MADELEINE
ONE OF LOVE’S JANSENISTS

COLLINS—LONDON

MADELEINE
ONE OF LOVE’S JANSENISTS

BY
HOPE MIRRLEES

‘Aux falseurs ou falseuses de Romans,

l’historie de ma vie et celle de ma mort.’

Le Testament de Clyante.

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

Copyright

TO
MY MOTHER

PREFACE

Fiction—to adapt a famous definition of law—is the meeting-point of Life and Art. Life is like a blind and limitless expanse of sky, for ever dividing into tiny drops of circumstances that rain down, thick and fast, on the just and unjust alike. Art is like the dauntless, plastic force that builds up stubborn, amorphous substance cell by cell, into the frail geometry of a shell. These two things are poles apart—how are they to meet in the same work of fiction?

One way is to fling down, pêle-mêle, a handful of separate acts and words, and then to turn on them the constructive force of a human consciousness that will arrange them into the pattern of logic or of drama.

Thus, in this book, Madeleine sees the trivial, disorderly happenings of her life as a momentous battle waged between a kindly Power who had written on tablets of gold before the world began that she should win her heart’s desire, and a sterner and mightier Power who had written on tablets of iron that all her hopes should be frustrated, so that, finally, naked and bleeding, she might turn to Him. And having this conception of life all her acquaintances become minor daimones, friendly or hostile, according as they seem to serve one power or the other.

The other way is to turn from time to time upon the action the fantastic limelight of eternity, with a sudden effect of unreality and the hint of a world within a world. My plot—that is to say, the building of the shell—takes place in this inner world and is summed up in the words that dog the dreams of Madeleine—per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur. In the outer world there is nothing but the ceaseless, meaningless drip of circumstances, in the inner world—a silent, ineluctable march towards a predestined climax.

I have had the epilogue printed in italics to suggest that the action has now moved completely on to the stage of the inner world. In the outer world Madeleine might with time have jettisoned the perilous stuff of youth and have sailed serenely the rough, fresh sea of facts. In the inner world, there was one thing and one thing only that could happen to her: life is the province of free-will, art the province of fate.

CONTENTS

PART I

‘En effet, si on laisse aller le Christianisme sans l’approfondir et le régénérer de temps en temps, il s’y fait comme une infiltration croissants de bon sens humain, de tolérance philosophique, de semi-Pélagianisme à quelque degré que ce soit: la “folie de la Croix” s’atténue.’

Sainte-Beuve.

CHAPTER I
THE DINNER AT MADAME PILOU’S

In the middle of the seventeenth century a family called Troqueville came from Lyons to settle in Paris. Many years before, Monsieur Troqueville had been one of the four hundred procureurs of the Palais de Justice. There were malicious rumours of disgraceful and Bacchic scenes in Court which had led to his ejection from that respectable body. Whether the rumours were true or not, Monsieur Troqueville had long ceased to be a Paris procureur, and after having wandered about from town to town, he had at last settled in Lyons, where by ‘devilling’ for a lawyer, writing bombastic love-letters for shop apprentices, and playing Lasquinet with country bumpkins, he managed to earn a precarious livelihood. When, a few months before the opening of this story, he had been suddenly seized with a feverish craving to return to Paris ‘and once more wear the glove of my lady Jurisprudence in the tournay of the law-courts,’ as he put it, his wife had regarded him with a frigid and sceptical surprise, as she had long since given up trying to kindle in him one spark of ambition. However, Madeleine, their only child, a girl of seventeen, expressed such violent despair and disappointment when Madame Troqueville pronounced her husband’s scheme to be vain and impracticable, that finally to Paris they came—for to her mother, Madeleine’s happiness was the only thing of any moment.

They had taken rooms above a baker’s shop in the petite rue du Paon, in the East end of the University quarter—the Pays Latin, where, for many centuries, turbulent abstract youth had celebrated with Bacchic orgies the cherub Contemplation, and strutting, ragged and debonair on the razor’s edge of most unprofitable speculation, had demonstrated to the gaping, well-fed burghers, that the intellect had its own heroisms and its own virtues. At that time it was a neighbourhood of dark, winding little streets, punctuated by the noble fabrics of colleges and monasteries, and the open spaces of their fields and gardens—a symbol, as it were, of contemporary learning, where crabbed scholasticism still held its own beside the spacious theories of Descartes and Gassendi.

Madame Troqueville had inherited a small fortune from her father, which made it possible to tide over the period until her husband found regular employment.

She was by birth and upbringing a Parisian, her father having been a Président de la Chambre des Comptes. As the daughter of a Judge, she was a member of ‘la Noblesse de Robe,’ the name given to the class of the high dignitaries of the Parlement, who, with their scarlet robes, their ermine, and their lilies, their Latin periods and the portentous solemnity of their manner, were at once ridiculous and awful.

It cannot be wondered at that on her return to Paris she shrank from renewing relations with old friends whose husbands numbered their legal posts by the score and who drove about in fine coaches, ruthlessly bespattering humble pedestrians with the foul mud of Paris. But for Madeleine’s sake she put her pride in her pocket, and though some ignored her overtures, others welcomed her back with genial condescension.

The day that this story begins, the Troquevilles were going to dine with the celebrated Madame Pilou, famous in ‘la Cour et la Ville’ for her homespun wit and remarkably ill-favoured countenance—it would be difficult to say of which of these two distinctions she was most proud herself. Her career had been a social miracle. Though her husband had been only a small attorney, there was not a Princess or Duchess who did not claim her as an intimate friend, and many a word of counsel had she given to the Regent herself.

None of her mother’s old acquaintanceships did Madeleine urge her so eagerly to renew as the one with Madame Pilou. In vain her mother assured her that she was just a coarse, ugly old woman.

‘So also are the Three Fates,’ said Jacques Tronchet (a nephew of Madame Troqueville, who had come to live with them), and Madeleine had looked at him, surprised and startled.

Madame Pilou dined at midday, so Monsieur Troqueville and Jacques were to go to her house direct from the Palais de Justice independently of Madame Troqueville and Madeleine. Madeleine had been ready a full half-hour before it was time to start. She had sat in the little parlour for a quarter of an hour absolutely motionless. She was dressed in her best clothes, a bodice of crimson serge, and an orange petticoat of camelot de Hollande, the slender purse’s substitute for silk. A gauze neckerchief threw a transparent veil over the extreme décolletage of her bodice. On her head was one of the new-fashioned ténèbres, a square of black crape that tied under her chin, and took the place of a hat. She wore a velvet mask and patches, in spite of the Sumptuary Laws, which would reserve them for ladies of rank, and from behind the mask her clear gray eyes, that never smiled and seldom blinked, looked out straight in front of her. Her hands were folded on her lap. She had a remarkable gift for absolute stillness.

At the end of a quarter of an hour, she went to her mother, who was preparing a cress salad in the kitchen, and said in a quiet, tense voice:—

‘Maybe you would liefer not go to Madame Pilou’s this morning. If so, tell me, and I will abandon it,’ then, with a sudden access of fury, ‘You will make me hate you—you are for ever sacrificing matters of moment to trifles. An you were to weigh the matter rightly, my having some pleasure when I was young would seem of greater moment than there being a salad for supper!’

‘Madame Pilou dines at twelve, and it is but a bare half-hour from our house to hers, and it is now eleven,’ Madame Troqueville answered slowly, emphasising each word. ‘But we will start now without fail, if ’tis your wish, and arrive like true Provincials half an hour before we are due;’ irritation now made the words come tumbling out, one on the top of the other. Madeleine began to smile, and her mother went on with some heat, but no longer with irritation.

‘But why in the name of Jesus do you lash yourself into so strange a humour before going to old Madame Pilou’s? One would think you were off to the Palais Cardinal to wait on the Regent! She is but a plain old woman; now if she were very learned, or——’

‘Oh, mother, let her be, and go and make your toilette,’ and Madame Troqueville went off obediently to her room.

Madeleine paced about like a restive horse until her mother was ready, but did not dare to disturb her while she was dressing. It used to surprise Madeleine that she should take such trouble over such unfashionable toilettes.

It was not long before she came in quite ready. She began to put Madeleine’s collar straight, which, for some reason, annoyed Madeleine extremely. At last they were out of the house.

Madame Pilou lived on the other side of the river, in the rue Saint Antoine, so there was a good walk before Madeleine and her mother, and judging from Madeleine’s gloomy, abstracted expression, it did not promise to be a very cheerful one.

They threaded their way into the rue des Augustins, a narrow, cloistered street flanked on the left by the long flat walls of the Monastery, over which were wafted the sound of bells and the scent of early Spring. It led straight out on to the Seine and the peaceful bustle of its still rustic banks. They crossed it by the Pont-Neuf, that perennial Carnival of all that Paris held of most picturesque and most disreputable. The bombastic eloquence of the quacks extolling their panaceas and rattling their necklaces of teeth; the indescribable foulness of the topical songs in which hungry-looking bards celebrated to sweet ghostly airs of Couperin and Cambert the last practical joke played by the Court on the Town, or the latest extravagance of Mazarin; the whining litany of the beggars; the plangent shrieks of strange shrill birds caught in American forests—all these sounds fell unheard on at least one pair of ears.

On they hurried, past the booths of the jugglers and comedians and the stalls of the money-lenders, past the bronze equestrian statue of Henri IV., watching with saturnine benevolence the gambols of the Gothic vagabonds he had loved so dearly in life, cynically indifferent to the discreet threats of his rival the water-house of the Samaritaine, which, classical and chaste, hinted at a future little to the taste of the Vert Gallant and his vagabonds.

