CHAPTER XI
REBUILDING THE HOUSE OF CARDS
All next day Madeleine had the feeling of something near her which she must, if she wished to live, push away, away, right out of her memory. Her vanity was too vigilant to have allowed her to give to Jacques a full account of the scene at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. The fixed smile, the failure to interest the Marquis, that awful exit, for instance, were too indecent to be mentioned. Even her thoughts blushed at their memory, and shuddered away from it—partly, perhaps, because at the back of her consciousness there dwelt always the imaginary Sappho, so that to recall these things was to be humiliated anew in her presence.
In fact, the whole scene at the Hôtel de Rambouillet must be forgotten, and that quickly, for it had been a descent into that ruthless world of reality in which Madeleine could not breathe. That world tyrannised over by the co-sovereigns Cause and Effect, blown upon by sharp, rough winds, and—most horrible of all—fretted with the counter-claims on happiness of myriads of individuals just as ‘square’ and real as she. In such a world how could she—with such frightful odds against her—hope for success, for here she was so impotent, merely a gauche young girl of no position?
There were times, as I have shown, when she felt a nostalgie for the world of reality, as a safe fresh place, but now ... in God’s name, back to her dreams.
Madeleine is entering the door of Sappho’s house. Sappho is lying on her bed, surrounded by her demoiselles. (This time Madeleine visualises her quite clearly. She is swarthy and plain.) When she sees Madeleine, she gives a little blush, which caresses the motion of Madeleine’s passions, and fills her with as sweet an expectancy as the rhythm of a Saraband. Madeleine comes forward, and kissing her hand says, with the most gallant air in the world: ‘I am well aware, Madame, that poets are exempt from the tax to la Dame Vérité, and that they have set up in her place another Sovereign. So when you gave me the other day the gracious permission to wait on you, I had, I admit, a slight fear that you were speaking as the subject of this sovereign, whose name, I believe, is le joli Mensonge, and that by taking you at your word, I would prove myself an eager, ignorant Scythian, unable to understand what is said, and—more important still—what is not said, by the citizens of the polite hemisphere. Madame, I would ten times rather earn such a reputation, I would ten times rather be an unwelcome visitor, than to wait another day before I saw you.’ It is a bold speech, and which, if made by any one else would surely have aroused all Sappho’s pride and prudishness. At first she colours and seems slightly confused, and then, she lets a smile have its own way. She changes the subject, however.
‘Do you consider,’ she asks, ‘that the society of Lesbos compensates, if I may use the expression, for the enamelled prairies and melodious brooks of Bœotia? For my own part, I know few greater pleasures than to sojourn in a rustic place with my lyre and a few chosen friends.’ These last two words awake the lover’s gadfly, jealousy, and causes it to give Madeleine a sharp sting.
‘I should imagine, Madame,’ she says coldly, ‘that by this means you must carry Lesbos with you wherever you go, and although it is one of the most agreeable spots on earth, this must deprive you of many of the delights of travel.’
‘I see that you take me for a provincial of the metropolis,’ says Sappho with a smile full of delicious raillery and in which Madeleine imagines she detects a realising of her jealousy and a certain pleasure in it, so that, in spite of herself, smiling also, she answers,—
‘One has but to read your ravishing verses, which are as fresh, as full of pomp, and as flowery as a summer meadow, to know that your pleasure in pastoral joys is as great as your pleasure in intercourse with les honnêtes gens, and the other attractions of the town. And this is combined with such marvellous talent that in your poetry, the trees offer a pleasanter shade, the flowers a sweeter odour, the brooks a more soothing lullaby than in earth’s most agreeable glades.’
‘If you hold,’ answers Sappho smiling, ‘that my verses make things fairer than they really are, you cannot consider them really admirable, for surely the closer art resembles nature the more excellent it becomes.’
‘Pardon me, Madame,’ says Madeleine, also smiling, ‘but we who believe that there are gods and goddesses ten times fairer than the fairest person on earth, must also believe that somewhere there exist for these divine beings habitations ten times fairer than the fairest of earth’s meadows. And you, Madame, have been carried to these habitations on the wings of the Muses, and in your verses you describe the delicious visions you have there beheld.’
Sappho cannot keep a look of gratification from lighting up her fine eyes.
‘You think, then, that I have visited the Elysian Fields?’ she asks.
‘Most certainly,’ rejoins Madeleine quickly. ‘Did I not call you the other day, in the Palais de Cléomire, the Sybil of Cumæ?’ She pauses, and draws just the eighth of an inch closer to Sappho. ‘As such, you are the authorised guide to the Elysian Fields. May I hope that some day you will be my conductress there?’
‘Then, as well, I am the “appointed guide” to Avernus,’ says Sappho with a delicious laugh. ‘Will you be willing to descend there also?’
‘With you as my guide ... yes,’ answers Madeleine.
There follows one of ces beaux silences, more gallant than the most agreeable conversation: one of the silences during which the wings of Cupid can almost be heard fluttering. Why does the presence of that mignon god, all dimples and rose-buds, terrify mortals as well as delight them?
Thus did Madeleine’s dreams quietly readjust themselves to their normal state and scornfully tremble away from reality.