In short, the fact could not be blinked that Jacques was ignoble enough to be quite content with being a bourgeois.
Then again, in Metaphysics, Jacques held very different views from Madeleine, for he was an Atheistic follower of Descartes and a scoffer at Jansenism, while in other matters he was much in sympathy with the ‘Libertins’—the sworn foes of the Précieuses. The name of ‘Libertin’ was applied—in those days with no pornographic connotation—to the disciples of Gassendi, Nandé, and La Motte le Vayer. These had evolved a new Epicurean philosophy, to some of their followers merely an excuse for witty gluttony, to others, a potent ethical incentive. The Précieuses, they held, had insulted by the diluted emotions and bombastic language their good goddess Sens Commun, who had caught for them some of the radiance of the Greek Σωφροσύνη. One taste, however, they shared with the Précieusues, and that was the love of the crotesque—of quaint, cracked brains and deformed, dwarfish bodies, and of colouring. It was the same tendency probably that produced a little earlier the architecture known as baroque, the very word crotesque suggesting the mock stalactitic grottoes with which these artists had filled the gardens of Italy. But this very thing was being turned by the Libertins, with unconscious irony, via the genre burlesque of the Abbé Scarron, into a sturdy Gallic realism—for first studying real life in quest of the crotesque, they fell in love with its other aspects too.
Madeleine resented that Jacques continued just as interested in his own life as before he had met her—in his bright-eyed vagabondage in Bohemia, his quest after absurdities on the Pont-Neuf and in low taverns. She hated to be reminded that there could be anything else in the world but herself. But in spite of her evident disapproval, he continued to spend just as much of his time in devising pranks with his subjects of La Bazoche, and in haunting the Pont-Neuf in quest of the crotesque.
Another thing which greatly displeased Madeleine was that Jacques and her father had struck up a boon-companionship, and this also she was not able to stop.
That same evening, when they got into her room, they were silent for a little. Jacques always left it to her to give the note of the evening’s intimacy.
‘What are you pondering?’ he said at last.
‘’Twould be hard to say, Jacques.... I’m exceeding happy.’
‘Are you? I’m glad of it! you have been of so melancholy and strange a humour ever since I’ve known you. There were times when you had the look of a hunted thing.’
‘Yes, at times my heart was like to break with melancholy.’