These changes in her religious attitude took place, as I have said, unconsciously, and Madeleine considered herself still a sound Jansenist.
As a consequence of this spiritual slackening, the imaginary connection had been severed between her obsession and her religion. She had forgotten that her love for Mademoiselle de Scudéry had originally been conceived as a remedy for amour-propre. But, about a week before the dinner at Madame Pilou’s, she had come upon these lines of Voiture:—
‘De louange, et d’honneur, vainement affamée,
Vous ne pouvez aimer, et voulez estre aymée.’
To her fevered imagination these innocent words hinted at some mysterious law which had ordained that the spurner of love should in his turn be spurned. She remembered that it was a commonplace in the writings of both the ancients and the moderns that it was an ironical lawgiver who had compiled the laws of destiny. And if this particular law were valid, the self-lover was on the horns of a horrible dilemma, for, while he continued in a condition of amour-propre, he was shut off from the love of God, but if he showed his repentance by falling in love, he was bringing on himself the appointed penalty of loving in vain. And here her morbid logic collapsed, and she thought of a very characteristic means of extricating herself. She would immediately start a love affair that it might act as a buffer between the workings of this law and her future affair with Mademoiselle de Scudéry.
It was this plan that had sent her to Jacques with the startling announcement I have already mentioned, that she loved him very much, and that he might take his fill of kissing her.
CHAPTER V
AN INVITATION
A few days after the dinner at Madame Pilou’s Madeleine was dancing Mænad-like up and down her little room. Then with eyes full of a wild triumph she flung herself on her bed.
Beside her on the table lay the sixth volume of Le Grand Cyrus, which she had taken to using as a kind of Sortes Virgilianæ. She picked it up and opened it. Her eyes fell on the following words:—