From time to time Madame Troqueville glanced timidly at Madeleine but did not like to break the silence. At last, as they walked down the right bank of the Seine, the lovely town at once substantial and aerial, taking the Spring as blithely as a meadow, filled her with such joy that she cried out:—

‘’Tis a delicate town, Paris! Are not you glad we came, my pretty one?’

‘Time will show if there be cause for gladness,’ Madeline answered gloomily.

‘There goes a fine lady! I wonder what Marquise or Duchesse she may be!’ cried Madame Troqueville, wishing to distract her. Madeleine smiled scornfully.

‘No one of any note. Did you not remark it was a hired coach? “Les honnêtes gens” do not sacrifice to Saint Fiacre.’

Madame Troqueville gave rather a melancholy little smile, but her own epigram had restored Madeleine, for the time being, to good humour. They talked amicably together for a little, and then again fell into silence, Madeleine wearing a look of intense concentration.

Madame Pilou’s house was on the first floor above the shop of a laundress. They were shown into her bedroom, the usual place of reception in those days. The furniture was of walnut, in the massive style of Henri IV., and covered with mustard-coloured serge. Heavy curtains of moquette kept out the light and air, and enabled the room to preserve what Madeleine called the ‘bourgeois smell.’ On the walls, however, was some fine Belgian tapestry, on which was shown, with macabre Flemish realism, the Seven Stations of the Cross. It had been chosen by the son Robert, who was fanatically devout.

Madame Pilou, dressed in a black dressing-gown lined with green plush, and wearing a chaperon (a sort of cap worn in the old days by every bourgeoise, but by that time rarely seen), was lying on the huge carved bed. Her face, with its thick, gray beard, looming huge and weather-beaten from under the tasselled canopy, was certainly very ugly, but its expression was not unpleasing. Monsieur Troqueville and Jacques had already arrived. Monsieur Troqueville was a man of about fifty, with a long beard in the doctor’s mode, a very long nose, and small, excited blue eyes, like a child’s. Jacques was rather a beautiful young man; he was tall and slight, and had a pale, pointed face and a magnificent chevelure of chestnut curls, and his light eyes slanting slightly up at the corners gave him a Faun-like look. He was a little like Madeleine, but he had a mercurial quality which was absent in her. Robert Pilou was there too, standing before the chimney-piece; he was dressed in a very rusty black garment, made to look as much like a priest’s cassock as possible. Jacques said that with his spindly legs and red nose and spectacles, he was exactly like old Gaultier-Garguille, a famous actor of farce at the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, and as the slang name for the Hôtel de Bourgogne was, for some unknown reason, the ‘Pois-Pilés,’ Jacques, out of compliment to Robert’s appearance and Madame Pilou’s beard, called their house the ‘Poil-Pilou.’

They were all sipping glasses of Hippocras and eating preserved fruit. Jacques caught Madeleine’s eyes as she came in. His own slanting green ones were dancing with pleasure, he was always in a state of suppressed amusement at the Pilous, but there was no answering merriment in Madeleine’s eyes. She gave one quick look round the room, and her face fell.

‘Well, my friends, you are exceeding welcome!’ bellowed Madame Pilou in the voice of a Musketeer. ‘I am overjoyed at seeing you, and so is Robert Pilou.’ Robert went as red as a turkey-cock, and muttered something about ‘any one who comes to the house.’ ‘You see I have to say his fleurettes for him, and he does my praying for me; ’tis a bargain, isn’t it, Maître Robert?’ Robert looked as if he were going to have a fit with embarrassment, while Monsieur Troqueville bellowed with laughter, and exclaimed, ‘Good! good! excellent!’ then spat several times to show his approval. (This habit of his disgusted Madeleine: ‘He doesn’t even spit high up on the wall like a grand seigneur,’ she would say peevishly.)

‘Robert Pilou, give the ladies some Hippocras—Oh! I insist on your trying it. My apothecary sends me a bottle every New Year; it’s all I ever get out of him, though he gets enough out of me with his draughts and clysters!’ This sally was also much appreciated by Monsieur Troqueville.

Robert Pilou grudgingly helped each of them to as much Hippocras as would fill a thimble, and then sat down on the chair farthest removed from Madame Troqueville and Madeleine.

When the Hippocras had been drunk, Madame Pilou bellowed across to him: ‘Now, Robert Pilou, it would be civil in you to show the young lady your screen. He has covered a screen with sacred woodcuts, and the design is most excellently conceived,’ she added in a proud aside to Madame Troqueville. ‘No, no, young man, you sit down, I’m not going to have the poor fellow made a fool of,’ as Jacques got up to follow the other two into an adjoining closet. ‘But you, Troqueville, I think it might be accordant with your humour—you can go.’ Monsieur Troqueville, always ready to think himself flattered, threw a look of triumph at Jacques and went into the closet.

Madeleine was gazing at Robert with a look of rapt attention in her large, grave eyes, while he expounded the mysteries of his design. ‘You see,’ he said, turning solemnly to Monsieur Troqueville, ‘I have so disposed the prints that they make an allegorical history of the Fronde and——’

‘An excellent invention!’ cried Monsieur Troqueville, all ready to be impressed, and at the same time to show his own cleverness. ‘Were you a Frondeur yourself?’

Robert Pilou drew himself up stiffly. ‘No, Monsieur, I—was—not. I was for the King and the Cardinal. Well, as I was saying, profane history is countenanced if told by means of sacred prints and moreover itself becomes sacred history.’ Monsieur Troqueville clapped his hands delightedly.

‘In good earnest it does,’ he cried, ‘and sacred history becomes profane in the same way—’tis but a matter of how you look at it—why, you could turn the life of Jesus into the history of Don Quixote—a picture of the woman who pours the ointment on his feet could pass for the grand lady who waits on Don Quixote in her castle, and the Virgin could be his niece——’

‘Here you have a print of Judas Iscariot,’ Robert went on, having looked at Monsieur Troqueville suspiciously. ‘You observe he is a hunchback, and therefore can be taken for the Prince de Conti!’ He looked round triumphantly.

Madeleine said sympathetically, ‘’Tis a most happy comparison!’ but Monsieur Troqueville was smiling and nodding to himself, much too pleased with his own idea to pay any attention to Robert’s.

‘And here we have the Cardinal! By virtue of his holy office I need not find a sacred symbol for him, I just give his own portrait. This, you see, is St Michael fighting with the Dragon——’

‘Why, that would do most excellently for Don Quixote fighting with the windmills!’

‘Father, I beseech you, no more!’ whispered Madeleine severely.

‘But why? My conceit is every whit as good as his!’ said Monsieur Troqueville sulkily. Fortunately Robert Pilou was too muddle-headed and too wrapt up in himself to understand very clearly what other people were talking about, so he went on:—

‘It is a symbol of the King’s party fighting with the Frondeurs. Now here is a picture of a Procession of the Confrérie de la Passion; needless to say, it shadows forth the triumphant entry of the King and Cardinal into Paris—you see the banners and the torches—’tis an excellent symbol. And here you have a picture of the stonemasons busy at the new buildings of Val de Grâce, that is a double symbol—it stands for the work of the King and Cardinal in rebuilding the kingdom; it also stands for the gradual re-establishment of the power of the Church. And this first series ends up with this’—and he pointed gleefully to a horrible picture of Dives in Hell—‘this stands for the Prince de Condé in prison. And now we come to the second series——;’ but just then Madame Pilou called them back to the other room.

‘It is a most sweet invention!’ said Madeleine in her low, soft voice, meeting Jacques’s twinkle with unruffled gravity.

‘A most excellent, happy conceit! but I would fain tell you the notion it has engendered in my mind!’ cried Monsieur Troqueville, all agog for praise.

‘Oh, I was of opinion it would accord with your humour,’ nodded Madame Pilou, with rather a wicked twinkle.

‘But what was your notion, Uncle?’ asked Jacques, his mouth twitching.

‘Well, ’tis this way——’ began Monsieur Troqueville excitedly, but Madeleine felt that she would faint with boredom if her father were given an innings, so turned the attention of the company to the workmanship of a handsome clock on the chimney-piece.

‘Yes, for Robert that clock is what the “Messieurs de Port Royal” (coxcombs all of them, I say!) would call the grace efficace, in that by preventing him from being late for Mass it saves his soul from Hell!’ said Madame Pilou, looking at her son, who nodded his head in solemn confirmation. Jacques shot a malicious glance at Madeleine, who was looking rather self-conscious.

‘Now, then, Monsieur Jacques,’ went on Madame Pilou, thoroughly enjoying herself. ‘You are a learned young man, and sustained your thesis in philosophy at the University, do you hold it can be so ordered that one person can get another into Paradise—in short, that one can be pious by proxy?’

‘Madame Pilou!’ piped Robert plaintively, flapping his arms as though they had been wings, then he crossed himself and pulled his face back into its usual expression of stolidity.

‘Because,’ went on Madame Pilou, paying not the slightest attention to him, ‘it would be much to my liking if Robert could do all my church-going for me; I was within an ace of fetching up my dinner at Mass last Sunday, the stench was so exceeding powerful. I am at a loss to know why people are wont to smell worse in Church than anywhere else!’

‘I suppose that is what is called the odour of sanctity,’ said Jacques, with his engaging grin, looking at Madeleine to see if she was amused. Both Madeleine and Madame Troqueville smiled, but Robert was so busy seeing how long he could keep his cheeks blown out without letting out the breath that he did not hear, and Monsieur Troqueville was so occupied with planning how he could go one better that he had no time to smile. Jacques’s sally, however, displeased Madame Pilou extremely. She was really very devout in the sane fashion of the old Gallican Church, and though she herself might make profane jokes, she was not going to allow them in a very young man.

