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.
Above all, Jansenism seemed made for Madeleine in that it promised a remedy for man’s ‘sick will,’ a remedy which perhaps would be more efficacious than steel and white wine for the lassitude, the moral leakage, the truly ‘sick will’ from which she had suffered so long. The Jansenist remedy was a complete abandonment to God, ‘an oarless drifting on the full sea of Grace,’ and at first this brought to her a sense of very great peace.
Her favourite of the Port-Royal books was La Fréquente Communion, in which the Père Arnauld brought to bear on Theology in full force his great inheritance, the Arnauld legal mind, crushing to powder the treatise of a certain Jesuit priest who maintained that a Christian can benefit from the Eucharist without Penitence.
Influenced by this book, very few Jansenists felt that they had reached the state of grace necessary for making a good Communion.
So, what with self-examination, self-congratulation, and abstaining from the Eucharist, for a time Jansenism kept Madeleine as happy and occupied as a new diet keeps a malade imaginaire. Her emotions when she danced became more articulate. She saw herself the new abbess of Port-Royal, the wise, tender adviser of the ‘Solitaires,’ Mère Angélique with a beautiful humility having abdicated in her favour, ‘for here is one greater than I.’ She went through her farewell address to her nuns, an address of infinite beauty and pathos. She saw herself laid out still and cold in the Chapel, covered with flowers culled by royal fingers in the gardens of Fontainebleau, with the heart-broken nuns sobbing around her. Finally the real Madeleine flung herself on her bed, the tears streaming from her eyes. Her subtle enemy, amour-propre, had taken the veil.
She had started a diary of her spiritual life, in which she recorded the illuminations, the temptations, the failures, the reflections, the triumphs, of each day. The idea suddenly occurred to her of sending the whole to Mère Agnès Arnauld, who was head of the Paris Port-Royal. She wrote her also a letter in which she told her of certain difficulties that had troubled her in the Jansenist doctrine, suggested by the Five Propositions. These were conclusions of an heretical nature, drawn from Jansen’s book and submitted to the Pope. The Jansenists denied that they were fair conclusions, but in their attempt to prove this, they certainly laid themselves open to the charge of obscurantism. She included in her letter the following énigme she had written on amour-propre, on the model of those of the Abbé Cotin, whose fertile imagination was only equalled by his fine disregard of the laws of prosody.
Je brûle, comme Narcisse, de ma propre flamme,
Quoique je n’aie pas
L’excuse des doux appas
De ce jeune conquérant des cœurs de dames.
Selon mon nom, de Vénus sort ma race;
Suis-je donc son joli fils
Qui rit parmi les roses et lys?
Moi chez qui jamais se trouve la Grâce?
The pun on ‘Grace’ seemed to her a stroke of genius. She was certain that Mère Agnès could not fail to be deeply impressed with the whole communication, and to realise that Madeleine was an instrument exquisitely tempered by God for fine, delicate work in His service. Madeleine planned beforehand the exact words of Mère Agnèse’s answer:—
‘Your words have illumined like a lamp for myself and my sister many a place hitherto dark.’ ‘My dearest child, God has a great work for you.’ ‘My brother says that the Holy Spirit has so illumined for you the pages of his book, that you have learned from it things he did not know were there himself,’
were a few of the sentences. In the actual letter, however, none of them occurred. Mère Agnès seemed to consider Madeleine’s experiences very usual, and irritated her extremely by saying with regard to some difficulty that Madeleine had thought unutterably subtle and original:—
‘Now I will say to you what I always say to my nuns when they are perplexed by that difficulty.’
The letter ended with these words of exhortation:—
‘Remember that pride of intellect is the most deadly and difficult to combat of the three forms of Concupiscence, and that the pen, although it can be touched into a shining weapon of God’s, is a favourite tool of the Evil One, for amour-propre is but too apt to seize it from behind and make it write nothing but one’s own praises, and that when one would fain be writing the praises of God. Are you certain, my dear child, that this has not happened to you? Conceits and jeux d’esprit may sometimes without doubt be used to the Glory of God, as, for example, in the writings of the late Bishop of Geneva of thrice blessed memory. But by him they were always used as were the Parables of Our Lord, to make hard truths clear to simple minds, but you, my child, are not yet a teacher. Examine your heart as to whether there was not a little vanity in your confessions. I will urgently pray that grace may be sent you, to help you to a true examination of your own heart.’
