Madeleine hung her head and then confessed her theory about the Wax, and how she had tried upon reality the plastic force of her will.
Jacques threw out his hands in despair.
‘Oh, Chop!’ he cried, ‘it is a sin to turn to such maniac uses the cleanest, sweetest good sense that ever man has penned! That passage about the wax is but a figure! The only way to compass what we wish is to exercise our will first on our own passions until they will take what ply we choose, and then to exercise it on the passions of others. Success lies in you but is not to be compassed by vain, foolish rites after the manner of the heathen and the Christians. Why, you have made yourself a slave, bound with the fetters of affrighting fancies that do but confound the senses and scatter the understanding. The will is the only talisman. Exercise yourself in the right using of it against your next meeting with Mademoiselle de Scudéry, then when that meeting comes, at one word from you the bashful humours—docile now—will cower behind your spleen, and the mercurial ones will go dancing through your blood up to your brain, whence they will let fall a torrent of conceits like sugar-plums raining from the Palais Mazarin, and thus in Mademoiselle de Scudéry you will arouse the mother of the passions—Admiration.’
They both laughed, and arm in arm—Madeleine with a serene look in her eyes—made their way to the petite rue du Paon.
CHAPTER XXV
THE SYMMETRY OF THE COMIC MUSE
July came, making the perfume of the meadows more fragrant, the stench of the Paris streets more foul.
Madeleine had adopted Jacques’s rationalism, and, having discarded all supernatural aids, was applying her energies to the quelling of her ‘passions.’
It stood to reason that l’amitié tendre could only spring from the seeds of Admiration. It behoved her, then, to make herself worthy of Admiration. The surest way of achieving this was to perfect herself in the air galant, and she had the great good fortune to procure the assistance of one of the most eminent professors of this difficult art. For the Chevalier de Méré wrote an elaborate Epistle asking her to grant him the privilege of waiting on her, which she answered in what she considered a masterpiece of elegant discretion, consisting of pages of obscure preciosity ending in the pleasant sting of a little piquant ‘yes.’
He became an almost daily visitor, and, unfailingly suave and fluent, he would give her dissertations on life and manners, filled with that tame, fade common sense which had recently come to be regarded as the last word in culture.