‘Very well, and I’ll settle down and build my harem there and fill it with Madame Pilous,’ said he, grinning. ‘If I had lived in the days of Amadis de Gaul she should have been my lady and I’d have worn ... a hair shirt made of her beard!’
Madeleine, who did not, as a rule, much appreciate Jacques’s wit, laughed long and excitedly. Her mother looked at her, not sure whether to rejoice at or to fear this sudden change from languid gloom. Jacques went on with his jerky panegyric. ‘She is like some one in Rabelais. She might have been the mother of Gargantua, she——’
‘Gargamelle! Gargamelle was the mother of Gargantua!’ cried Madeleine eagerly and excitedly.
‘As you will, Gargamelle, then. Why doesn’t she please you, Aunt? It is you that are really the Précieuse, and Madeleine is at heart a franque gauloise,’ and he looked at Madeleine wickedly.
‘That I’m not ... you know nothing of my humour, Jacques.... I know best about myself, I am abhorrent of aught that is coarse and ungallant.... I am to seek why you should make other people share your faults, you——’ Madeleine had tears of rage in her eyes.
‘You are a sprouting Madame Pilou, beard and all!’ teased Jacques. ‘No, you’re not,’ and he stopped abruptly. It was his way suddenly to get bored with a subject he had started himself.
‘But Madeleine,’ began Madame Troqueville, ‘what, in Heaven’s name, prompted you to refuse to meet Mademoiselle de Scutary?’
‘De S-c-u-d-é-r-y,’ corrected Madeleine, enunciating each letter with weary irritation.
‘De Scudéry, then. You are such a goose, my child; in the name of Our Lady, how can you expect——’ and Madame Troqueville began to work herself up into a frenzy, such as only Madeleine was able to arouse in her.