CHAPTER VII
THE MERCHANTS OF DAMASCUS AND DAN
Madeleine woke up the following morning to the sense of a most precious new possession.
She got out of bed, and, after having first rubbed her face and hands with a rag soaked in spirit, was splashing them in a minute basin of water—her thoughts the while in Lesbos—when the door opened and in walked Madame Troqueville.
‘Jésus! Madeleine, it cannot be that you are again at your washing!’ she cried in a voice vibrant with emotion. ‘Why, as I live, ’twas but yesterday you did it last. Say what you will, it will work havoc with your sight and your complexion. I hold as naught in this matter the precepts of your Précieuses. You need to sponge yourself but once a week to keep yourself fresh and sweet, a skin as fine and delicate as yours——’
But Madeleine, trembling with irritation that her mother should break into her pleasant reverie with such prosaic and fallacious precepts, cried out with almost tearful rage: ‘Oh, mother, let me be! What you say is in the last of ignobility; ’tis the custom of all honnêtes gens to wash their hands and face each day.... I’ll not, not, not be a stinking bourgeoise!’
It was curious how shrill and shrewish these two outwardly still and composed beings were apt to become when in each other’s company.
Madame Troqueville shrugged her shoulders: ‘Well, if you won’t be ruled! But let that go—I came to say that we should do well to go to the Foire Saint-Germain this morning to provide you with some bravery for the Troguin’s ball——’
‘The Troguin’s ball, forsooth! Ever harping on that same string! Are you aware that I am for the Hôtel de Rambouillet on Thursday? That surely is a more staid and convenient event on which to hang your hopes!’
‘Is it?’ said Madame Troqueville, with a little smile. ‘Well, what shall you wear on that most pregnant day? Your flowered ferrandine petticoat and your crimson sarge bodice?’
Madeleine went rather pale; she rapped out in icy tones: ‘Les honnêtes gens pronounce it serge. Leave me, please ... I have the caprice to dress myself unaided this morning.’
Once alone, Madeleine flung herself on her bed, clutched her head in her hands and gave little, short, sharp moans.
The truth of the matter was this—that when, in her dances, she rehearsed her visit to the Hôtel de Rambouillet, she pictured herself dressed in a very décolleté bodice of céladon velvet sparkling with jewels and shrouded in priceless Italian lace, a petticoat of taffetas dotted with countless knots of ribbon, and green silk stockings with rose-coloured clocks. Until this moment, when her mother, with her irritating sense of reality, had brought her face to face with facts, it had never so much as occurred to her that nothing of this bravery existed outside her own imagination. Yes, it was true! a serge bodice and a ferrandine petticoat were all the finery her wardrobe could provide. Was she then to make her début at the Palace of Arthénice as a dingy little bourgeoise? What brooked the Grecian Sappho and her conceits, what brooked the miraculous nature of Madame Cornuel’s invitation if the masque of reality was to lack the ‘ouches and spangs’ of dreams? Well, God had made the path of events lead straight to Mademoiselle de Scudéry, could He not too turn her mother’s purse into that of Fortunatus? She could but go to the Fair—and await a miracle.
As they made their way along the bank of the Seine, Madame Troqueville was wrapt in pleasant reverie. None of the wealthy young bourgeoises at the ball would look as delicate and fine as her Madeleine ... what if she took the fancy of some agreeable young magistrate, with five or six different posts in the Parlement, and a flat, red house with white facings in the Place Dauphine, like the Troguins? Then he would ‘give the Fiddles’ for a ball, and offer Madeleine a bouquet in token that it was in her honour, then Madeleine would ‘give the Fiddles’ for a return ball.... The Troguins would lend their house ... and then ... why not? stranger things had happened.
‘A fragment of Lyons silk ... some bisette and some camelot de Hollande ... a pair of shoes that you may foot it neatly ... yes, you will look rare and delicate, and ’twill go hard but one gold coin will furnish us with all we need.’
Madeleine smiled grimly—unless she were much mistaken, not even one silver coin would be squandered on the Troguins’s ball.
They were now making their way towards two long rows of wooden buildings in which was held the famous Fair.
In the evenings it was a favourite haunt of beauty and fashion, but in the mornings it was noisy with all the riff-raff of the town—country cousins lustily bawling ‘Stop, thief!’; impudent pages; coarse-tongued musketeers; merchant’s wives with brazen tongues and sharp, ruthless elbows; dazzled Provincials treating third-rate courtesans to glasses of aigre de cèdre and the delicious cakes for which the Fair was famous.
Through this ruthless, plangent, stinking crowd, Madame Troqueville and Madeleine pushed their way, with compressed lips and faces pale with disgust.
Of a sudden, their ears were caught by the cry:—
‘Galants pour les dames! Faveurs pour les galants! Rubans d’écarlate, de cramoisie, et de Cé-la-don!’
It came from a little man of Oriental appearance, sitting at a stall that contained nothing but knots of ribbon of every colour, known as galants.
When he caught sight of Madeleine, he waved before her one of pale green.
‘A céladon galant for the young lady—a figure of the perfect lover,’ he called out. ‘Mademoiselle cannot choose but buy it!’ Céladon, the perfect lover, in the famous romance called Astrée, had given his name to a certain shade of green.
Madeleine, thinking the words of good omen, pinched her mother’s arm and said she must have it. After a good deal of bargaining, they got it for more than Madame Troqueville had intended spending on a pair of shoes, and with a wry little smile, she said:—
‘Enough of these childish toys! Let us now to more serious business,’ and once more began to push her way through the hateful, seething crowd.
