Here were countless many-volumed romances, such as the Astrée of Honoré d’Urfé, La Calprenèdes’s Cassandre, and that flower of modernity, Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Grand Cyrus. Romans à clef, they were called, for in them all the leaders of fashion, all the bels esprits of the day were dressed up in classical or Oriental costumes, and set to the task of fitting the fashions and fads of modern Paris into the conditions of the ancient world or of the kingdom of the Grand Turk. But the important thing in these romances was what Madeleine called to herself, with some complacency at the name, ‘l’escrime galante’—conversations in which the gallant, with an indefatigable nimbleness of wit, pays compliment after compliment to the prudishly arch belle, by whom they are parried with an equal nimbleness and perseverance. If the gallant manages to get out a declaration, then the belle is touchée, and in her own eyes disgraced for ever. Then, often, paragons of esprit and galanterie, and the other urbane qualities necessary to les honnêtes gens, give long-winded discourses on some subtle point in the psychology of lovers. And all this against a background of earthquakes and fires and hair-breadth escapes, which, together with the incredible coldness of the capricious heroine, go to prove that nothing can wither the lilies and roses of the hero’s love and patience and courage. Then there were countless books of Vers Galants, sonnets, and madrigals by beplumed, beribboned poets, who, like pedlars of the Muses, displayed their wares in the ruelles and alcoves of great ladies. There were collections of letters, too, or rather, of jeux d’esprit, in which verse alternated with prose to twist carefully selected news into something which had the solidity of a sonnet, the grace of a madrigal. Of these letters, Madeleine was most dazzled by those of the late Vincent Voiture, Jester, and spoilt child of the famous Hôtel de Rambouillet, and through his letters she came to feel that she almost knew personally all those laughing, brilliant people, who had made the Hôtel so famous in the reign of Louis XIII.—the beautiful touchy ‘Lionne,’ with her lovely voice and burnished hair; the Princess Julie, suave and mocking, and, like all her family, an incorrigible tease; and the great Arthénice herself, whimsical and golden-hearted, with a humorous, half-apologetic chastity. She knew them all, and the light fantastic world in which they lived, a world of mediæval romance pour rire, in which magic palaces sprang up in the night, and where ordinary mortals who had been bold enough to enter were apt to be teased as relentlessly as Falstaff by the fairies of Windsor Forest.
But what Madeleine pored over most of all was the theory of all these elegant practices, embodied in species of guide-books to the polite world, filled with elaborate rules as to the right way of entering a room and of leaving it, analyses of the grades of deference or of insolence that could be expressed by a curtsey, the words which must be used and the words that must not be used, and all the other tiny things which, pieced together, would make the paradigm of an honnête homme or a femme galante. There Madeleine learned that the most heinous crime after that of being a bourgeois, was to belong to the Provinces, and the glory speedily departed from the Lyons Précieuses to descend on those of Paris. Her own surroundings seemed unbearable, and when she was not storming at the Virgin for having made her an obscure provincial, she was pestering her with prayers to transplant her miraculously to some higher sphere.
The craze for Jansenism—that Catholic Calvinism deduced from the writings of Saint Augustine by the Dutch Jansen, and made fashionable by the accomplished hermits of Port-Royal—already just perceptibly on the wane in Paris, had only recently reached Lyons. As those of Paris some years before, the haberdashers of Lyons now filled their shops with collars and garters à la Janséniste, and the booksellers with the charming treatises on theology by ‘les Messieurs de Port-Royal.’ Many of the ladies became enamoured of the ‘furiously delicious Saint Augustine,’ and would have little debates, one side sustaining the view that his hair had been dark, the other that it had been fair. They raved about his Confessions, vowing that there was in it a ‘Je ne sais quoi de doux et de passionné.’
Madeleine also caught the craze and in as superficial a manner as the others. For instance, the three petticoats worn by ladies which the Précieuses called ‘la modeste,’ ‘la friponne,’ and ‘la secrète,’ she rechristened ‘la grâce excitante,’ ‘la grâce subséquente,’ and ‘la grâce efficace.’ She gained from this quite a reputation in Lyons.
That Lent, the wife of the Intendant manœuvred that a priest of recognised Jansenist leanings should preach a sermon in the most fashionable Church of the town. He based his sermon on the Epistle for the day, which happened to be 2 Timothy, iii. 1. ‘This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves.’ The whole sermon was a passionate denunciation of amour-propre—self-love according to its earliest meaning—that newly-discovered sin that was to dominate the psychology of the seventeenth century. By a certain imaginative quality in his florid rhetoric, he made his hearers feel it as a thing loathly, poisonous, parasitic. After a description of the awful loneliness of the self-lover, cut off for ever from God and man, he thundered out the following peroration:—
‘Listen! This Narcissus gazing into the well of his own heart beholds, not that reflection which awaits the eyes of every true Christian, a Face with eyes like unto swords and hair as white as wool, a King’s head crowned with thorns, no, what meets his eyes is his own sinful face. In truth, my brethren, a grievous and unseemly vision, but anon his face will cast a shadow a thousand-fold more unsightly and affrighting—to wit, the fiery eyes and foaming jowl of the Dragon himself. For to turn into a flower is but a pretty fancy of the heathen, to turn into the Dragon is the doom of the Christian Narcissus.’
Madeleine left the Church deeply moved. She had realised that she was such a Narcissus and that ‘amour-propre’ filled every cranny of her heart.
She turned once more to the publications of Port-Royal, this time not merely in quest of new names for petticoats, and was soon a convinced Jansenist.
Jansenism makes a ready appeal to egotists ... is it not founded on the teaching of those two arch-egotists, Saint Paul and Saint Augustine? And so Madeleine found in Jansenism a spiritual pabulum much to her liking. For instance, grace comes to the Jansenist in a passion of penitence, an emotion more natural to an egotist than the falling in love with Christ which was the seal of conversion in the time of Louis XIII., with its mystical Catholicism à l’espagnole, touched with that rather charming fadeur peculiar to France. Then to the elect (among whom Madeleine never doubted she was numbered) there is something very flattering in the paradox of the Jansenists that although it is from the Redemption only that Grace flows, and Christ died for all men, yet Grace is no vulgar blessing in which all may participate, but it is reserved for those whom God has decided shall, through no merit of their own, eventually be saved.