The scruples with regard to having compromised with an uncompromising God which Madeleine entertained in spite of herself were silenced by the determination of settling things with Jacques. For a right action is a greater salve to conscience than a thousand good resolutions.
This determination gave her a double satisfaction, for she had realised that the relationship was also a sin against preciosity—and a very deadly sin to boot. For one thing, les honnêtes femmes must never love more than once, and then her shameful avowal that ‘she loved him very much, and that he might take his fill of kissing,’ would surely cause the belles who staked their reputation on never permitting a gallant to succeed in expressing his sentiments and who were beginning to shudder at even the ‘minor favours,’ such as the acceptance of presents and the discreetest signs of the chastest complacency, to fall into a swoon seven fathoms deep of indignation, horror, and scorn.
The retraction should be made that very evening, she decided; it was to be her Bethel, a spiritual stone set up as a covenant between herself and God. But Jacques did not come back to supper that evening, so it happened that she celebrated her new coup de grâce in a vastly more agreeable manner.
After supper she had gone into her own room and had begun idly to turn over the pages of Cyrus, and, as always happened, it soon awoke in her an agonising sense of the author’s charms, and a craving for closer communion with her than was afforded by the perusal of even these intimate pages. This closer communion could only be reached through a dance. In a second she was up and leaping:—
She has gone to a ‘Samedi’ where she finds a select circle of Sappho’s friends ... then by a great effort of will she checks herself. Is she a Jansenist or is she not? And if she is a Jansenist, is this dancing reconcilable with her tenets? As a means of moulding the future it certainly is not, for the future has been decided once and for all in God’s inscrutable councils. As a mere recreation, it is probably harmless. But is there no way of making it an integral part of her religious life? Yes, from the standpoint of Semi-Pelagianism it was a means of helping God to make the future, from the standpoint of Jansenism it can be a demonstration in faith, by which she tells God how safe her future is in His hands, and how certain she is of His goodness and mercy in the making of it.
Then, an extra sanctity can be given to its contents by the useful device of Robert Pilou’s screen—let the talk be as witty and gallant as you please, as long as every conceit has a mystical second meaning.
This settled, once more she started her dance.
Madeleine has gone to a ‘Samedi’ at Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s, where she finds a select circle of Sappho’s friends.
The talk drifts to the writings of ‘Callicrate,’ as the late Monsieur Voiture was called.