In Madeleine’s heart rage gave way to a dull sense of failure. She would not be a Jansenist at all if she could not be an eminent one. It was quite clear to her that her conversion had merely reinforced her amour-propre. What was to be done?
Jansenism had by no means destroyed her hankerings after the polite society of Paris, it had merely pushed them on to a lower shelf in her consciousness. One night she dreamed that she was walking in a garden in thrillingly close communion with the Duc de Candale. Their talk was mainly about his green garters, but in her dream it had been fraught with passionate meaning. Suddenly he turned into Julie de Rambouillet, but the emotion of the intimacy was just as poignant. This dream haunted her all the following day. Then in a flash it occurred to her that it had been sent from above as a direct answer to prayer. Obviously love for some one else was the antidote to amour-propre. This was immediately followed by another inspiration. Ordinary love was gradually becoming a crime in the code of the Précieuses, and ‘l’amitié tendre’ the perfect virtue. But would it not be infinitely more ‘gallant’ and distinguished to make a woman the object of that friendship? It seemed to her the obvious way of keeping friendship stationary, an elegant statue in the discreet and shady groves of Plato’s Academe which lies in such dangerous contiguity to the garden of Epicurus. Thus did she settle the demands at once of Jansenism and of the Précieuses.
The problem that lay before her now was to find an object for this Platonic tenderness. Julie de Rambouillet, as a wife, mother, and passionately attached daughter, could scarcely have a wide enough emotional margin to fit her for the rôle. After first choosing and then discarding various other ladies, she settled on Madeleine de Scudéry. Unmarried and beyond the age when one is likely to marry (she was over forty), evidently of a romantic temperament, very famous, she had every qualification that Madeleine could wish. Then there was the coincidence of the name, a subject for pleasant thrills. Madeleine soon worked up through her dances a blazing pseudo flamme. The sixth book of Cyrus, which treats of Mademoiselle de Scudéry herself, under the name of Sappho, and of her own circle, seemed full of tender messages for her.
‘Moreover, she is faithful in her friendships; and she has a soul so tender, and a heart so passionate, that one may certainly place the supreme felicity in being loved by Sappho.’
‘I conceive that beyond a doubt there is nothing so sweet as to be loved by a person that one loves.’
She pictured herself filling the rôle of Phaon, whom she had heard was but an imaginary character, Mademoiselle de Scudéry having as yet made no one a ‘Citoyen de Tendre.’
‘And the most admirable thing about it was that in the midst of such a large company, Sappho did not fail to find a way of giving Phaon a thousand marks of affection, and even of sacrificing all his rivals to him, without their remarking it.’
Oh, the thrill of it! It would set Madeleine dancing for hours.
The emotions of her dances were at first but a vague foretasting of future triumphs and pleasures, shot with pictures of wavering outlines and conversations semi-articulate. But she came in time to feel a need for a scrupulous exactitude in details, as if her pictures acquired some strange value by the degree of their accuracy. What that value was, she could not have defined, but her imaginings seemed now to be moulding the future in some way, to be making events that would actually occur.... It was therefore necessary that they should be well within the bounds of probability.
This new conviction engendered a sort of loyalty to Mademoiselle de Scudéry, for previously a stray word or suggestion would fire her with the charms of some other lady, whom she would proceed to make for the time the centre of her rites—la Comtesse de la Suze, after having read her poetry, the Marquise de Sévigné, when she had heard her praised as a witty beauty—but now, with the fortitude of a Saint Anthony, she would chase the temptresses from her mind, and firmly nail her longings to Mademoiselle de Scudéry. And soon the temptation to waver left her, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry became a corroding obsession. She began to crave feverishly to go to Paris. Lyons turned into a city of Hell, where everything was a ghastly travesty of Heaven. The mock Précieuses with their grotesque graces, the vulgar dandies, so complacently unconscious of their provincialism, the meagre parade of the Promenade, it was all, she was certain, like the uncouth Paris of a nightmare. If she went to Paris, she would, of course, immediately meet Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who, on the spot, would be fatally wounded by her esprit and air gallant, and the following days would lead the two down a gentle slope straight to le Pays de Tendre. But how was she to get to Paris?
Then, as if by a miracle, her father was also seized by a longing to go to Paris, and finally a complete déménagement was decided upon. What wonder if Madeleine felt that the gods were upon her side?
