CHAPTER VIII
‘RITE DE PASSAGE’
At about six o’clock on Wednesday evening a hired coach came to take them to the Troguin’s. To a casual eye it presented a gorgeous appearance of lumbering gilt, but Madeleine noticed the absence of curtains, the straw leaking out of the coachman’s cushion, and the jaded, shabby horses. Jacques had arranged that a band of his devoted clerks of la Bazoche, armed with clubs, should follow the coach to the Île Notre Dame, for the streets of Paris were infested by thieves and assassins, and it did not do to be out after dusk unarmed and unattended. On ordinary occasions this grotesque parody of the state of a Grand Seigneur—a hired coach, and grinning hobbledehoys instead of lackeys, strutting it, half proud, half sheepish, in their quaint blue and yellow livery—would have nearly killed Madeleine with mortification. To-night it rather pleased her, as a piquant contrast to what was in store for her to-morrow and onwards. For were not all doors to open to her to-morrow—the doors of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the doors of the whole fashionable world, as well as the doors of Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s heart? The magical petite-oie, hidden away in her drawer at home, and the miraculous manner in which her eyes had been opened to its efficacy were certain earnests of success. The whole universe was ablaze with good omens—to-morrow ‘the weight of hungry dreams’ would drop from her, and her soul would get what it desired.
She found herself remembering with some perplexity that in romances the siege of a lady’s heart was a very long affair. Perhaps the instantaneous yielding of the fortress, which she felt certain would be the case with Mademoiselle de Scudéry when they met, was not quite in the best traditions of Galanterie. It was annoying, but inevitable, for she felt that any further delay would kill her.
The Troguins lived in the new, red-brick triangle of houses called la Place Dauphine, facing the bronze statue of Henri IV., and backed by Notre-Dame.
Lackeys holding torches were standing on the steps of their house, that the guests might have no trouble in finding it.
After having taken off their cloaks and pattens, the Troquevilles went into the ball-room. Here were countless belles and gallants, dressed in white, carnation, and sea-water green, which, on the authority of a very grave writer, we know to be the colours that show best by candle-light. Here and there this delicate mass of colour was freaked with the sombre soutanes of magistrates and the black silk of dowagers. The Four Fiddles could be heard tuning up through the hubbub of mutual compliments. Madeleine felt as if she were gazing at it all from some distant planet. Then Madame Troguin bustled up to them.
‘Good-evening, friends, you are exceeding welcome. You must all have a glass of Hippocras to warm you. It operates so sweetly on the stomach. I am wont to say a glass of Hippocras is better than any purge. I said as much to Maître Patin—our doctor, you know—and he said——’
Madeleine heard no more, for she suddenly caught sight of her father’s shining, eager eyes and anxious smile, ‘his vanity itching for praise,’ she said to herself scornfully. She saw him make his way to where the youngest Troguin girl was sitting on a pliant with several young men on their cloaks at her feet. How could he be such an idiot, Madeleine wondered, he must know that the Troguin girl did not want to talk to him just then. But there he stood, hawking and spitting and smirking. Now he was sitting down on a pliant beside her ... how angry the young men were looking ... Madeleine was almost certain she saw the Troguin girl exchange a look of despair with one of them. Now, from his arch gesture, she could see that he was praising the outline of her breasts and regretting the jabot that hid them.... Jésus! his provinciality! it was at least ten years ago since it had been fashionable to praise a lady’s breasts! So her thoughts ran on, while every moment she felt more irritated.
Then the fiddles struck up the air of ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon,’ and the whole company formed up into circles for the opening Branle.
There was her father, grimacing and leaping like a baboon in a nightmare, grave magistrates capering like foals, and giving smacking kisses to their youthful partners, young burghers shouting the words at the top of their voices. The whole scene seemed to Madeleine to grow every minute more unreal.
Then the fiddles stopped and the circles broke up into laughing, breathless groups. A young bourgeois, beplumed and beribboned, and wearing absurd thick shoes, came up to her, and taking off his great hat by the crown, instead of, in the manner of ‘les honnêtes gens,’ by the brim, made her a clumsy bow. He began to ‘galantise’ her. Madeleine wondered if he had learned the art from the elephant at a fair. She fixed him with her great, still eyes. Then she found herself forced to lead him out to dance a Pavane. The fiddles were playing a faint, lonely tune, full of the sadness of light things bound to a ponderous earth, for these were the days before Lulli had made dance tunes gay. The beautiful pageant had begun—the Pavane, proud and preposterous as a peacock or a Spaniard. Then some old ladies sitting round the room began in thin, cracked voices to sing according to a bygone fashion, the words of the dance:—
‘Approche donc, ma belle,
Approche-toi, mon bien;
Ne me sois plus rebelle,
Puisque mon cœur est tien;
Pour mon âme apaiser,
Donne mois un baiser.’
