CHAPTER VI
THE GRECIAN PROTOTYPE
During the days that followed, Madeleine wallowed in Semi-Pelagianism. With grateful adoration, she worshipped the indulgent God, who had hung upon a Cross that everything she asked might be given her.
As a result of this new-found spiritual peace, she became much more friendly and approachable at home. She even listened with indulgence to her father’s egotistical crudities, and to her mother’s hopes of her scoring a great success on the following Wednesday when the Troguins were giving a ball. Seeing that her imprisonment in the bourgeois world of pale reflections was so nearly over, and that she would so soon be liberated to the plane of Platonic ideas and face to face with the real Galanterie, the real Esprit, the real Fashion, she could afford a little tolerance.
Then, in accordance with her promise to the Virgin, she insisted on helping her mother in the work of the house. Madame Troqueville would perhaps be sewing, Madeleine would come up to her and say in a voice of resigned determination: ‘Mother, if you will but give me precise instructions what to do, I will relieve you of this business.’ Then, having wrested it from her unwilling mother, she would leave it half finished and run off to dance—feeling she had discharged her conscience. The virtue did not lie in a thing accomplished, but in doing something disagreeable—however useless. The boredom of using her hands was so acute as to be almost physical pain. It was as if the fine unbroken piece of eternity in which her dreams took place turned into a swarm of little separate moments, with rough, prickly coats that tickled her in her most tender parts. The prickly coats suggested thorns, and—the metaphor breaking off, as it were, into a separate existence of its own—she remembered that in the old story of her childhood, it was thorns that had guarded the palace of the hidden Princess. This association of ideas seemed full of promise and encouraged her to persevere.
Many were the winks and leers of Berthe over this new domesticity, which she chose to interpret in a manner Madeleine considered unspeakably vulgar. ‘Ho! Ho!’ ... wink ... ‘Mademoiselle is studying to be a housewife! Monsieur Jacques will be well pleased.’ And when Madeleine offered to help her wash some jabots and fichus, she said, with a mysterious leer, that she was reminded of a story of her grandmother’s about a girl called Nausicaa, but when Madeleine asked to be told the story, she would only chuckle mysteriously.
One evening she made a discovery that turned her hopes into certainty.
After supper, she had given Jacques a signal to follow her to her own room. It was not that she wanted his society, but it was incumbent on her to convince the gods that she loved him. She sat down on his knee and caressed him. He said suddenly:—
‘I could scarce keep from laughing at supper when my uncle was descanting on his diverse legal activities and reciting the fine compliments paid him by judges and advocates by the score! Malepest! So you do not drive him to a nonplus with too close questionings, but let him unmolested utter all his conceit, why then his lies will give you such entertainment as——’
‘Have a care what you say, Jacques,’ she cried, ‘I’ll not have my father called a liar. It may be that he paints the truth in somewhat gaudy colours, but all said, ’tis a good-natured man, and I am grateful to him in that being exercised as to the material welfare of my mother and myself, he came to Paris to better our fortunes. Jacques! Have done with your foolish laughter!’
But Jacques continued cackling with shrill, mocking glee.
‘My aunt’s and your material welfare, forsooth! This is most excellent diversion! If you but knew the true cause of his leaving Lyons! If you but knew!’
‘Well, tell me.’
‘That I will not, sweet Chop! Oh, ’tis a most fantastic nympholeptic! As passionate after dreams as is his daughter.’
‘I am to seek as to your meaning, Jacques,’ said Madeleine very coldly, and she slipped down from his knee.
Jacques went on chuckling to himself: ‘To see him standing there, nonplussed, and stammering, and most exquisitely amorous.
‘Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
Flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
Tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
Lumina nocte.’
‘What’s that you are declaiming, Jacques?’
‘Some lines of the Grecian Sappho, turned into Latin by Catullus, that figure, with an exquisite precision, the commingling in a lover of passion and of bashfulness.’
The look of cold aloofness suddenly vanished from Madeleine’s face.
‘The Grecian Sappho!’ she cried eagerly. ‘She is but a name to me. Tell me of her.’
‘She was a poetess. She penned amorous odes to diverse damsels, and then leapt into the sea,’ he answered laconically, looking at her with rather a hostile light in his bright eyes.
‘Repeat me one of her odes,’ she commanded, and Jacques began in a level voice:—
‘Deathless Dame Venus of the damasked throne, daughter of Jove, weaver of wiles, I beseech thee tame not my soul with frets and weariness, but if ever in time past thou heard’st and hearkened to my cry, come hither to me now. For having yoked thy chariot of gold thou did’st leave thy father’s house and fair, swift swans, with ceaseless whirring of wings over the sable earth did carry thee from heaven through the midmost ether. Swift was their coming, and thou, oh, blessed one, a smile upon thy deathless face, did’st ask the nature of my present pain, and to what new end I had invoked thee, and what, once more, my frenzied soul was fain should come to pass.
‘“Who is she now that thou would’st fain have Peitho lead to thy desire? Who, Sappho, does thee wrong? For who flees, she shall pursue; who spurns gifts, she shall offer them; who loves not, willy-nilly she shall love.”
‘Now, even now, come to me! Lift from me the weight of hungry dreams, consummate whatever things my soul desires, and do thou thyself fight by my side.’
He looked at her, his eyes screwed up into two hard, bright points. Madeleine continued to gaze in front of her—silent and impassive.
‘Well, is it to your liking?’ he asked.
‘What?’ she cried with a start, as if she had been awakened from a trance. ‘Is it to my liking? I can scarcely say. To my mind ’tis ... er ... er to speak ingenuously, somewhat blunt and crude, and lacking in galanterie.’
He broke into a peal of gay laughter, the hostile look completely vanished.
‘Galanterie, forsooth! Oh, Chop, you are a rare creature! Hark’ee, in the “smithy of Vulcan,” as you would say, weapons are being forged of the good iron of France—battle-axes à la Rabelais, and swords à la Montaigne—and they will not tarry to smash up your fragile world of galanterie and galimatias into a thousand fragments.’
Madeleine in answer merely gave an abstracted smile.
Madame Troqueville came in soon afterwards to turn out Jacques and order Madeleine to bed. Madeleine could see that she wanted to talk about the Troguin’s ball, but she was in no mood for idle conjectures, and begged her to leave her to herself.
As soon as she was alone she flung herself on her knees and offered up a prayer of solemn triumphant gratitude. That of her own accord she should have come to the conclusion reached centuries ago by the Paris Sappho’s namesake—that the perfect amitié tendre can exist only between two women—was a coincidence so strange, so striking, as to leave no doubt in her mind that her friendship with Mademoiselle de Scudéry was part of the ancient, unalterable design of the universe. Knowing this, how the Good Shepherd must have laughed at her lack of faith!