But once in Paris, she was brought face to face with reality. It had never struck her that a meeting with Mademoiselle de Scudéry might be a thing to need manœuvring. Days, weeks, went by, and she had not yet met her. She began to realise the horror of time, as opposed to eternity. Her meeting with Mademoiselle de Scudéry could only be the result of a previous chain of events, not an isolated miracle. To fit it into an air-tight compartment of causality and time, seemed to require more volition than her ‘sick will’ could compass.
Then there was the maddening thought that while millions of people were dead, and millions not yet born, and millions living at the other side of the world, Mademoiselle de Scudéry was at that very moment alive, and actually living in the same town as herself, and yet she could not see her, could not speak to her. What difference was there in her life at Paris to that at Lyons?
They had settled, as we have seen, in the Quartier de l’Université, as it was cheap, and not far from the Île Notre-Dame, where Jacques and Monsieur Troqueville went every day, to the Palais de Justice. It was a quarter rich in the intellectual beauty of tradition and in the tangible beauty of lovely objects, but—it was not fashionable and therefore held no charm for Madeleine.
The things she valued were to be found in the quarters of Le Marais, of the Arsenal, of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, of the Place Royale. She hated the Rambouillets for not begging her to live with them, she hated the people in the streets for not acclaiming her with shouts of welcome every time she appeared, she hated Mademoiselle de Scudéry for never having heard of her. Whenever she passed a tall, dark lady, she would suddenly become very self-conscious, and raising her voice, would try and say something striking in the hopes that it might be she.
She was woken every morning by the cries of the hawkers:—
‘Grobets, craquelines; brides à veau, pour friands museaux!’
‘Qui en veut?’
‘Salade, belle Salade!’
‘La douce cerise, la griotte à confire, cerises de Poitiers!’
‘Amandes nouvelles, amandes douces; amendez-vous!’
And above these cries from time to time would rise the wail of an old woman carrying a basket laden with spoons and buttons and old rags,
‘Vous désirez quelque cho-o-se?’
Was it Fate come to mock her?
There is no position so difficult to hold for any length of time as a logical one. Even before leaving Lyons, in Madeleine’s mind the steps had become obliterated of that ruthless argument by which the Augustinian doctors lead the catechumen from the premises set down by Saint Paul to conclusions in which there is little room for hope. She struggled no longer in close mental contact—according to Jansenius’s summing up of the contents of Christianity—with:—
‘Hope or Concupiscence, or any of the forms of Grace; or with the price or the punishment of man, or with his beatitude or his misery; or with free-will and its enslavage; or with predestination and its effect; or with the love and justice and mercy and awfulness of God; in fact, with neither the Old nor the New Testament.’
But, without any conscious ‘revaluing of values,’ the kindly god of the Semi-Pelagians, a God so humble as to be grateful for the tiniest crumb of virtue offered Him by His superb and free creatures, this God was born in her soul from the mists made by expediency, habit, and the ‘Passions.’
But when she had come to Paris and no miracle had happened, she began to get desperate, and Semi-Pelagianism cannot live side by side with despair. The kind Heavenly Father had vanished, and His place was taken by a purblind and indifferent deity who needed continual propitiation.
These changes in her religious attitude took place, as I have said, unconsciously, and Madeleine considered herself still a sound Jansenist.
As a consequence of this spiritual slackening, the imaginary connection had been severed between her obsession and her religion. She had forgotten that her love for Mademoiselle de Scudéry had originally been conceived as a remedy for amour-propre. But, about a week before the dinner at Madame Pilou’s, she had come upon these lines of Voiture:—
‘De louange, et d’honneur, vainement affamée,
Vous ne pouvez aimer, et voulez estre aymée.’
To her fevered imagination these innocent words hinted at some mysterious law which had ordained that the spurner of love should in his turn be spurned. She remembered that it was a commonplace in the writings of both the ancients and the moderns that it was an ironical lawgiver who had compiled the laws of destiny. And if this particular law were valid, the self-lover was on the horns of a horrible dilemma, for, while he continued in a condition of amour-propre, he was shut off from the love of God, but if he showed his repentance by falling in love, he was bringing on himself the appointed penalty of loving in vain. And here her morbid logic collapsed, and she thought of a very characteristic means of extricating herself. She would immediately start a love affair that it might act as a buffer between the workings of this law and her future affair with Mademoiselle de Scudéry.
It was this plan that had sent her to Jacques with the startling announcement I have already mentioned, that she loved him very much, and that he might take his fill of kissing her.