CHAPTER XXX
A JAR
It was the day before the meeting. Early next morning the Chevalier de Méré was to call for her in his coach and drive her out to Conrart’s house. He was also taking that tiresome little Mademoiselle Boquet. That was a pity, but she was particularly pleased that the Chevalier himself was to be there, he always brought out her most brilliant qualities.
She was absolutely certain of success ... the real world seemed to have become the dream world ... she felt as if she had been turned into a creature of some light, unsubstantial substance living in an airless crystal ball.
That afternoon, being Thursday and a holiday, she went an excursion with Jacques to Chaillot, a little village up the Seine. She walked in a happy trance, and the fifteenth century Church, ornate and frivolous, dotted with its black Minims—‘les bons hommes de Chaillot’—and the coach of the exiled Queen-Mother of England’s gaily rattling down the cobbled street, seemed to her—safe inside her crystal ball—pretty and unreal and far-away, like Berthe’s stories of Lorraine.
Then they wandered into a little copse behind the village and lay there in the fantastic green shade, and Madeleine stroked and petted Jacques and laughed away his jealousy about the Chevalier, and promised that next week she would go with him to the notary and plight her troth.
Then they got up and she took his arm; on her face was a rapt smile, for she was dreaming particularly pleasant things about herself and Sappho.
Suddenly Jacques’s foot caught in a hidden root ... down he came, dragging Madeleine after him ... smash went the crystal ball, and once more she saw the world bright and hard and menacing and felt around her the rough, shrewd winds.
So Jacques had made her fall—just when she was having such pleasant dreams of Sappho!
Hylas, hélas! Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. Birds thinking to fly through have dashed themselves against the wall. ’Tis as though the issue of his roman were tied in a strange knot with that of yours. I have been writing a little comedy on life instead of on foolscap. In the smithy of Vulcan are being forged weapons which will not tarry to smash your fragile world into a thousand fragments ... weapons? Perhaps one of them was ‘the scimitar of the Comic Muse’ (or was it the ‘symmetry’? It did not really matter which.)
Who was the mercer at the Fair? He had the same eyes as the nun at the Carmelites.... Her father, too, had a petite-oie ... he had put his faith in bravery. Perhaps Venus-Magdalen and the Comic Muse were one ... and their servant was Hylas the mocking shepherd. The wooden cubes on which God’s finger had cut a design ... generals and particulars. Have a care lest that scoundrel Jacques stick a disgrace upon you, as he has done to me! A comedy written upon life instead of upon foolscap.