‘Odour of sanctity indeed!’ she cried angrily. ‘I warrant you don’t smell any better than your neighbours, young man!’ a retort which made up in vehemence what it lacked in point. Monsieur Troqueville roared with delight and Jacques made a face. He had a wonderful gift for making faces.

‘Impudent fellow! One would think your face was Tabarin’s hat by the shapes you twist it into! Anyway, you have more sense in your little finger than your uncle has in his whole body! and while we are on the matter of his shortcomings, I would fain know the true motive of his leaving Lyons?’ and she shot a malicious look at the discomfited Monsieur Troqueville, while Madame Troqueville went quite white with rage. Fortunately, at this moment, the servant came to say that dinner was ready, and they all moved into the large kitchen, where, true to the traditions of the old bourgeoisie, Madame Pilou always had her meals.

‘Well, well, Mademoiselle Marie, I dare swear you have not found that Paris has gained one ounce of wisdom during your sojourn in the provinces. Although the Prince des Sots no longer enters the gates in state on Mardi Gras, as was the custom in my young days, that is not to say that Folly has been banished the town. ‘Do you frequent many of your old friends?’ bellowed Madame Pilou, almost drowning the noise Monsieur Troqueville and Robert were making over their soup.

‘Oh, yes, they have proffered me a most kindly welcome,’ Madame Troqueville answered not quite truthfully.

‘Have you seen the Coigneux and the Troguins?’

‘We have much commerce with the Troguins.’

‘And has not the désir de parroistre been flourishing finely since your day? All the Parliamentary families have got coats of arms from the herald Hozier since then, and have them tattooed all over their bodies like Chinamen.’

Monsieur Troqueville cocked an intelligent eye, he was always on the outlook for interesting bits of information.

‘And you must know that there are no families nowadays, there are only “houses”! And they roll their silver up and down the stairs, hoping by such usage to give it the air of old family plate, instead of eating off decent pewter as their fathers did before them! And every year the judges grow vainer and more extravagant—great heavy puffed-out sacks of nonsense! There is la cour and la ville—and la basse-cour, and that’s where the gens de robe live, and the judges are the turkey-cocks!’ Every one laughed except Robert Pilou. ‘And the sons with their plumes and swords like young nobles, and the daughters who would rather wear a velvet gown in Hell than a serge one in Paradise put me in a strong desire to box their ears!’

‘’Tis your turn now!’ Jacques whispered to Madeleine, who was feeling terribly conscious of her mask and six patches. However, Madame Pilou abruptly changed the subject by turning to Madeleine and asking her what she thought of Paris.

‘I think it is furiously beautiful,’ she answered, at which Madame Pilou went off into a bellow of laughter.

‘Jésus! Hark to the little Précieuse with her “furiously”! So “furiously” has reached the provinces, has it? Little Madeleine will be starting her “ruelle” next! Ha! Ha!’ Madeleine blushed crimson, Jacques looked distressed, Robert Pilou gave a sudden wild whoop of laughter, then stopped dead, looked anxiously round, and pulled a long face again.

‘That is news to me,’ Monsieur Troqueville began intelligently; ‘is “furiously” much in use with the Précieuses?’ but Madame Troqueville, who was very indignant that Madeleine should be made fun of, broke in hurriedly with, ‘I think my daughter learned it in Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Grand Cyrus; she liked it rarely; we read it through together from beginning to end.’

‘Well, I fear me, I cannot confess to the same assiduity, and that though Mademoiselle de Scudéry brought me the volumes herself,’ said Madame Pilou. ‘I promised her I would read it if she gave me her word that that swashbuckler of a brother of hers should not come to the house for six months, but there he was that very evening, come to find out what I thought of the description of the battle of Rocroy! Are you a lover of reading, my child?’ suddenly turning to Madeleine.

‘No, ’tis most distasteful to me,’ she answered emphatically, to her mother’s complete stupefaction.

‘But Madeleine——’ she began. Madame Pilou, however, cut her short with ‘Quite right, quite right, my child. You’ll never learn anything worth the knowing out of books. I have lived nearly eighty years, and my Missal and Æsop his fables are near the only two books I have ever read. What you can’t learn from life itself is not worth the learning——’

‘But Madeleine has grown into such an excessive humour for books, that she wholly addicts herself to them!’ cried Madame Troqueville indignantly. She was determined that an old barbarian like Madame Pilou should not flatter herself she had anything in common with her Madeleine. But Madame Pilou was too busy talking herself to hear her.

‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry is writing a new romance, she tells me (it’s all her, you know; Conrart tells me that all the writing in it that tedious, prolix, bombastic fop of a brother does is to put his name to the title page!) and she says that I am to be portrayed in it. Poor Robert is in a sad taking; he thinks you cannot be both in a romance and the Book of Life!’ Robert Pilou looked at his mother with the eyes of an anxious dog, and she smiled at him encouragingly, and assured him that there were many devotees described in romances.

‘I dare swear she will limn me as a beautiful princess, with Robert Pilou as my knight, or else I’ll be—what d’ye call her—that heathen goddess, and Robert Pilou will be my owl!’

Madeleine had been strangely embarrassed for the last few minutes. When she was nervous the sound of her father’s voice tortured her, and feeling the imminence of a favourite story of his about an old lady of Lyons, called Madame Hibou, who had found her gardener drunk in her bed, she felt she would go mad if she had to listen to it again, so to stop him, she said hurriedly, ‘Could you tell us, Madame, whom some of the characters in the Grand Cyrus are meant to depict?’

‘Oh! every one is there, every one of the Court and the Town. I should be loath to have you think I wasted my time in reading all the dozen volumes, but I cast my eye through some of them, and I don’t hold with dressing up living men and women in all these outlandish clothes and giving them Grecian names. It’s like the quacks on the Pont-Neuf, who call themselves “Il Signor Hieronymo Ferranti d’Orvieto,” and such like, though they are only decent French burghers like the rest of us!’

‘Or might it not be more in the nature of duchesses masquerading at the Carnival as Turkish ladies and shepherdesses?’ suggested Madeleine in a very nervous voice, her face quite white, as though she were a young Quakeress, bearing testimony for the first time.

‘Oh, well, I dare swear that conceit would better please the demoiselle,’ said Madame Pilou good-humouredly. ‘But it isn’t only in romances that we aren’t called by our good calendar names—oh, no, you are baptized Louise, or Marie, or Marguerite, but if you want to be in the mode, you must call yourself Amaryllis, or Daphne, or Phillis,’ and Madame Pilou minced out the names, her huge mouth pursed up. ‘I tell them that it is only actors and soldiers—the scum of the earth—who take fancy names. No, no, I am quite out of patience with the present fashion of beribboning and beflowering the good wood of life, as if it were a great maypole.’

‘And I am clearly on the other side!’ cried Madame Troqueville hotly, ‘I would have every inch of the hard wood bedecked with flowers!’

‘Well, well, Marie, life has dealt hardly with you,’ said Madame Pilou, throwing a menacing look at Monsieur Troqueville, ‘but life and I have ever been good friends; and the cause may be that we are not unlike one to the other, both strong and tough, and with little tomfoolery about us.’ Madame Troqueville gazed straight in front of her, her eyes for the moment as chill as Madeleine’s. This was more than she could stand, she, the daughter of an eminent judge, to be pitied by this coarse old widow of an attorney.

‘Maybe the reason you have found life not unkind is because you are not like the dog in the fable,’ said Madeleine shyly, ‘who lost the substance out of greediness to possess the shadow.’

Madame Pilou was delighted. Any reference to Æsop’s fables was sure to please her, for it brought her the rare satisfaction of recognising a literary allusion.

‘That is very prettily said, my child,’ and she chuckled with glee. Then she looked at Madeleine meditatively. ‘But see here, as you are so enamoured of the Grand Cyrus, you had better come some day and make the acquaintance of Mademoiselle de Scudéry.’

‘Oh, Madeleine, you would like that rarely, would you not?’ cried Madame Troqueville, flushing with pleasure.

But Madeleine had gone deadly white, and stammered out, ‘Oh—er—I am vastly obliged, Madame, but in truth I shouldn’t ... the honour would put me out of countenance.’

‘Out of countenance? Pish! Pish! my child,’ laughed Madame Pilou, ‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry is but a human being like the rest of us, she eats and drinks and is bled and takes her purges like any one else. Yes, you come and see her, and convey yourself towards her as if she were a grande dame who had never seen a goose’s quill in her life, and you will gain her friendship on the spot.’

‘The lady I would fainest in the world meet,’ said Madeleine, and there was suppressed eagerness in her voice, ‘is Madame de Rambouillet, she——’

‘My child, your wish has something in’t like rare wit and sense,’ interrupted Madame Pilou warmly, ‘she is better worth seeing than anything else in the world, than the Grand Turk or Prester John himself.’

‘Was it not the late Monsieur Voiture that said of her, “I revere her as the most noble, the most beautiful, and the most perfect thing I have ever seen”?’ said Madeleine, the ordeal of quoting making her burn with self-consciousness.

‘I dare say it was. Poor Voiture, he was an impudent fellow, but his wit was as nimble as a hare. He always put me in mind of a performer there used to be on the Pont-Neuf—we called him the “Buveur d’Eau”—he would fill his mouth with ordinary cold water and then spout it out in cascades of different coloured scents. Some trick, doubtless, but it was wonderful. And in the same way Voiture would take some plain homespun sentiment and twist it and paint it and madrigalise it into something so fantastical that you would never recognise it as the same.’

