‘Her Majesty asked her for a definition of the Précieuses, and Ninon said at once, “Madame, les Précieuses sont les Jansénistes de l’amour!” ’Twas prettily said, wasn’t it?’ They laughed, and were soon out of sight.
‘Les Précieuses sont les Jansénistes de l’amour!’ Madeleine laughed aloud, as there swept over her a flood of what she imagined to be divine illumination. Her prayer for guidance had been miraculously answered, and in a manner perfectly accordant with her own wishes. It was obviously a case of Robert Pilou’s sacred screen. ‘Profane history told by means of sacred prints becomes sacred history.’ A Précieuse need only have a knack of sacramentalism to become in the same way a Jansenist, for there was a striking resemblance between the two creeds. In their demands on their followers they had the same superb disregard for human weakness, and in both this disregard was coupled with a firm belief in original sin (for the contempt and loathing with which the Précieuses regarded the manners of all those ignorant of their code sprang surely from a belief in ‘original boorishness’ which in their eyes was indistinguishable from ‘original sin’), the only cure for which was their own particular form of grace. And the grace of the Précieuses, namely, l’air galant—that elusive social quality which through six or seven pages of Le Grand Cyrus, gracefully evades the definitions in which the agile authoress is striving to hold it, that quality without which the wittiest conversation is savourless, the most graceful compliment without fragrance, that quality which can be acquired by no amount of good-will or application, and which can be found in the muddiest poet and be lacking in the most elegant courtier—did it not offer the closest parallel to the mysterious grace of the Jansenists without which there was no salvation, and which was sometimes given in abundance to the greatest sinners and denied to the most virtuous citizens? And then—most striking analogy of all—the Précieuses’ conception of the true lover possessed just those qualities demanded from us by Saint Paul and the Jansenists. What finer symbol, for instance, of the perfect Christian could be found than that of the hero of the Astrée, Céladon, the perfect lover?
Yes, in spite of Saint Augustine’s condemnation of the men ‘who blushed for a solecism,’ she could sanctify her preciosity by making it the symbol of her spiritual development, and—oh, rapture—she could sanctify her obsession for Mademoiselle de Scudéry by making it definitely the symbol of her love for Christ, not merely a means of curing her amour-propre. Through her, she would learn to know Him. Had it not been said by Saint Augustine: ‘My sin was just this, that I sought for pleasure, grandeur, vanity, not in Him, but in His creatures,’ by which he surely meant that the love of the creature for the creature was not in itself a sin, it only became so when it led to forgetting the Creator.
So, with singular rapidity this time, ‘La folie de la Croix s’est atténuée.’
It was already twilight. In the Churches they would be celebrating Compline. The choir would be singing: ‘Jube, Domine, benedicere,’ and the priest would answer: ‘Noctem quietam et finem perfectum concedat nobis Dominus omnipotens.’
The criers of wafers were beginning their nocturnal song: ‘La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies!’ It was time to go home; her mother would be anxious; she must try very hard not to be so inconsiderate.
It was quite dark when she reached the petite rue du Paon. She found Madame Troqueville almost frantic with anxiety, so she flung her arms round her neck and whispered her contrition for her present lateness and her former ill-humour. Madame Troqueville pressed her convulsively and whispered back that she was never ill-humoured, and even if she were, it was no matter. In the middle of this scene in came Berthe, nodding and becking. ‘Ah! Mademoiselle is câline in her ways! She is skilled in wheedling her parents—a second Nausicaa!’