They beat time with their fans, and their eyes filled with tears. Gradually the song was taken up by the whole room, the words rising up strong and triumphant:—
‘Approche donc, ma belle,
Approche-toi, mon bien——’
Madeleine’s lips were parted into a little smile, and her spellbound eyes filled with tears; then she saw Jacques looking at her and his eyes were bright and mocking. She blushed furiously.
‘He is like Hylas, the mocking shepherd in the Astrée,’ she told herself. ‘Hylas, hélas, Hylas, hélas,’ she found herself muttering.
After another pause for Galanterie and preserved fruits, the violins broke into the slow, voluptuous rhythm of the Saraband. The old ladies again beat time with their fans, muttering ‘vraiment cela donne à rêver.’
Madeleine danced with Jacques and he never took his eyes from her face, but hers were fixed and glassy, and the words of the Sapphic Ode, ‘that man seems to me the equal of the gods’ ... clothed itself, as with a garment, with the melody.
She was awakened from her reverie by feeling Jacques’s grasp suddenly tighten on her hand. She looked at him, he was white and scowling. A ripple of interest was passing over the dancers, and all eyes were turned to the door. Two or three young courtiers had just come in, attracted by the sound of the fiddles. For in those days courtiers claimed a vested right to lounge uninvited into any bourgeois ball, and they were always sure of an obsequious welcome.
There was the Président Troguin puffily bowing to them, and the Présidente bobbing and smirking and offering refreshment. Young Brillon, the giver of the fiddles, had left his partner, Marguerite Troguin, and was standing awkwardly half-way to the door, unable to make up his mind whether he should doff his hat to the courtiers before they doffed theirs to him; but they rudely ignored all three, and, swaggering up to the fiddles, bade them stop playing.
‘Foi de gentilhomme, I vow that it is of the last consequence that this Saraband should die. It is really ubiquitous,’ lisped one of them, a little muguet, with a babyish face.
‘It must be sent to America with the Prostitutes,’ said another.
‘That is furiously well turned, Vicomte. Really it deserves to be put to the torture.’
‘Yes, because it is a danger to the kingdom, it debases the coinage.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it generates tender emotions in so many vulgar bosoms turning thus the fine gold of Cupid into a base alloy!’
‘Bravo! Comte, tu as de l’esprit infiniment.’
During this bout of wit, the company had been quite silent, trying hard to look amused, and in the picture.
‘My friends, would you oblige us with the air of a Corante?’ the Vicomte called out with a familiar wink to the ‘Four Fiddles,’ with whom it behoved every fashionable gallant to be on intimate terms. The ‘Fiddles’ with an answering wink, started the tune of this new and most fashionable dance.
‘Ah! I breathe again!’ cried the little Marquis. They then proceeded to choose various ladies as partners, discussing their points, as if they had been horses at a Fair. The one they called Comte, a tall, military looking man, chose Marguerite Troguin, at which Brillon tried to assert himself by blustering out that the lady was his partner. But the Comte only looked him up and down, with an expression of unutterable disgust, and turning to the Marquis, asked: ‘What is this thing?’ Brillon subsided.
Then they started the absurd Corante. The jumping steps were performed on tip-toe, and punctuated by countless bows and curtseys. There was a large audience, as very few of the company had yet learned it. When it was over, it was greeted with enthusiastic applause.
The courtiers proceeded to refresh themselves with Hippocras and lemonade. Suddenly the little Marquis seized the cloak of the Comte, and piped out in an excited voice:—
‘Look, Comte, over there ... I swear it is our old friend, the ghost of the fashion of 1640!’
‘It is, it is, it’s the black shadow of the white Ariane! The crotesque and importunate gallant!’ They made a dash for Monsieur Troqueville, who was trying hard to look unconscious, and leaping round him beset him with a volley of somewhat questionable jests. All eyes were turned on him, eyebrows were raised, questioning glances were exchanged. Madame Troqueville sat quite motionless, gazing in front of her, determined not to hear what they were saying. She would not be forced to see things too closely.
When they had finished with Monsieur Troqueville, they bowed to the Présidente, studiously avoiding the rest of the company in their salutation, and, according to their picture of themselves, minced or swaggered out of the room. Jacques followed them.
