However, she too must do her part, must reinforce the Power behind her, so over and over again she danced out the scene at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, trying to keep it exactly the same each time. ‘Ah! dear Zénocrite! here you come, leading our new Bergère.’
All the morning she seemed in a dream, and her mother, father, Jacques, and Berthe hundreds of miles away. She could not touch a morsel of food. ‘Ah! the little creature with wings. I know, I know,’ Berthe kept muttering.
With her throat parched, and still in a strange, dry dream, she went to dress. The magical petite-oie seemed to her to take away all shabbiness from the serge bodice and the petticoat of camelot de Hollande. Then, in a flash, she remembered she had decided to add to her purchases at the Fair a trimming of those wonderful imitation jewels known as the pierreries du Temple. The petite-oie had taken on the exigency of a magic formulary, and its contents, to be efficacious, had to conform as rigidly to the original conception as a love-potion must to its receipt. In a few minutes she would have to start, and the man who sold the stones lived too far from Madame Cornuel for her to go there first. She was in despair.
At that moment the door opened, and in walked Jacques; as a rule he did not come home till evening. He sheepishly brought out of his hose an elaborate arrangement of green beads.
‘Having heard you prate of the pierreries du Temple, I’ve brought you these glass gauds. I fear me they aren’t from the man in the Temple, for I failed to find the place ... but these seemed pretty toys. I thought maybe they would help you to cut a figure before old Dame Scudéry.’
It was truly a strange coincidence that he should have brought her the very thing that at that very moment she had been longing for. But was it the very thing? For the first time that morning, Madeleine felt her feet on earth. The beads were hideous and vulgar and as unlike the pierreries du Temple as they were unlike the emeralds they had taken as their model. She was almost choked by a feeling of impotent rage.
How dare Jacques be such a ninny with so little knowledge of the fashion? How dare he expect a belle to care for him, when he was such a miserable gallant with such execrable taste in presents? The idea of giving her rubbish like that! She would like to kill him!
Always quick to see omens, her nerves, strung up that morning to their highest pitch, felt in the gift the most malignant significance. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes—I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts. She blanched, and furtively crossed herself. Having said, in a dead voice, some words of thanks, she silently pinned the bead trimming on to her bodice and slowly left the room.
It was time to start; she got into the little box-like sedan. There was her mother standing at the door, waving her hand, and wishing her good luck. She was soon swinging along towards the Seine.
When the house was out of sight, with rude, nervous fingers she tore off the beads, and they fell in a shower about the sedan. Though one could scarcely move in the little hole, she managed to pick them all up, and pulling back the curtain she flung them out of the window. They were at that moment crossing the Pont-Neuf, and she caught a glimpse of a crowd of beggars and pages scrambling to pick them up. Recklessly scattering jewels to the rabble! It was like a princess in Amadis, or like the cardinal’s nieces, the two Mancini, whose fabulous extravagance was the talk of the town. Then she remembered that they were only glass beads. Was it an omen that her grandeur would be always a mere imitation of the real thing? Also—though she had got rid of the hateful trimming, her petite-oie was still incomplete. Should she risk keeping Madame Cornuel waiting and go first to the man in the Temple? No, charms or no charms, she was moving on to her destiny, and felt deadly calm. What she had prayed for was coming and she could not stop it now. Its inevitableness frightened her, and she began to feel a poignant longing for the old order, the comforting rhythm of the rut she was used to, with the pleasant feeling of every day drawing nearer to a miraculous transformation of her circumstances.