That night Madeleine was delirious, and Madame Troqueville was sent for. It was the beginning of a long illness which, for want of a better name, her doctor called a sharp attack of the spleen.
CHAPTER IV
THE SIN OF NARCISSUS
In time she recovered, or at least was supposed to have recovered, but she did not return to the Convent, and her mother still watched her anxiously and was more than ever inclined to give in to her in everything.
The doctor had advised her to continue taking an infusion of steel in white wine, and to persist in daily exercise, the more violent the better. So at first she would spend several hours of the day playing at shuttlecock with her mother, but Madame Troqueville’s energy failing her after the first few weeks, Madeleine was forced to pursue her cure by herself.
She found the exercise led to vague dreaming of a semi-dramatic nature—imaginary arguments with a nameless opponent dimly outlined against a background of cloth of gold—arguments in which she herself was invariably victorious. In time, she discarded the shuttlecock completely, finding that this semi-mesmeric condition was reached more easily through a wild dance, rhythmic but formless.
In the meantime her social values had become more just, and she realised that rank is higher than wealth, and that she herself, as the granddaughter of a Judge of the Paris Parlement, and even as the daughter of a procureur, was of more importance socially than the daughters of merchants, however wealthy.
Round the Intendant of the province and his wife there moved a select circle, dressed in the penultimate Paris fashion, using the penultimate Paris slang, and playing for very high stakes at Hoc and Reversi. It was to this circle that Madeleine’s eyes now turned with longing, as they had formerly done to the Sacred Circle at the Convent.
In time she got to know some of these Olympians. Those with whom she had the greatest success were the Précieuses, shrill, didactic ladies who by their unsuccessful imitation of their Paris models made Lyons the laughing-stock of the metropolis. Some of them would faint at the mention of a man’s name; indeed, one of them, who was also a dévote, finding it impossible to reconcile her prudishness with the idea of a male Redeemer, started a theory that Christ had been really a woman—‘’Tis clear from His clothes,’ she would say—and that the beard that painters gave Him, was only part of a plot to wrest all credit from women. They spoke a queer jargon, full of odd names for the most ordinary objects and barely intelligible to the uninitiated. Madeleine talked as much like them as self-consciousness would permit. Also, she copied them in a scrupulous care of her personal appearance, and in their attention to personal cleanliness, which was considered by the world at large as ridiculous as their language. Madame Troqueville feared she would ruin her by the expensive scents—poudre d’iris, musc, civette, eau d’ange—with which she drenched herself.
In the meantime she had got to know a grubby, smirking old gentleman who kept a book-shop and fancied himself as a literary critic. He used to procure the most recent publications of Sercy and Quinet and the other leading Paris publishers, and his shop became a favourite resort of a throng of poetasters and young men of would-be fashion who came there to read and criticise in the manner of the Paris muguets. Hither also came Madeleine, and in a little room behind the shop, where she was safe from ogles and insolence, she would devour all the books that pleased and modelled the taste of the day.