‘But, indeed,’ she continues, ‘I must frankly admit that my distaste for Bœotia (for that is what I call the Provinces!) is as great as that felt for pastoral life by Alcippe and Amaryllis in the Astrée. There is liberty in the prairies, you may say, but any one who has read of the magic palaces of Armide or Alcine in Amadis de Gaule, would, rather than enjoy all the liberty of all the sons of Boreas, be one of the blondines imprisoned in the palace of the present day Armide,’ and she bows to Arthénice.
‘I do not care for Amadis de Gaule,’ says Sappho a little haughtily. Madeleine thrills with indescribable triumph. Can it be possible that Sappho is jealous of the compliment paid to Arthénice?
CHAPTER VI
THE GRECIAN PROTOTYPE
During the days that followed, Madeleine wallowed in Semi-Pelagianism. With grateful adoration, she worshipped the indulgent God, who had hung upon a Cross that everything she asked might be given her.
As a result of this new-found spiritual peace, she became much more friendly and approachable at home. She even listened with indulgence to her father’s egotistical crudities, and to her mother’s hopes of her scoring a great success on the following Wednesday when the Troguins were giving a ball. Seeing that her imprisonment in the bourgeois world of pale reflections was so nearly over, and that she would so soon be liberated to the plane of Platonic ideas and face to face with the real Galanterie, the real Esprit, the real Fashion, she could afford a little tolerance.
Then, in accordance with her promise to the Virgin, she insisted on helping her mother in the work of the house. Madame Troqueville would perhaps be sewing, Madeleine would come up to her and say in a voice of resigned determination: ‘Mother, if you will but give me precise instructions what to do, I will relieve you of this business.’ Then, having wrested it from her unwilling mother, she would leave it half finished and run off to dance—feeling she had discharged her conscience. The virtue did not lie in a thing accomplished, but in doing something disagreeable—however useless. The boredom of using her hands was so acute as to be almost physical pain. It was as if the fine unbroken piece of eternity in which her dreams took place turned into a swarm of little separate moments, with rough, prickly coats that tickled her in her most tender parts. The prickly coats suggested thorns, and—the metaphor breaking off, as it were, into a separate existence of its own—she remembered that in the old story of her childhood, it was thorns that had guarded the palace of the hidden Princess. This association of ideas seemed full of promise and encouraged her to persevere.
Many were the winks and leers of Berthe over this new domesticity, which she chose to interpret in a manner Madeleine considered unspeakably vulgar. ‘Ho! Ho!’ ... wink ... ‘Mademoiselle is studying to be a housewife! Monsieur Jacques will be well pleased.’ And when Madeleine offered to help her wash some jabots and fichus, she said, with a mysterious leer, that she was reminded of a story of her grandmother’s about a girl called Nausicaa, but when Madeleine asked to be told the story, she would only chuckle mysteriously.
One evening she made a discovery that turned her hopes into certainty.
After supper, she had given Jacques a signal to follow her to her own room. It was not that she wanted his society, but it was incumbent on her to convince the gods that she loved him. She sat down on his knee and caressed him. He said suddenly:—