get the love of Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’ feeling, the while, that the facets of the adamant were pressing deep, deep into the wax of reality.
Then Saturday came, and Monsieur Conrart arrived in his old-fashioned coach punctually at 12.30. She took her place by his side and they began to roll towards the Seine.
‘I trust Acanthe will be worshipping at Sappho’s shrine to-day. His presence is apt to act as a spark setting ablaze the whole fabric of Sappho’s wit and wisdom,’ said Conrart in the tone of proud proprietorship he always used when speaking of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Who was Acanthe? Madeleine felt a sudden pang of jealousy, and her high confidence seemed suddenly to shrink and shrivel up as it always did at any reminder that Mademoiselle de Scudéry had an existence of her own, independent of that phantom existence of hers in Madeleine’s imaginings. She felt sick with apprehension.
As they passed from the rue de la Mortellerie into the fine sweep of the rue Sainte-Antoine the need for sympathy became peremptory. Conrart had been giving her a dissertation on the resemblance between modern Paris and ancient Rome, she had worn a look of demure attention, though her thoughts were all to the four winds. There was a pause, and she, to break the way for her question, said with an admirable pretence of half-dazzled glimpses into long vistas of thought: ‘How furiously interesting. Yes—in truth—there is a great resemblance,’ followed by a pause, as if her eyes were held spellbound by the vistas, while Conrart rubbed his hands in mild triumph. Then, with a sudden quick turn, as if the thought had just come to her,—
‘I must confess to a sudden access of bashfulness; the company will all be strange to me.’