This interlude had shaken Madeleine out of her vastly agreeable dreams. The muguets had made her feel unfinished and angular, and they had not even asked her to dance. Then, their treatment of her father had been a sharp reminder that after all she was by birth nothing but a contemptible bourgeoise. But as the evening’s gaiety gradually readjusted itself, so did her picture of herself, and by the time of the final Branle, she was once more drunk with vanity and hope.
The Troguins sent them back in their own coach, and the drive through the fantastic Paris of the night accentuated Madeleine’s sense of being in a dream. There passed them from time to time troops of tipsy gallants, their faces distorted by the flickering lights of torches, and here and there the lanternes vives of the pastry-cooks—brilliantly-lighted lanterns round whose sides, painted in gay colours, danced a string of grimacing beasts, geese, and apes, and hares and elephants—showed bright and strange against the darkness.
Then the words:—
La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies! echoed melancholy in the distance. It was the cry of the Oublieux, the sellers of wafers and the nightingales of seventeenth century Paris, for they never began to cry their wares before dusk.
La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies!
Oublie, oublier! The second time that evening there came into Madeleine’s head a play on words.
La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies! Could it be that the secret of la joie was nothing but this dream-sense and—l’oubli?
They found Jacques waiting for them, pale but happy. He would not tell them why he had left the ball-room, but he followed Madeleine to her room. He was limping. And then, with eyes bright with triumph, he described how, at their exit from the ball-room, he had rallied the Clercs of the Bazoche (they had stayed to play cards with the Troguin’s household), how they had followed the courtiers, and, taking them by surprise, had given them the soundest cudgelling they had probably ever had in their lives. ‘Though they put up a good fight!’ and he laughed ruefully and rubbed his leg.
‘How came it that they knew my father?’ Madeleine asked. Jacques grinned.
‘Oh, Chop, should I tell you, it would savour of the blab ... yet, all said, I would not have you lose so good a diversion ... were I to tell you, you would keep my counsel?’
‘Yes.’
Then he proceeded to tell her that her father had fallen in love in Lyons with a courtesan called Ariane. She had left Lyons to drive her trade in Paris, and that was the true cause of his sudden desire to do the same. On reaching Paris, his first act was to buy from the stage wardrobe of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, an ancient suit of tawdry finery, which long ago had turned a courtier into the Spirit of Spring in a Royal Ballet. This he had hidden away in the attic of an old Huguenot widow who kept a tavern on the Mont Sainte-Geneviève, and had proceeded to pester Ariane with letters and doggerel imploring an interview—but in vain! Finally, he had taken his courage in both hands, and donning his finery—‘which he held to have the virtue of the cestus of Venus!’ laughed Jacques—he had boldly marched into Ariane’s bedroom, only to be received by a flood of insults and ridicule by that lady and her gallants.
Madeleine listened with a pale, set face. Why had she been so pursued these last few days by her father’s sordid amours?
‘So this ... Ariane ... rejected my father’s suit?’ she said in a low voice.
‘Ay, that she did! How should she not?’ laughed Jacques.
‘And you gave your suffrage to the foolish enterprise?’
Jacques looked rather sheepish.
‘I am not of the stuff that can withstand so tempting a diversion—why, ’twill be a jest to posterity! His eager, foolish, obsequious face; and his tire! I’faith, I would not have missed it for a kingdom!’ and he tossed back his head and laughed delightedly.
Hylas, hélas!... Jacques was limping ... Vulcan was lame, wasn’t he? ‘In the smithy of Vulcan weapons are being forged that will smash up your world of galanterie and galamatias into a thousand fragments!’
‘Why, Chop, you look sadly!’ he cried, with sudden contrition. ‘’Tis finished and done with, and these coxcombs’ impudence bred them, I can vouch for it, a score of bruises apiece! Chop, come here! Why, the most modish and galant folk have oftentimes had the strangest visionnaires for fathers. There is Madame de Chevreuse—who has not heard of the naïvetés and visions of her father? And ’twas a strange madman that begot the King himself!’ he said, thinking to have found where the shoe pinched. But Madeleine remained silent and unresponsive, and he left her.
Yes, why had she been so pursued these last few days by her father’s amours? It was strange that love should have brought him too from Lyons! And he too had set his faith on the magical properties of bravery! What if.... Then there swept over her the memory of the Grecian Sappho, driving a host of nameless fears back into the crannies of her mind. Besides—to-morrow began the new era!
She smiled ecstatically, and, tired though she was, broke into a triumphant dance.