‘I remember me to have seen that “Buveur d’Eau” when I came to Paris as a young man, and——’ began Monsieur Troqueville, in whom for some time the pleasures of the table had triumphed over the desire to shine. But Madeleine was not going to let the conversation wander to quacks and mountebanks. In a clear, though gentle voice, she asked if it were true that the Marquise de Rambouillet was in very delicate health.

‘Yes, very frail but rarely in Paris nowadays. The last time I went to see her she said, smiling as is always her way, “I feel like a ghost in Paris these days, a ghost that died hundreds of years ago,” and I much apprehend that she will in sober earnest be a ghost before long,’ and Madame Pilou, who was deeply moved, blew her nose violently on a napkin.

‘She must be a lady of great and rare parts,’ said Madame Troqueville sympathetically. The remark about ‘feeling like a ghost’ had touched her imagination.

‘Yes, indeed. She is the only virtuous woman I have ever known who is a little ashamed of her virtue—and that is perfection. There is but little to choose between a prude and a whore, I think ... yes, I do, Robert Pilou. Ay! in good earnest, she is of a most absolute behaviour. The Marquis has no need to wear his hair long. You know when this fashion for men wearing love-locks came in, I said it was to hide the horns!’

‘Do the horns grow on one’s neck, then?’ Jacques asked innocently. Monsieur Troqueville was much tickled, and Madame Troqueville wondered wearily how many jokes she had heard in her life about ‘horns’ and ‘cuckolds.’

‘Grow on one’s neck, indeed! You’ll find that out soon enough, young man!’ snorted Madame Pilou.

The substantial meal was now over, and Monsieur Troqueville had licked from his fingers the last crumbs of the last Pasté à la mazarinade, when Robert Pilou, who had been silent nearly all dinner-time, now said slowly and miserably, ‘To appear in a romance! In a romance with Pagans and Libertins! Oh! Madame Pilou!’ His mother looked round proudly.

‘Hark to him! He has been pondering the matter; he always gets there if you but give him time!’ and she beamed with maternal pride. Then Madame Troqueville rose and made her adieux, though Madeleine looked at her imploringly, as if her fate hung upon her staying a little longer. Madame Pilou was particularly affectionate in her good-bye to Madeleine. ‘Well, we’ll see if we can’t contrive it that you meet Madame de Rambouillet.’

Madeleine’s face suddenly became radiantly happy.

CHAPTER II
A PARTIAL CONFESSION

At supper that evening Madeleine seemed intoxicated with happiness. She laughed wildly at nothing and squeezed Jacques’s hand under the table, which made him look pleased but embarrassed. Monsieur Troqueville was also excited about something, for he kept smiling and muttering to himself, gesticulating now and then, his nostrils expanding, his eyes flashing as if in concert with his own unspoken words. Jacques burst into extravagant praise of Madame Pilou, couched, as was his way, in abrupt adjectives, ‘She is crotesque ... she is gauloise ... she is superb!’

‘My dear Jacques,’ said Madame Troqueville, smiling, ‘You would find dozens of women every whit as crotesque and gauloise in the Halles. I’ll take you with me when I go marketing some day.’

‘Very well, and I’ll settle down and build my harem there and fill it with Madame Pilous,’ said he, grinning. ‘If I had lived in the days of Amadis de Gaul she should have been my lady and I’d have worn ... a hair shirt made of her beard!’

Madeleine, who did not, as a rule, much appreciate Jacques’s wit, laughed long and excitedly. Her mother looked at her, not sure whether to rejoice at or to fear this sudden change from languid gloom. Jacques went on with his jerky panegyric. ‘She is like some one in Rabelais. She might have been the mother of Gargantua, she——’

‘Gargamelle! Gargamelle was the mother of Gargantua!’ cried Madeleine eagerly and excitedly.

‘As you will, Gargamelle, then. Why doesn’t she please you, Aunt? It is you that are really the Précieuse, and Madeleine is at heart a franque gauloise,’ and he looked at Madeleine wickedly.

‘That I’m not ... you know nothing of my humour, Jacques.... I know best about myself, I am abhorrent of aught that is coarse and ungallant.... I am to seek why you should make other people share your faults, you——’ Madeleine had tears of rage in her eyes.

‘You are a sprouting Madame Pilou, beard and all!’ teased Jacques. ‘No, you’re not,’ and he stopped abruptly. It was his way suddenly to get bored with a subject he had started himself.

‘But Madeleine,’ began Madame Troqueville, ‘what, in Heaven’s name, prompted you to refuse to meet Mademoiselle de Scutary?’

‘De S-c-u-d-é-r-y,’ corrected Madeleine, enunciating each letter with weary irritation.

‘De Scudéry, then. You are such a goose, my child; in the name of Our Lady, how can you expect——’ and Madame Troqueville began to work herself up into a frenzy, such as only Madeleine was able to arouse in her.

But Madeleine said with such earnestness, ‘Pray mother, let the matter be,’ that Madame Troqueville said no more.

Supper being over, Monsieur Troqueville, wearing an abstracted, important air, took his hat and cloak and went out, and Madame Troqueville went to her spinning-wheel.

Jacques and Madeleine went up to her bedroom, to which they retired nearly every evening, nominally to play Spelequins or Tric-trac. Madame Troqueville had her suspicions that little of the evening was spent in these games, but what of that? Jacques’s mother had left him a small fortune, not large enough to buy a post in the Parlement, but still a competency, and if Madeleine liked him they would probably be able to get a dispensation, and Madame Troqueville would be spared the distasteful task of negotiating for a husband for her daughter. Her passion for Madeleine was not as strong as a tendency to shudder away from action, to sit spellbound and motionless before the spectacle of the automatic movement of life.

Jacques was now learning to be an attorney, for although his father had been an advocate, his friends considered that he would have more chance on the other side. Jacques docilely took their advice, for it was all one to him whether he eventually became an advocate or an attorney, seeing that from the clerks of both professions were recruited ‘les Clercs de la Bazoche’—a merry, lewd corporation with many a quaint gothic custom that appealed to Jacques’s imagination.

They had a Chancellor—called King in the old days—whom they elected annually from among themselves, and who had complete authority over them. That year Jacques reached the summit of his ambition, for they chose him for the post.

He had never seen Madeleine till her arrival in Paris two months before. At that time he was fanning the dying embers of a passion for a little lady of the Pays-Latin of but doubtful reputation.

Then the Troquevilles had arrived, and, to his horror, he began to fall in love with Madeleine. Although remarkably cynical for his age, he was nevertheless, like all of his contemporaries, influenced by the high-flown chivalry of Spain, elaborated by the Précieuses into a code where the capital crime was to love more than once. In consequence, he was extremely surly with Madeleine at first and laid it on himself as a sacred duty to find out one fault in her every day. Her solemnity was unleavened by one drop of the mocking gaiety of France; in an age of plump beauties she seemed scraggy; unlike his previous love, she was slow and rather clumsy in her movements. But it was in vain, and he had finally to acknowledge that she was like one of the grave-eyed, thin-mouthed beauties Catherine de Médici had brought with her from Italy, that her very clumsiness had something beautiful and virginal about it, and, in fact, that he was deeply in love with her.

When he had told her of his new feelings towards herself she had replied with a scorn so withering as to be worthy of the most prudish Précieuse of the Marais. This being so, his surprise was as great as his joy when, about a week before the dinner described in the last chapter, she announced that he ‘might take his fill of kissing her, and that she loved him very much.’

So a queer little relationship sprang up between them, consisting of a certain amount of kissing, a great deal of affectionate teasing on Jacques’s side, endless discussions of Madeleine’s character and idiosyncrasies—a pastime which never failed to delight and interest her—and a tacit assumption that they were betrothed.

But Jacques was not the gallant that Madeleine would have chosen. In those days, the first rung of the social ladder was le désir de parroistre—the wish to make a splash and to appear grander than you really were—and this noble aspiration of ‘une âme bien née’ was entirely lacking in Jacques. Then his scorn of the subtleties of Dandyism was incompatible with being un honnête homme, for though his long ringlets were certainly in the mode, they had originally been a concession to his mother, and all Madeleine’s entreaties failed to make him discard his woollen hose and his jerkin of Holland cloth, or substitute top boots for his short square shoes. Nor did he conform in his wooing to the code of the modish Cupid and hire the Four Fiddles to serenade her, or get up little impromptu balls in her honour, or surprise collations coming as a graceful climax to a country walk. Madeleine had too fine a scorn for facts to allow the knowledge of his lack of means to extenuate this negligence.

In short, the fact could not be blinked that Jacques was ignoble enough to be quite content with being a bourgeois.

Then again, in Metaphysics, Jacques held very different views from Madeleine, for he was an Atheistic follower of Descartes and a scoffer at Jansenism, while in other matters he was much in sympathy with the ‘Libertins’—the sworn foes of the Précieuses. The name of ‘Libertin’ was applied—in those days with no pornographic connotation—to the disciples of Gassendi, Nandé, and La Motte le Vayer. These had evolved a new Epicurean philosophy, to some of their followers merely an excuse for witty gluttony, to others, a potent ethical incentive. The Précieuses, they held, had insulted by the diluted emotions and bombastic language their good goddess Sens Commun, who had caught for them some of the radiance of the Greek Σωφροσύνη. One taste, however, they shared with the Précieusues, and that was the love of the crotesque—of quaint, cracked brains and deformed, dwarfish bodies, and of colouring. It was the same tendency probably that produced a little earlier the architecture known as baroque, the very word crotesque suggesting the mock stalactitic grottoes with which these artists had filled the gardens of Italy. But this very thing was being turned by the Libertins, with unconscious irony, via the genre burlesque of the Abbé Scarron, into a sturdy Gallic realism—for first studying real life in quest of the crotesque, they fell in love with its other aspects too.