Suddenly, Madeleine again pinched her mother’s arm, and bade her stop. They were passing the stall of a mercer—a little man with black, beady eyes, leering at them roguishly from among his delicate merchandise.
‘Here is most rare Italian lace,’ said Madeleine, with a catch in her voice.
‘Ay, here, for example, is a piece of point de Gênes of most exquisite design,’ broke in the mercer’s wife—an elegant lady, with a beautifully dressed head of hair, ‘I sold just such a piece, a week come Thursday, to the Duchesse de Liancourt.’
‘Ah! but if one be fair and young and juicy ’tis the transparent point de Venise that is best accordant with one’s humour,’ interrupted the mercer, with a wink at Madeleine. ‘’Tis the point de Venise that discovers the breasts, Mademoiselle! Which, being so, I vow the names should be reversed, and the transparent fabric be called point de Gênes, hein? Point de gêne!’ and he gleefully chuckled over his own wit, while his wife gave him a good-natured push and told him with a grin not to be a fool.
‘Whatever laces you may stock, good sir, no one can with truth affirm that you have—point d’Esprit,’ said Madeleine graciously.
‘Come, my child!’ said Madame Troqueville, with a smile, and prepared to move away. This put the mercer on his mettle.
‘Ladies, you would be well advised to tarry a while with me!’ he cried, in the tones of a disinterested adviser. ‘Decked in these delicate toys you would presently learn how little serves, with the help of art, to adorn a great deal. Let a lady be of any form or any quality, after a visit to my stall she’d look a Marquise!’
‘Nay, say rather that she’d look a Duchesse,’ amended his wife.
‘Come, my child!’ said Madame Troqueville again.
‘Nay, lady, there is good sense in what I say!’ pleaded the mercer, ‘the very pith of modishness is in my stall. A galant of gay ribbons, and a fichu of fine point—such as this one, for example—in fact the trifling congeries which in the dress of gallants is known as “petite oie” will lend to the sorriest sarge the lustre of velvet!’
Madeleine’s eyes were blazing with excitement. God had come to her rescue once again, and forgoing, with the economy of the true artist, the meretricious aid of a material miracle, had solved her problem in the simplest manner by the agency of this little mercer. To cut a brave figure on Thursday, there was no need of Fortunatus’s purse. Her eyes had been opened. Of course, as in manners, so in dress, the days of solidity were over. Who now admired the heavy courtesy of the school of the Admiral de Bassompière in comparison with the careless, mocking grace of the air galant? In the same way, she, twirling a little cane in her hand, motley with ribbons, her serge bodice trimmed with the pierreries du Temple (of which, by the way, more anon), with some delicate trifles from the mercer’s stall giving a finish to the whole, could with a free mind, allow three-piled velvet and strangely damasked silk to feed the moths in the brass-bound, leather chests that slumber in châteaux, far away mid the drowsy foison of France.
With strange, suppressed passion, she pleaded with her mother, first, for a Holland handkerchief, edged with Brussels lace, and caught up at the four corners by orange-coloured ribbon; then for a pair of scented gloves, also hung with ribbons; then for a bag of rich embroidery for carrying her money and her Book of Hours. And Madame Troqueville, under the spell of Madeleine’s intense desire, silently paid for one after another.
They left the mercer’s stall, having spent three times over the coin that Madame Troqueville had dedicated to the Troguins’s ball. Suddenly, she realised what had happened, and cried out in despair:—
‘I have done a most inconsiderate, rash, weak thing! How came it that I countenanced such shameless, such fantastic prodigality? I fear——’
‘Mother, by that same prodigality I have purchased my happiness,’ said Madeleine solemnly.
‘Oh, my foolish love! ’Tis only children that find their happiness in toys,’ and her mother laughed, in spite of herself. ‘Well, our purse will not now rise above a piece of ferrandine. We must see what we can contrive.’
They walked on, Madeleine in an ecstasy of happiness—last night, the Grecian Sappho, this morning, God’s wise messenger, the mercer—the Lord was indeed on her side!
They were passing the stall of a silk merchant. He was a tight-lipped, austere-looking old man, and he was listening to an elderly bourgeoise, whose expression was even more severe than his own. The smouldering fire in her eye and the harsh significance of her voice, touched their imagination, and they stopped to listen.
‘Ay, as the Prophet tells us, the merchants of Damascus and Dan and Arabia brought in singing ships to the fairs of Tyre, purple, and broidered work, and fine linen, and coral, and agate, and blue clothes in chests of rich apparel, bound with cords and made of cedar. And where now is Tyre, Master Petit?’
‘Tyre, with its riches and its fairs, and its merchandise and its mariners fell into the midst of the seas in the day of its ruin,’ solemnly chanted in reply Master Petit. Evidently neither he nor the lady considered the words to have any application either to himself or to the costly fabrics in which he was pleased to traffic.
‘Vanity of vanities! ’Tis a lewd and sinful age,’ said the lady, with gloomy satisfaction, ‘I know one old vain, foolish fellow who keeps in my attic a suit of tawdry finery in which to visit bawdy-houses, as if, forsooth, all the purple and fine linen of Solomon himself could add an ounce of comeliness to his antic, foolish face! He would be better advised to lay up the white garment of salvation with sprigs of the lavender of grace, in a coffer of solid gold, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal. I do oft-times say to him: “Monsieur Troqueville——”’
‘Come, my child,’ said Madame Troqueville quietly, moving away.
So this was what Jacques had meant by his mysterious hints the night before! Madeleine followed her mother with a slight shudder.