Madeleine was pat with her answers from Jansenism—the perfection of man’s estate before the Fall, when there was granted him the culminating grace of free will, his misuse of it by his choice of sin, and its attendant, pain.
Jacques was silent for a moment, and then he said:—
‘I can conceive of no scale of virtues wherein room is found for a lasting, durable, and unremitted anger, venting itself on the progeny of its enemy unto the tenth and twentieth-thousand generation. Yet, such an anger was cherished by your God, towards the children of Adam. Nor in any scale of virtues is there place for the pregnant fancy of an artificer, who having for his diversion moulded a puppet out of mud, to show, forsooth, the cunning of his hand, makes that same puppet sensible to pain and to affliction. Why, ’tis a subtle malice of which even the sponsors of Pandora were guiltless! Then his ignoble chicanery! With truly kingly magnanimity he cedes to the puppet the franchise of free will; but mark what follows! The puppet, guileless and trusting, proceeds to enjoy its freedom, when lo! down on its head descends the thunder-bolt, that it may know free will must not be exercised except in such manner as is accordant with the purposes of the giver. The pettifogging attorney!
‘Yes, your God is bloodier than Moloch, more perfectly tyrant than Jove, more crafty and dishonest than Mercury.
‘Have you read the fourth book of Virgil’s Æneid? In it I read a tragedy more pungent than the cozenage of Dido—that of a race of mortals, quick in their apprehensions, tender in their affections, sensible to the dictates of conscience and of duty, who are governed by gods, ferocious and malign, as far beneath them in the scale of creation as are the roaring lions of the Libyan desert. And were I not possessed by the certainty that your faith is but a monstrous fiction, my wits would long ere now have left me in comparing the rare properties of good men with those of your low Hebrew idol.’
Madeleine looked at him curiously. This was surely a piece of prepared rhetoric, not a spontaneous outburst. So she was not the only person who in her imagination spouted eloquence to an admiring audience!
Although she had no arguments with which to meet his indictment, her faith, not a whit disturbed, continued comfortably purring in her heart. But as she did not wish to snub his outburst by silence—her mood was too benevolent—she said:—
‘Do you hold, then, that there is no good power behind the little accidents of life?’
‘The only good power lies in us ourselves, ’tis the Will that Descartes writes of—a magic sword like to the ones in Amadis, a delicate, sure weapon, not rusting in the armoury of a tyrannical god, but ready to the hand of every one of us to wield it when we choose. Les hommes de volonté—they form the true noblesse d’épée, and can snap their fingers at Hozier and his heraldries,’ he paused, then said very gently, ‘Chop, I sometimes fear that in your wild chase after winged horses you may be cozened out of graver and more enduring blessings, which, though they be not as rare and pretty as chimeras....’
‘Because you choose to stick on them the name of chimeras,’ Madeleine interrupted with some heat, ‘it does not a whit alter their true nature. Though your mind may be too narrow to stable a winged horse, that is no hindrance to its finding free pasturage in the mind of God, of which the universe is the expression. And even if they should be empty cheats—which they are not—do you not hold the Duc de Liancourt was worthy of praise in that by a cunningly painted perspective he has given the aspect of a noble park watered by a fair river to his narrow garden in the Rue de Seine?’