Madeleine resented that Jacques continued just as interested in his own life as before he had met her—in his bright-eyed vagabondage in Bohemia, his quest after absurdities on the Pont-Neuf and in low taverns. She hated to be reminded that there could be anything else in the world but herself. But in spite of her evident disapproval, he continued to spend just as much of his time in devising pranks with his subjects of La Bazoche, and in haunting the Pont-Neuf in quest of the crotesque.

Another thing which greatly displeased Madeleine was that Jacques and her father had struck up a boon-companionship, and this also she was not able to stop.

That same evening, when they got into her room, they were silent for a little. Jacques always left it to her to give the note of the evening’s intimacy.

‘What are you pondering?’ he said at last.

‘’Twould be hard to say, Jacques.... I’m exceeding happy.’

‘Are you? I’m glad of it! you have been of so melancholy and strange a humour ever since I’ve known you. There were times when you had the look of a hunted thing.’

‘Yes, at times my heart was like to break with melancholy.’

Jacques was silent, then he said suddenly, ‘Has it aught to do with that Scudéry woman?’

Madeleine gave a start and blushed all over. ‘What ... what ... how d’you mean?’

‘Oh! I don’t know. I had the fancy it might in some manner refer to her ... you act so whimsically when mention is made of her.’

Madeleine laughed nervously, and examined her nails with unnecessary concentration, and then with eyes still averted from Jacques, she began in a jerky, embarrassed voice, ‘I’m at a loss to know how you discovered it ... ’tis so foolish, at least, I mean rather ’tis so hard to make my meaning clear ... but to say truth, it is about her ... the humour to know her has come so furiously upon me that I shall go mad if it cannot be compassed!’ and her voice became suddenly hard and passionate.

‘There is no reason in nature why it should not. Old Pilou said she would contrive it for you, but you acted so fantastically and begged her not to, funny one!’

Madeleine once more became self-conscious. ‘I know ... it’s so hard to make clear my meaning.... ’Tis an odd, foolish fancy, I confess, but I am always having the feeling that things won’t fall out as I would wish, except something else happens first. As soon as the desire for a thing begins to work on me, all manner of little fantastical things crop up around me, and I am sensible that except I compound with them I shall not compass the big thing. For example ... for example, if I was going to a ball and was eager it should prove a pleasant junketing, well, I might feel it was going to yield but little pleasure unless—unless—I were able to keep that comb there balanced on my hand while I counted three.’

‘Don’t!’ cried Jacques, clasping his head despairingly. ‘I shall get the contagion.... I know I shall!’

‘Well, anyway,’ she went on wearily, ‘I was seized by the notion that ... that ... that it wouldn’t ... that I wouldn’t do so well with Mademoiselle de Scudéry unless I met her for the first time at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and it must be there, and if the Marquise be of so difficult access, perchance it can’t be compassed.... Oh! I would I were dead,’ the last words came tumbling out all in one breath.

‘Poor little Chop!’ said Jacques sympathetically. (It was the fashion, brought to Paris by the exiled King of England, to call pets by English names, and Jacques had heard a bulldog called ‘Chop,’ and was so tickled by the name, that he insisted on giving it to Madeleine that he might have the pleasure of often saying it).

‘’Tis a grievous thing to want anything sorely. But I am confident the issue will be successful.’

‘Are you? Are you?’ she cried, her face lighting up. ‘When do you think the meeting will take place? Madame de Rambouillet is always falling ill.’

‘Oh! Old Pilou can do what she will with all those great folk, and she has conceived a liking for you.’

‘Has she? Has she? How do you know? What makes you think so?’

‘Oh, I don’t know ... however, she has,’ he answered, suddenly getting distrait. ‘Is it truly but as an exercise against the spleen that you pass whole hours in leaping up and down the room?’ he asked after a pause, watching her curiously.

Madeleine blushed, and answered nervously:—

‘Yes, ’tis good for the spleen—the doctor told me so—also, if you will, ’tis a caprice——’

‘How ravishing to be a woman!’ sighed Jacques. ‘One can be as great a visionnaire as one will and be thought to have rare parts withal, whereas, if a man were to pass his time in cutting capers up and down the room, he’d be shut up in les petites maisons.[1] How comes it that you want to know Mademoiselle Scudéry more than any one else?’

‘I cannot say, ’tis just that I do, and the wish has worked so powerfully on my fancy that ’tis become my only thought. It has grown from a little fancy into a huge desire. ’Tis like to a certain nightmare I sometimes have when things swell and swell.’

‘When things swell and swell?’

‘Yes, ’tis what I call my Dutch dream, for it ever begins by my being surrounded by divers objects, such as cheeses and jugs and strings of onions and lutes and spoons, as in a Dutch picture, and I am sensible that one of them presently, I never know which ’twill be, will start to swell. And then on a sudden one of them begins, and it is wont to continue until I feel that if it get any bigger I shall go mad. And in like manner, I hold it to be but chance that it was Mademoiselle de Scudéry that took to swelling, it might quite well have been any one else.’

Jacques smiled a little. ‘It might always quite well have been any one else,’ he said.

Madeleine looked puzzled for a minute and then went on unhappily, ‘I feel ’tis all so unreal, just a “vision.” Oh! How I wish it was something in accordance with other people’s experiences ... something they could understand, such as falling in love, for example, but this——’

‘It isn’t the cause that is of moment, you know, it’s the strength of the “passion” resulting from the cause. And in truth I don’t believe any one could have been subject to a stronger “passion” than you since you have come to Paris.’

‘So it doesn’t seem to you extravagant then?’ she asked eagerly.

‘Only as all outside one’s own desires do seem extravagant.’ He sat down beside her and drew her rather timidly to him. ‘I’m confident ’twill right itself in the end, Chop,’ he whispered. She sprang up eagerly, her eyes shining.

‘Do you think so, Jacques ... in sober earnest?’

‘Come back, Chop!’ In Jacques’s eyes there was what Madeleine called the ‘foolish expression,’ which sooner or later always appeared when he was alone with her. It bored her extremely; why could he not be content with spending the whole time in rational talk? However, she went back with a sigh of resignation.

After a few minutes she said with a little excited giggle, ‘What do you think ... er ... Mademoiselle de Scudéry will think of me?’

Jacques only grunted, the ‘foolish expression’ still in his eyes.

‘Jacques!’ she cried sharply, ‘tell me!’ and she got up.

‘What will she think of you? Oh! that you’re an ill-favoured, tedious little imp.’

‘No, Jacques!’

‘A scurvy, lousy, bombastic——’

‘Oh! Jacques, forbear, for God’s sake!’

‘Provincial——’

‘Oh! Jacques, no more, I’ll scream till you hold your tongue ... what will she think of me, in sober earnest?’

‘She’ll think——’ and he stopped, and looked at her mischievously. Her lips were moving, as if repeating some formulary. ‘That you are ... that there is a “I know not what about you of gallant and witty.”’ Madeleine began to leap up and down the room, then she rushed to Jacques and flung her arms round his neck.

‘I am furiously grateful to you!’ she cried. ‘I felt that had you not said something of good omen ere I had repeated “she’ll think” twenty times, I would never compass my desires, and you said it when I had got to eighteen times!’ Jacques smiled indulgently.

‘So you know the language she affects, do you?’ said Madeleine, with a sort of self-conscious pride.

‘Alas! that I do! I read a few volumes of the Grand Cyrus, and think it the saddest fustian——’

‘Madame Pilou said she had begun another ... do you think ... er ... do you think ... that ... maybe I’ll figure in it?’

‘’Tis most probable. Let’s see. “Chopine is one of the most beautiful persons in the whole of Greece, as, Madame, you will readily believe when I tell you that she was awarded at the Cyprian Games the second prize for beauty.”’ Madeleine blushed prettily, and gave a little gracious conventional smile. She was imagining that Mademoiselle de Scudéry herself was reading it to her. ‘“The first prize went, of course, to that fair person who, having learnt the art of thieving from Mercury himself, proceeded to rob the Graces of all their charms, the Muses of all their secrets. Like that of the goddess Minerva, hers is, if I may use the expression, a virile beauty, for on her chin is the thickest, curliest, most Jove-like beard that has ever been seen in Greece——”’

‘Jacques! it’s not——’

‘“Madame, your own knowledge of the world will tell you that I speak of Madame Pilou!”’ Madeleine stamped her foot, and her eyes filled with angry tears, but just then there was a discreet knock at the door, and Berthe, the Troqueville’s one servant, came in with a cup and a jug of Palissy faience. She was fat and fair, with a wall-eye and a crooked mouth. Her home was in Lorraine, and she was a mine of curious country-lore, but a little vein of irony ran through all her renderings of local legends, and there was nothing she held in veneration—not even ‘la bonne Lorraine’ herself. Her tongue wagged incessantly, and Jacques said she was like the servant girl, Iambe—‘the prattling daughter of Pan.’ She had been with the Troquevilles only since they had come to Paris, but she belonged to the class of servants that become at once old family retainers. She took a cynically benevolent interest in the relationship between Jacques and Madeleine, and although there was no need whatever for the rôle, she had instituted herself the confidante and adviser of the ‘lovers,’ and from the secrecy and despatch with which she would keep the two posted in each other’s movements, Monsieur and Madame Troqueville might have been the parental tyrants of a Spanish comedy. This attitude irritated Madeleine extremely, but Jacques it tickled and rather pleased.

