Yes, that was a prayer she had need of praying. ‘An exile from the fulfilment of life’—that was what she had always feared to be. An exile in the provinces, far from the full stream of life—but what was Paris itself but a backwater, compared with the City of God? ‘Perennially pondering emptiness’—yes, that was her soul’s only exercise. She had long ceased to ponder grave and pregnant matters. The time had come to review once more her attitude to God and man.
She had come lately to look upon God as a Being with little sense of sin, who had a mild partiality for attrition in His creatures, but who never demanded contrition. And the compact into which she had entered with Him was this: she was to offer Him a little lip-service, perform daily some domestic duties and pretend to Jacques she was in love with him; in return for this He (aided by her dances) was to procure for her the entrée into the inner circle of the Précieuses, and the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry! And the tenets of Jansenism—it was a long time since she had boldly faced them. What were they?
Every man is a tainted creature, fallen into an incurable and permanent habit of sinning. His every action, his every thought—beginning from the puny egotism of his babyhood—is a loathsome sin in the eyes of God. The only remedy for the diseased will that prompts these sinful thoughts and actions is the sovereign, infallible grace that God sends on those whom He has decided in His secret councils to raise to a state of triumphant purity. And what does this Grace engender? An agony of repentance, a loathing of things visible, and a burning longing for things invisible—in invisibilium amorem rapiamur, yes, that is the sublime and frigid fate of the true penitent.
And she had actually deceived herself so far as to think that the Arch-Enemy of sin manifested His goodness like a weak, earthly father by gratifying one’s worldly desires, one’s ‘concupiscence’ which Jansenius calls the ‘source of all the other vices’! No, His gifts to men were not these vain baubles, the heart’s desires, but Grace, the Eucharist, His perpetual Presence on the Altar—gigantic, austere benefits befitting this solemn abstract universe, in which angels are helping men in the fight for their immortal souls.
Yes, this was the Catholic faith, this was the true and living God, to Whose throne she had dared to come with trivial requests and paltry bargainings.
She felt this evening an almost physical craving for perfect sincerity with herself, so without flinching she turned her scrutiny upon her love for Mademoiselle de Scudéry. There flashed into her mind the words of Jansenius upon the sin of Adam:—
‘What could Adam love after God, away from whom he had fallen? What could so sublime a spirit love but the sublimest thing after God Himself, namely—his own spirit?... This love, through which he wished, somehow, to take joy in himself, in as much as he could no longer take joy in God, in itself did not long suffice. Soon he apprehended its indigence, and that in it he would never find happiness.
‘Then, seeing that the way was barred that led back to God, the source of true felicity from which he had cut himself off, the want left in his nature precipitated him towards the creatures here below, and he wandered among them, hoping that they might satisfy the want. Thence come those bubbling desires, whose name is legion; those tight, cruel chains with which he is bound by the creatures he loves, that bondage, not only of himself but of all he imprisons by their love for him. Because, once again, in this love of his for all other things, it is above all himself that he holds dear. In all his frequent delights it is always—and this is a remnant of his ancient noble state—in himself that he professes to delight.’
How could she, knowing this passage, have deceived herself into imagining she could save her soul by love for a creature?