CHAPTER XXVII
THE CHRISTIAN VENUS
The sane and steady procedure of the last few weeks—to prepare for the arousing of Admiration in Mademoiselle de Scudéry by a course in the art of pleasing—now seemed to Madeleine inadequate and frigid. She felt she could no longer cope with life without supernatural aid.
Once more her imagination began to pullulate with tiny nervous fears.
There would be onions for dinner—a vegetable that she detested. She would feel that unless she succeeded in gulping down her portion before her father gave another hiccough, she would never gain the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. She would wake up in the middle of the night with the conviction that unless, standing on one leg, she straightway repeated ‘cogito, ergo sum’ fifteen times, Conrart would be seized by another attack of gout which would postpone her visit.
But these little fears—it would be tedious to enumerate them all—found their source in one great fear, to wit lest the Sapphic Ode and the adventures of Nausicaa formed one story.
The Ode tells how Venus appeared to Sappho and promised her rare things; but were these promises fulfilled? The Ode does not tell us, but we know that Sappho leapt from a cliff into the cold sea. The Virgin appears to Nausicaa, and although her promises are not as explicit as those of Venus, they are every whit as enticing, and what do they lead to? To a maiden disillusioned, deserted, and heart-broken, finding her final consolation in the cold and ravishing embraces of an Angel.
She, too, by omens and signs had been promised rare things; she had abandoned God, but had she ceased to believe in His potency? She remembered the impression left on Jacques by the fourth book of the Eneid, and Descartes’ discarded hypothesis of an evil god, le grand trompeur—the ‘great cheat,’ he had called Him. Perhaps He had sent the Virgin to Nausicaa, Dame Venus to Sappho, and to herself a constellation of auspicious stars, to cozen them with fair promises that He might have the joy of breaking them—and their hearts as well.
One evening when her nerves were nearly cracking under the strain of this idea, she went to the kitchen to seek out Berthe.
‘Berthe,’ she said, ‘when you do strangely desire a thing shall come to pass, what means do you affect to compass it?’