‘Some Rossoli for Mademoiselle, very calming to the stomach, in youth one needs such drafts, for the blood is hot, he! he!’ and she nodded her head several times, and smiled a smile which shut the wall-eye and hitched up the crooked mouth. Then she came up to them and whispered, ‘The master is not in yet, and the mistress is busy with her spinning!’ and the strange creature with many nods and becks set the jug and cup on the table, and continuing to mutter encouragement, marched out with soft, heavy steps.

Madeleine dismissed Jacques, saying she was tired and wanted to go to bed.

CHAPTER III
A SUPPLEMENT TO THE CONFESSION

‘On a oublié le temps où elle vivait et combien dans cette vie de luxe et de désœuvrement les passions peuvent ressembler à des fantaisies, de même que les manies y deviennent souvent des passions.’

Sainte-Beuve.—Madame de Sévigné.

It is wellnigh impossible for any one to be very explicit about their own nerves, for there is something almost indecently intimate in a nervous fear or obsession. Thus, although Madeleine’s explanation to Jacques had given her great relief, it had been but partial. She would sooner have died than have told him the real impulse, for instance, that sent her dancing madly up and down the room, or have analysed minutely her feelings towards Mademoiselle de Scudéry.

The seeds of the whole affair were, I think, to be found in the fact that an ancestor of Madame Troqueville’s had been an Italian lady of high family, who had left a strain, fine, fastidious, civilised—in the morbid way of Italy—to lie hidden in obscurity in the bourgeois stock, and to crop up from time to time with pathetic persistence, in a tragically aristocratic outlook, thin features, and the high, narrow forehead that had given to the pallid beauties of the sixteenth century a look of maladif intellect.

To Madeleine it had also brought a yearning from earliest childhood for a radiant, transfigured world, the inhabitants of which seemed first of all to be the rich merchant families of Lyons.

One of her most vivid memories was an occasion on which a strolling company of players had acted a comedy in the house of a leader among these merchants, a certain Maître Jean Prunier. Although the Troquevilles personally did not know the Pruniers, they had a common friend, and he had taken Madeleine and her parents to the performance. They went into an enormous room filled with benches, with a raised platform at one end. The walls and the ceiling were frescoed with various scenes symbolical of Maître Prunier’s commercial prowess. He was shown riding on woolly waves on the back of a dolphin, presenting a casket of gloves to Marie de Médici, marching in crimson robes at the head of the six guilds of merchants. On the ceiling was his apotheosis. It showed him sitting, his lap full of gloves, on a Lyons shawl, which winged Cherubs were drawing through the air to a naked goddess on a cloud, who was holding out to him a wreath made of Dutch tulips. When Madame Troqueville saw it she shook with laughter, much to Madeleine’s surprise.

Maître Prunier and his family sat on the stage during the performance, that they might be seen as well as see. He was a large stout man, and his nose was covered with warts, but his youngest daughter held Madeleine’s eyes spellbound. She had lovely golden hair for one thing, and then, although she looked no older than Madeleine herself, who was about seven at the time, she was dressed in a velvet bodice covered with Genoese point, and—infinitely grander—she was actually wearing what to Madeline had always seemed one of the attributes of magnificent eld, to wit, a real stomacher, all stiff with busks and embroidered in brightly coloured silks with flowers and enchanting beasts—a thing as lovely and magical as the armour of Achilles in the woodcut that hung in the parlour at home.

Some years later Madeleine was sent to school at a Convent about a mile out of Lyons. One of the scholars was this very Jeanne Prunier. Madeleine would watch her stumbling through the Creed, her fat white face puckered with effort, her stumpy fingers fiddling nervously with her gold chain, and would wonder what great incomprehensible thoughts were passing behind that greasy forehead and as what strange phantasmagoria did she see the world. And that chain—it actually hung round her neck all day long, and when she went home, was taken through the great wooden door of Maître Prunier’s house—the door carved with flowers and grinning faces—and perhaps in a drawer in her bedroom had a little box of its own. And Maître Prunier probably knew of its existence, as doubtless it had been his gift, and thus it had a place in the consciousness of that great man, while she, Madeleine ... he had never heard of her.

Lyons, like most rich provincial towns, was very purse-proud, and this characteristic was already quite apparent in its young daughters at the Convent. Their conversation consisted, to a great extent, in boastings about their fathers’ incomes, and surmises as to those of the fathers of their companions. They could tell you the exact number of gold pieces carried on each girl’s back, and when some one appeared in a new dress they would come up and finger the material to ascertain its texture and richness. Every one knew exactly how many pairs of Spanish gloves, how many yards of Venetian lace, how many pure silk petticoats were possessed by every one else, and how many Turkey carpets and Rouen tapestries and tables of marble and porphyry, how much gold and silver plate, and how many beds covered with gold brocade were to be found in each other’s homes.

As Madeleine’s dresses were made of mere serge, and contemptible guese was their only trimming, and as it was known that her father was nothing but a disreputable attorney, they coldly ignored her, and this made her life in the Convent agonising. Although subconsciously she was registering every ridiculous or vulgar detail about her passive tormentors, yet her boundless admiration for them remained quite intact, and to be accepted as one of their select little coterie, to share their giggling secrets, to walk arm in arm with one of them in the Convent garden would be, she felt, the summit of earthly glory.

One hot summer’s day, it happened that both she and a member of the Sacred Circle—a girl called Julie Duval—felt faint in Chapel. A nun had taken them into the Refectory—the coolest place in the Convent—and left them to recover. Madeleine never quite knew how it happened, but she suddenly found herself telling Julie that her mother was the daughter of a Duke, and her father the son of an enormously wealthy merchant of Amsterdam; that he had been sent as quite a young man on a political mission to the Court of France, where he had met her mother; that they had fallen passionately in love with one another, and had been secretly married; when the marriage was announced the parents of both were furious, owing to her father’s family being Protestant, her mother’s Catholic, and had refused to have anything more to do with their respective offspring; that her father had taken the name of Troqueville and settled in Lyons; that some months ago a letter had come from her paternal grandfather, in which he told them that he was growing old and that, although a solemn vow prevented him from ever looking again on the face of his son, he would like to see his grandchild before he died, would she come to Amsterdam?; that she had refused, saying that she did not care to meet any one who had treated her father as badly as he; that the old man had written back to say that he admired her spirit and had made her his sole heir, ‘which was really but a cunning device to take, without tendering his formal forgiveness, the sting from the act whereby he had disinherited my father, because he must have been well aware that I would share it all with him!’ (Unconsciously she had turned her father into a romantic figure, to whom she was attached with the pious passion of an Antigone. In reality she gave all her love to her mother; but the unwritten laws of rhetoric commanded that the protagonists in this story should be father and daughter.)

Julie’s eyes grew rounder and rounder at each word.

‘Jésus, Madeleine Troqueville! what a fine lady you will be!’ she said in an awed voice. Madeleine had not a doubt that by the next morning she would have repeated every word of it to her friends.

In the course of the day she half came to believing the whole story herself, and sailed about with measured, stately gait; on her lips a haughty, faintly contemptuous smile. She felt certain that she was the centre of attention. She was wearing her usual little serge dress and plain muslin fichu, but if suddenly asked to describe her toilette, she would have said it was of the richest velvet foaming with Italian lace. She seemed to herself four inches taller than she had been the day before, while her eyes had turned from gray to flashing black, her hair also was black instead of chestnut.

Mythology was one of the subjects in the Convent curriculum—a concession to fashion made most unwillingly by the nuns. But as each story was carefully expurgated, made as anterotic as possible, and given a neat little moral, Ovid would scarce have recognised his own fables. The subject for that day happened to be Paris’s sojourn as a shepherd on Mount Ida. When the nun told them he was really the son of the King of Troy, Madeleine was certain that all the girls were thinking of her.

Several days, however, went by, and no overtures were made by the Sacred Circle. Madeleine’s stature was beginning to dwindle, and her hair and eyes to regain their ordinary colour, when one morning Jeanne Prunier came up to her, took hold of the little medallion that hung round her neck on a fine gold chain, and said: ‘Tiens! c’est joli, ça.’

This exclamation so often interchanged among the élite, but which Madeleine had never dreamed that any object belonging to her could elicit, was the prelude to a period of almost unearthly bliss. She was told the gallant that each of them was in love with, was given some of Jeanne’s sweet biscuits and quince jam, and was made a member of their Dévises Society. The dévise designed for her was a plant springing out of a tabouret (the symbol of a Duchess); one of its stems bore a violet, the other a Dutch tulip, and over them both hovered the flowery coronet of a Duke—wherein was shown a disregard for botany but an imaginative grasp of Madeleine’s circumstances.

At times she felt rather condescending to her new friends, for the old man could not live much longer, and when he died she would not only be richer than any of them, but her mother’s people would probably invite her to stay with them in Paris, and in time she might be made a lady-in-waiting to the Regent ... and then, suddenly, the sun would be drowned and she would feel sick, for a Saint’s day was drawing near, and they would all go home, and the girls would tell their parents her story, and their parents would tell them that it was not true.

The Saint’s day came in due course, and after it, the awful return to the Convent. Had they been undeceived about her or had they not? It was difficult to tell, for during the morning’s work there were few opportunities for social intercourse. It was true that in the embroidery class, when Madeleine absent-mindedly gave the Virgin a red wool nose instead of a white one, and the presiding nun scolded her, the girls looked coldly at her instead of sympathetically; then in the dancing lesson as a rule the sacred ones gave her an intimate grin from time to time, or whispered a pleasantry on the clumsy performance of some companion outside the Sacred Circle, but this morning they merely stared at her coldly. Still their indifference might mean nothing. Did it, or did it not?

