‘La douce cerise, la griotte à confire, cerises de Poitiers!’
‘Amandes nouvelles, amandes douces; amendez-vous!’
And above these cries from time to time would rise the wail of an old woman carrying a basket laden with spoons and buttons and old rags,
‘Vous désirez quelque cho-o-se?’
Was it Fate come to mock her?
There is no position so difficult to hold for any length of time as a logical one. Even before leaving Lyons, in Madeleine’s mind the steps had become obliterated of that ruthless argument by which the Augustinian doctors lead the catechumen from the premises set down by Saint Paul to conclusions in which there is little room for hope. She struggled no longer in close mental contact—according to Jansenius’s summing up of the contents of Christianity—with:—
‘Hope or Concupiscence, or any of the forms of Grace; or with the price or the punishment of man, or with his beatitude or his misery; or with free-will and its enslavage; or with predestination and its effect; or with the love and justice and mercy and awfulness of God; in fact, with neither the Old nor the New Testament.’
But, without any conscious ‘revaluing of values,’ the kindly god of the Semi-Pelagians, a God so humble as to be grateful for the tiniest crumb of virtue offered Him by His superb and free creatures, this God was born in her soul from the mists made by expediency, habit, and the ‘Passions.’
But when she had come to Paris and no miracle had happened, she began to get desperate, and Semi-Pelagianism cannot live side by side with despair. The kind Heavenly Father had vanished, and His place was taken by a purblind and indifferent deity who needed continual propitiation.