On the drive home the Chevalier and Mademoiselle Boquet had a learned discussion about music, and Madeleine sat silent and wide-eyed. It was eight o’clock when they reached the petite rue du Paon. Madeleine rushed in to her mother, who was waiting for her, and launched into a long excited account of the day’s doings, which fulfilled the same psychological need that a dance would have done, and then she went to her room, for her mother wished to discuss the violent decision come to so suddenly by Jacques.
She went straight to bed and fell asleep to the cry of the Oublieux—‘La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies!’
CHAPTER XXXIII
FACE TO FACE WITH FACTS
She awoke next morning to the sense that she must make up her account. How exactly did things stand? She certainly had been neither gauche nor silent the day before. Saint Magdalene had done all she had asked of her, but by so doing had she played her some hideous trick?
She had had absolute faith in Descartes’ doctrine that love proceeds from admiration, and that admiration is caused by anything rare and extraordinary. She was rare, she was extraordinary, but had she aroused admiration? And even if she had, could it not be the forerunner of hate as well as of love?
Alas! how much easier would be self-knowledge, and hence, if the Greeks were right, how much easier too would be virtue, if the actions of our passions were as consistent, the laws that govern them as mechanical, as they appear in Descartes’ Treatise. Moreover, how much easier would be happiness if, docile and catholic like birds and flowers, we were never visited by these swift, exclusive passions, which are so rarely reciprocal.
No, if Mademoiselle de Scudéry did not feel for her d’un aveugle penchant le charme imperceptible, the Cestus of Venus itself would be of no avail. Even if she had not cut herself off from the relief of her dances by bringing them to a climax beyond which their virtue could not function, this had been, even for their opiate, too stern and dolorous a fact.
Circumstances had forced her bang up against reality this time. She must find out, once and for all, how matters stood, that is to say, if she had aroused the emotion of admiration. She must have her own suspicions allayed—or confirmed. The only way this could be done, was to go to the Chevalier’s house and ask him. The spoken word carried for her always a strange finality. Suspense would be unbearable; she must go now.