’Un, deux, trois,

Marquez les pas,

Faites la ré-vé-ren-ce,’

chanted the little master.

How Madeleine wished she were he, a light, artificial little creature, with no great claims on life.

But her fears became a certainty, when going into the closet where they kept their pattens and brushes, Jeanne commanded her in icy tones to take her ‘dirty brush’ out of her, Jeanne’s, bag. And that was all. If they had been boys, uproariously contemptuous, they would have twitted Madeleine with her lie, but being girls, they merely sneered and ignored her. She felt like a spirit that, suspended in mid-air, watches the body it has left being torn to pieces by a pack of wolves. Days of dull agony followed, but she felt strangely resigned, as if she could go on bearing it for ever and a day.

It was during the Fronde, and Jeanne and her friends had a cult for Condé and Madame de Longueville, the royal rebels. They taught their parrots at home to repeat lines of Mazarinades, they kept a print of Condé at the battle of Rocroy in their book of Hours, and had pocket mirrors with his arms emblazoned on the back, while Madame de Longueville simpered at them from miniatures painted on the top of their powder boxes or the backs of their tablets. As the nuns, influenced by the clergy, were strong Royalists, and looked upon Condé as a sort of Anti-Christ, the girls had to hide their enthusiasm.

Some weeks after Madeleine’s fall, it was announced that on the following Wednesday there was to be a public demonstration in favour of Condé and the Frondeurs, and that there would be fireworks in their honour, and that some of the streets would be decorated with paper lanterns.

On Wednesday Jeanne and Julie came to Madeleine and ordered her to slip out of her window at about eight o’clock in the evening, go down to the gate at the end of the avenue, and when they called her from the other side, to unbolt it for them. They then went to one of the nuns and, pleading a headache, said they would like to go to bed, and did not want any supper.

During the last weeks Madeleine had lost all spirit, all personality almost, so she followed their instructions with mechanical submission, and was at the gate at the appointed time, opened it, let them in, and all three got back to bed in safety.

About a week later, all the girls were bidden to assemble in the Refectory, where the Reverend Mother was awaiting them with a look of Rhadamanthine severity.

‘Most grievous news had been given her concerning a matter that must be dealt with without delay. She would ask all the demoiselles in turn if they had left their bedrooms on Wednesday evening.’

‘No, Madame.’

‘No, Madame,’ in voices of conscious rectitude, as one girl after another was asked by name. It was also the answer of Jeanne and Julie. Then: ‘Mademoiselle Troqueville, did you leave your bedroom on Wednesday evening?’

There was a pause, and then came the answer: ‘Yes, Madame.’

All eyes were turned on her, and Julie, covertly, put out her tongue.

‘Mesdemoiselles, you may all go, excepting Mademoiselle Troqueville.’

Madeleine noticed that the Reverend Mother had a small mole on her cheek, she had not seen it before.

Then came such a scolding as she had never before experienced. Much mention was made of ‘obedience,’ ‘chastity,’ ‘Anti-Christ,’ ‘the enemies of the King and the Church.’ What had they to do with walking across the garden and opening a gate? Perhaps she had shown too much leg in climbing out of the window—that would, at least, account for the mention of chastity.

The Reverend Mother had asked if any one had left their bedroom—that was all—and Madeleine had. And to her mind, dulled, and, as is often the case, made stupidly literal by sheer terror, this fact had lost all connection with Jeanne’s and Julie’s escapade, and seemed, by itself, the cause of this mysterious tirade. It certainly was wrong to have left her bedroom—but why did it make her ‘an enemy of the King’?

She found herself seizing on a word here and there in the torrent and spelling it backwards.

‘Example’ ... elpmaxe ... rather a pretty word! la chastité ... étitsahc al ... it sounded like Spanish ... who invented the different languages? Perhaps a prize had once been offered at a College for the invention of the best language, and one student invented French and got the prize, and another nearly got the second, but it was discovered in time that he had only turned his own language backwards, and that was cheating.... Jésus! there was a little bit of wood chipped out of the Reverend Mother’s crucifix! But these thoughts were just a slight trembling on the surface of fathoms of inarticulate terror and despair.

Then she heard the Reverend Mother telling her that it would be a sign of grace if she were to disclose the names of her companions.

In a flash she realised that she was supposed to have done whatever it was that Jeanne and Julie had done on Wednesday evening.

‘But, Madame, I didn’t ... ’twas only——’

‘Mademoiselle, excuses and denials will avail you nothing. Who was the other lady with you?’

‘Oh, it isn’t that ... there were no others, at least ... ah! I am at a loss how I can best make it clear, but we are, methinks, at cross-purposes.’

But her case was hopeless. She could not betray Jeanne and Julie, and even if she had wished to, she was incapable just then of doing so, feeling too light-headed and rudderless to make explanations. Finally she was dismissed, and walked out of the room as if in a trance.

She was greeted by a clamour of questions and reproaches from the girls. Jeanne and Julie were in hysterics. When they discovered that she had not betrayed them, they muttered some sheepish expressions of gratitude, and to save their faces they started badgering her in a half-kindly way for having got herself into trouble so unnecessarily; why could she not have said ‘No’ like the rest of them? Madeleine had no satisfactory answer to give, because she did not know why herself. In sudden crises it seemed as if something stepped out from behind her personality and took matters into its own hands, and spite of all her good-will it would not allow her to give a false answer to a direct question. And this although, as we have seen, she could suddenly find herself telling gratuitous falsehoods by the gross.

Of course Madeleine was in terrible disgrace, and penance was piled on penance. The Sacred Circle was friendly to her again, but this brought no comfort now, and the severe looks of the nuns put her in a perpetual agony of terror.

About a week went by, and then one day, when she was sitting in the little room of penance, the door was thrown open and in rushed Julie turned into a gurgling, sniffing whirlwind of tears.

‘The Reverend Mother’ ... sob ... ‘says I must’ ... sob ... ‘ask your forgiveness’ ... scream, and then she flopped down on the floor, overcome by the violence of her emotion. It was clear to Madeleine that in some miraculous way all had been discovered, but she did not feel particularly relieved. The ‘movement of the passions’ seemed to have been arrested in her. She sat watching Julie with her clear, wide-open eyes, and her expression was such as one might imagine on the face of an Eastern god whose function is to gaze eternally on a spectacle that never for an instant interests or moves him. She did not even feel scorn for Julie, just infinite remoteness.

Julie began nervously to shut and open one of her hands; Madeleine looked at it. It was small and plump and rather dirty, and on one of its fingers there was a little enamelled ring, too tight for it, and pressing into the flesh. It looked like a small distracted animal; Madeleine remembered a beetle she had once seen struggling on its back. Its smallness and dirtiness, and the little tight ring and its suggestion of the beetle, for some reason touched Madeleine. A sudden wave of affection and pity for Julie swept over her. In a second she was down beside her, with her arms around her, telling her not to cry, and that it didn’t matter. And there she was found some minutes later by the Reverend Mother, from whom she received a panegyric of praise for her forgiving spirit and a kiss, which she could well have dispensed with.

Then the whole thing was explained; an anonymous letter had been sent to the Reverend Mother saying that the writer had seen, on the evening of the demonstration in favour of Condé, two girls masked and hooded, evidently of position, as they had attendants with them, and that they were laughing together about their escape from the Convent. The Reverend Mother had never thought of connecting with the affair Jeanne’s and Julie’s early retirement that evening. Now she had just got a letter from Maître Prunier informing her that it had come to his knowledge that his daughter and her great friend had been walking in the town that same evening. He had learned this distressing news from one of his servants whom Jeanne had got to accompany her on her escapade. He bade the Reverend Mother keep a stricter watch on his daughter. She had sent for Jeanne and Julie and they had told her that it was only through coercion that Madeleine had played any part in the escapade.

Then the Reverend Mother and Julie went away, and Jeanne came in to offer her apologies. She also had evidently been crying, and her mouth had a sulky droop which did not suggest that her self-complacency had shrivelled up, like that of Julie. Madeleine found herself resenting this; how dare she not be abject?

The two following sentences contained Jeanne’s apology:—

(a) ‘The Reverend Mother is a spiteful old dragon!’ and she sniffed angrily.

(b) ‘Will you come home for my Fête Day next month? There is to be a Collation and a Ball and a Comedy,’ and she gave the little wriggle of her hips, and the complacent gesture of adjusting her collar, which were so characteristic.

A few weeks ago, this invitation would have sent Madeleine into an ecstasy of pleasure. To enter that great fantastic door had seemed a thing one only did in dreams. As Jeanne gave her invitation she saw it clearly before her, cut off from the house and the street and the trees, just itself, a finely embossed shield against the sky. It was like one of the woodcuts that she had seen in a booth of the Fair that year by a semi-barbarian called Master Albert Dürer. Woodcuts of one carrot, or a king-fisher among the reeds, or, again, a portion of the grassy bank of a high road, shown as a busy little commonwealth of bees and grasses, and frail, sturdy flowers, heedless of and unheeded by the restless stream of the high road, stationary and perfect like some obscure island of the Ægean. The world seen with the eyes of an elf or an insect ... how strange! Then she looked at Jeanne, and suddenly there flashed before her a sequence of little ignoble things she had subconsciously registered against her. She had a provincial accent and pronounced volontiers, voulentiers; she had a nasty habit of picking her nose; Madeleine had often witnessed her being snubbed by one of the nuns, and then blushing; there was something indecently bourgeois in the way she turned the pages of a book.

