In Madeleine’s heart rage gave way to a dull sense of failure. She would not be a Jansenist at all if she could not be an eminent one. It was quite clear to her that her conversion had merely reinforced her amour-propre. What was to be done?
Jansenism had by no means destroyed her hankerings after the polite society of Paris, it had merely pushed them on to a lower shelf in her consciousness. One night she dreamed that she was walking in a garden in thrillingly close communion with the Duc de Candale. Their talk was mainly about his green garters, but in her dream it had been fraught with passionate meaning. Suddenly he turned into Julie de Rambouillet, but the emotion of the intimacy was just as poignant. This dream haunted her all the following day. Then in a flash it occurred to her that it had been sent from above as a direct answer to prayer. Obviously love for some one else was the antidote to amour-propre. This was immediately followed by another inspiration. Ordinary love was gradually becoming a crime in the code of the Précieuses, and ‘l’amitié tendre’ the perfect virtue. But would it not be infinitely more ‘gallant’ and distinguished to make a woman the object of that friendship? It seemed to her the obvious way of keeping friendship stationary, an elegant statue in the discreet and shady groves of Plato’s Academe which lies in such dangerous contiguity to the garden of Epicurus. Thus did she settle the demands at once of Jansenism and of the Précieuses.
The problem that lay before her now was to find an object for this Platonic tenderness. Julie de Rambouillet, as a wife, mother, and passionately attached daughter, could scarcely have a wide enough emotional margin to fit her for the rôle. After first choosing and then discarding various other ladies, she settled on Madeleine de Scudéry. Unmarried and beyond the age when one is likely to marry (she was over forty), evidently of a romantic temperament, very famous, she had every qualification that Madeleine could wish. Then there was the coincidence of the name, a subject for pleasant thrills. Madeleine soon worked up through her dances a blazing pseudo flamme. The sixth book of Cyrus, which treats of Mademoiselle de Scudéry herself, under the name of Sappho, and of her own circle, seemed full of tender messages for her.
‘Moreover, she is faithful in her friendships; and she has a soul so tender, and a heart so passionate, that one may certainly place the supreme felicity in being loved by Sappho.’
‘I conceive that beyond a doubt there is nothing so sweet as to be loved by a person that one loves.’
She pictured herself filling the rôle of Phaon, whom she had heard was but an imaginary character, Mademoiselle de Scudéry having as yet made no one a ‘Citoyen de Tendre.’
‘And the most admirable thing about it was that in the midst of such a large company, Sappho did not fail to find a way of giving Phaon a thousand marks of affection, and even of sacrificing all his rivals to him, without their remarking it.’
Oh, the thrill of it! It would set Madeleine dancing for hours.
The emotions of her dances were at first but a vague foretasting of future triumphs and pleasures, shot with pictures of wavering outlines and conversations semi-articulate. But she came in time to feel a need for a scrupulous exactitude in details, as if her pictures acquired some strange value by the degree of their accuracy. What that value was, she could not have defined, but her imaginings seemed now to be moulding the future in some way, to be making events that would actually occur.... It was therefore necessary that they should be well within the bounds of probability.