The ignoble pageant took about two seconds for its transit, then Madeleine said, ‘I am much beholden to you, albeit, I fear me I cannot assist at your Fête,’ and dropping her a curtsey she opened the door, making it quite clear that Jeanne was to go, which she did, without a word, as meek as a lamb.

In Madeleine’s description of this scene to Jacques long afterwards she made herself say to Jeanne what actually she had only thought; many young people, often the most sensitive, hanker after the power of being crudely insolent: it seems to them witty and mature.

That night Madeleine was delirious, and Madame Troqueville was sent for. It was the beginning of a long illness which, for want of a better name, her doctor called a sharp attack of the spleen.

CHAPTER IV
THE SIN OF NARCISSUS

In time she recovered, or at least was supposed to have recovered, but she did not return to the Convent, and her mother still watched her anxiously and was more than ever inclined to give in to her in everything.

The doctor had advised her to continue taking an infusion of steel in white wine, and to persist in daily exercise, the more violent the better. So at first she would spend several hours of the day playing at shuttlecock with her mother, but Madame Troqueville’s energy failing her after the first few weeks, Madeleine was forced to pursue her cure by herself.

She found the exercise led to vague dreaming of a semi-dramatic nature—imaginary arguments with a nameless opponent dimly outlined against a background of cloth of gold—arguments in which she herself was invariably victorious. In time, she discarded the shuttlecock completely, finding that this semi-mesmeric condition was reached more easily through a wild dance, rhythmic but formless.

In the meantime her social values had become more just, and she realised that rank is higher than wealth, and that she herself, as the granddaughter of a Judge of the Paris Parlement, and even as the daughter of a procureur, was of more importance socially than the daughters of merchants, however wealthy.

Round the Intendant of the province and his wife there moved a select circle, dressed in the penultimate Paris fashion, using the penultimate Paris slang, and playing for very high stakes at Hoc and Reversi. It was to this circle that Madeleine’s eyes now turned with longing, as they had formerly done to the Sacred Circle at the Convent.

In time she got to know some of these Olympians. Those with whom she had the greatest success were the Précieuses, shrill, didactic ladies who by their unsuccessful imitation of their Paris models made Lyons the laughing-stock of the metropolis. Some of them would faint at the mention of a man’s name; indeed, one of them, who was also a dévote, finding it impossible to reconcile her prudishness with the idea of a male Redeemer, started a theory that Christ had been really a woman—‘’Tis clear from His clothes,’ she would say—and that the beard that painters gave Him, was only part of a plot to wrest all credit from women. They spoke a queer jargon, full of odd names for the most ordinary objects and barely intelligible to the uninitiated. Madeleine talked as much like them as self-consciousness would permit. Also, she copied them in a scrupulous care of her personal appearance, and in their attention to personal cleanliness, which was considered by the world at large as ridiculous as their language. Madame Troqueville feared she would ruin her by the expensive scents—poudre d’iris, musc, civette, eau d’ange—with which she drenched herself.

In the meantime she had got to know a grubby, smirking old gentleman who kept a book-shop and fancied himself as a literary critic. He used to procure the most recent publications of Sercy and Quinet and the other leading Paris publishers, and his shop became a favourite resort of a throng of poetasters and young men of would-be fashion who came there to read and criticise in the manner of the Paris muguets. Hither also came Madeleine, and in a little room behind the shop, where she was safe from ogles and insolence, she would devour all the books that pleased and modelled the taste of the day.

Here were countless many-volumed romances, such as the Astrée of Honoré d’Urfé, La Calprenèdes’s Cassandre, and that flower of modernity, Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s Grand Cyrus. Romans à clef, they were called, for in them all the leaders of fashion, all the bels esprits of the day were dressed up in classical or Oriental costumes, and set to the task of fitting the fashions and fads of modern Paris into the conditions of the ancient world or of the kingdom of the Grand Turk. But the important thing in these romances was what Madeleine called to herself, with some complacency at the name, ‘l’escrime galante’—conversations in which the gallant, with an indefatigable nimbleness of wit, pays compliment after compliment to the prudishly arch belle, by whom they are parried with an equal nimbleness and perseverance. If the gallant manages to get out a declaration, then the belle is touchée, and in her own eyes disgraced for ever. Then, often, paragons of esprit and galanterie, and the other urbane qualities necessary to les honnêtes gens, give long-winded discourses on some subtle point in the psychology of lovers. And all this against a background of earthquakes and fires and hair-breadth escapes, which, together with the incredible coldness of the capricious heroine, go to prove that nothing can wither the lilies and roses of the hero’s love and patience and courage. Then there were countless books of Vers Galants, sonnets, and madrigals by beplumed, beribboned poets, who, like pedlars of the Muses, displayed their wares in the ruelles and alcoves of great ladies. There were collections of letters, too, or rather, of jeux d’esprit, in which verse alternated with prose to twist carefully selected news into something which had the solidity of a sonnet, the grace of a madrigal. Of these letters, Madeleine was most dazzled by those of the late Vincent Voiture, Jester, and spoilt child of the famous Hôtel de Rambouillet, and through his letters she came to feel that she almost knew personally all those laughing, brilliant people, who had made the Hôtel so famous in the reign of Louis XIII.—the beautiful touchy ‘Lionne,’ with her lovely voice and burnished hair; the Princess Julie, suave and mocking, and, like all her family, an incorrigible tease; and the great Arthénice herself, whimsical and golden-hearted, with a humorous, half-apologetic chastity. She knew them all, and the light fantastic world in which they lived, a world of mediæval romance pour rire, in which magic palaces sprang up in the night, and where ordinary mortals who had been bold enough to enter were apt to be teased as relentlessly as Falstaff by the fairies of Windsor Forest.

But what Madeleine pored over most of all was the theory of all these elegant practices, embodied in species of guide-books to the polite world, filled with elaborate rules as to the right way of entering a room and of leaving it, analyses of the grades of deference or of insolence that could be expressed by a curtsey, the words which must be used and the words that must not be used, and all the other tiny things which, pieced together, would make the paradigm of an honnête homme or a femme galante. There Madeleine learned that the most heinous crime after that of being a bourgeois, was to belong to the Provinces, and the glory speedily departed from the Lyons Précieuses to descend on those of Paris. Her own surroundings seemed unbearable, and when she was not storming at the Virgin for having made her an obscure provincial, she was pestering her with prayers to transplant her miraculously to some higher sphere.

The craze for Jansenism—that Catholic Calvinism deduced from the writings of Saint Augustine by the Dutch Jansen, and made fashionable by the accomplished hermits of Port-Royal—already just perceptibly on the wane in Paris, had only recently reached Lyons. As those of Paris some years before, the haberdashers of Lyons now filled their shops with collars and garters à la Janséniste, and the booksellers with the charming treatises on theology by ‘les Messieurs de Port-Royal.’ Many of the ladies became enamoured of the ‘furiously delicious Saint Augustine,’ and would have little debates, one side sustaining the view that his hair had been dark, the other that it had been fair. They raved about his Confessions, vowing that there was in it a ‘Je ne sais quoi de doux et de passionné.’

Madeleine also caught the craze and in as superficial a manner as the others. For instance, the three petticoats worn by ladies which the Précieuses called ‘la modeste,’ ‘la friponne,’ and ‘la secrète,’ she rechristened ‘la grâce excitante,’ ‘la grâce subséquente,’ and ‘la grâce efficace.’ She gained from this quite a reputation in Lyons.

That Lent, the wife of the Intendant manœuvred that a priest of recognised Jansenist leanings should preach a sermon in the most fashionable Church of the town. He based his sermon on the Epistle for the day, which happened to be 2 Timothy, iii. 1. ‘This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves.’ The whole sermon was a passionate denunciation of amour-propre—self-love according to its earliest meaning—that newly-discovered sin that was to dominate the psychology of the seventeenth century. By a certain imaginative quality in his florid rhetoric, he made his hearers feel it as a thing loathly, poisonous, parasitic. After a description of the awful loneliness of the self-lover, cut off for ever from God and man, he thundered out the following peroration:—

‘Listen! This Narcissus gazing into the well of his own heart beholds, not that reflection which awaits the eyes of every true Christian, a Face with eyes like unto swords and hair as white as wool, a King’s head crowned with thorns, no, what meets his eyes is his own sinful face. In truth, my brethren, a grievous and unseemly vision, but anon his face will cast a shadow a thousand-fold more unsightly and affrighting—to wit, the fiery eyes and foaming jowl of the Dragon himself. For to turn into a flower is but a pretty fancy of the heathen, to turn into the Dragon is the doom of the Christian Narcissus.’

Madeleine left the Church deeply moved. She had realised that she was such a Narcissus and that ‘amour-propre’ filled every cranny of her heart.

She turned once more to the publications of Port-Royal, this time not merely in quest of new names for petticoats, and was soon a convinced Jansenist.

Jansenism makes a ready appeal to egotists ... is it not founded on the teaching of those two arch-egotists, Saint Paul and Saint Augustine? And so Madeleine found in Jansenism a spiritual pabulum much to her liking. For instance, grace comes to the Jansenist in a passion of penitence, an emotion more natural to an egotist than the falling in love with Christ which was the seal of conversion in the time of Louis XIII., with its mystical Catholicism à l’espagnole, touched with that rather charming fadeur peculiar to France. Then to the elect (among whom Madeleine never doubted she was numbered) there is something very flattering in the paradox of the Jansenists that although it is from the Redemption only that Grace flows, and Christ died for all men, yet Grace is no vulgar blessing in which all may participate, but it is reserved for those whom God has decided shall, through no merit of their own, eventually be saved.