CHAPTER XIII
ROBERT PILOU’S SCREEN
When Mass was over, Madeleine walked home with her parents in absolute silence. She was terribly afraid of losing the flavour of her recent experience. She specially dreaded Jacques. He was such a scoffer; besides, at this moment, she felt a great distaste for the insincerity of her relationship with him. However, as it happened, he did not come in to dinner that day.
After dinner she went to her room and lay down on her bed, in the hopes of sleeping, and so guarding her religious emotion from the contamination of thoughts and desires—for, at the bottom of her heart, she knew quite well that her obsession was only dozing. Finally, she did fall asleep, and slept for some hours.
When she awoke, it was half-past four, and she realised with joy that she had nursed successfully the mystic atmosphere. She felt a need for space and fresh air, and hastily put on her pattens, mask, and cloak. As she came out of her room, her mother appeared from the parlour.
‘Madeleine—dear life—whither in the name of madness, are you bound? You cannot be contemplating walking alone? Why, ’twill soon be dusk! Jacques should shortly return, and he’ll accompany you!’
This was unbearable. In a perfect frenzy, lest the spell should be broken, Madeleine gathered up her petticoats and made a dash for the staircase.
‘Madeleine! Madeleine! Is the child demented? Come back! I command you!’
‘For God’s sake, let me be!’ screeched Madeleine furiously from half-way down the stairs. ‘Curse her! With her shrill importunity she has shattered the serenity of my humour!’ she muttered to herself, in the last stage of nervous irritation.
She had half a mind to go back and spend the rest of the afternoon in dinning into her mother that by her untimely interruption she had arrested a coup de Grâce, and come between her and her ultimate redemption. But pleasant though this would be, the soft sunshine of early June was more so, so she ran down the stairs and into the street.
At first she felt so irritated and ruffled that she feared the spell was broken for ever, but gradually it was renewed under the magical idleness of the Sunday afternoon. In a house opposite some one was playing a Saraband on the lute. From a neighbouring street came the voices and laughter of children—otherwise the whole neighbourhood seemed deserted.
Down the long rue des Augustins, that narrowed to a bright point towards the Seine, she wandered with wide, staring eyes, to meet something, she knew not what. Then up the quays she wandered, up and on, still in a trance.
Finally she took her stand on the Pont-Rouge, a little wooden bridge long since replaced. For some moments she gazed at the Seine urbanely flowing between the temperate tints of its banks, and flanked on its right by the long, gray gallery of the Louvre. Everything was shrouded in a delicate distance-lending haze; there was the Cité—miles and miles away it seemed—nuzzling into the water and dominated by the twin towers of Notre-Dame. They had caught the sun, and though unsubstantial, they still looked sturdy—like solid cubes of light. The uniform gray-greenness of everything—Seine and Louvre and Cité—and a quality in it all of decorative unreality, reminded Madeleine of a great, flat, gray-green picture by Mantegna of the death of Saint Sebastian, that she had seen in one of the Palaces.
The bell of Saint-Germain-des-Prés began to peal for Vespers. She started murmuring to herself the Vesper hymn—Lucis Creator:—
‘Ne mens gravata crimine.
Vitæ sit exul munere,
Dum nil perenne cogitat,
Seseque culpis illigat.’
‘Grant that the mind, borne down by the charge of guilt, be not an exile from the fulfilment of life, perennially pondering emptiness and binding itself by its transgressions.’
Yes, that was a prayer she had need of praying. ‘An exile from the fulfilment of life’—that was what she had always feared to be. An exile in the provinces, far from the full stream of life—but what was Paris itself but a backwater, compared with the City of God? ‘Perennially pondering emptiness’—yes, that was her soul’s only exercise. She had long ceased to ponder grave and pregnant matters. The time had come to review once more her attitude to God and man.
She had come lately to look upon God as a Being with little sense of sin, who had a mild partiality for attrition in His creatures, but who never demanded contrition. And the compact into which she had entered with Him was this: she was to offer Him a little lip-service, perform daily some domestic duties and pretend to Jacques she was in love with him; in return for this He (aided by her dances) was to procure for her the entrée into the inner circle of the Précieuses, and the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry! And the tenets of Jansenism—it was a long time since she had boldly faced them. What were they?
Every man is a tainted creature, fallen into an incurable and permanent habit of sinning. His every action, his every thought—beginning from the puny egotism of his babyhood—is a loathsome sin in the eyes of God. The only remedy for the diseased will that prompts these sinful thoughts and actions is the sovereign, infallible grace that God sends on those whom He has decided in His secret councils to raise to a state of triumphant purity. And what does this Grace engender? An agony of repentance, a loathing of things visible, and a burning longing for things invisible—in invisibilium amorem rapiamur, yes, that is the sublime and frigid fate of the true penitent.
And she had actually deceived herself so far as to think that the Arch-Enemy of sin manifested His goodness like a weak, earthly father by gratifying one’s worldly desires, one’s ‘concupiscence’ which Jansenius calls the ‘source of all the other vices’! No, His gifts to men were not these vain baubles, the heart’s desires, but Grace, the Eucharist, His perpetual Presence on the Altar—gigantic, austere benefits befitting this solemn abstract universe, in which angels are helping men in the fight for their immortal souls.
Yes, this was the Catholic faith, this was the true and living God, to Whose throne she had dared to come with trivial requests and paltry bargainings.
She felt this evening an almost physical craving for perfect sincerity with herself, so without flinching she turned her scrutiny upon her love for Mademoiselle de Scudéry. There flashed into her mind the words of Jansenius upon the sin of Adam:—
‘What could Adam love after God, away from whom he had fallen? What could so sublime a spirit love but the sublimest thing after God Himself, namely—his own spirit?... This love, through which he wished, somehow, to take joy in himself, in as much as he could no longer take joy in God, in itself did not long suffice. Soon he apprehended its indigence, and that in it he would never find happiness.
‘Then, seeing that the way was barred that led back to God, the source of true felicity from which he had cut himself off, the want left in his nature precipitated him towards the creatures here below, and he wandered among them, hoping that they might satisfy the want. Thence come those bubbling desires, whose name is legion; those tight, cruel chains with which he is bound by the creatures he loves, that bondage, not only of himself but of all he imprisons by their love for him. Because, once again, in this love of his for all other things, it is above all himself that he holds dear. In all his frequent delights it is always—and this is a remnant of his ancient noble state—in himself that he professes to delight.’
How could she, knowing this passage, have deceived herself into imagining she could save her soul by love for a creature?
The words of Jansenius were confirmed by those of Saint Augustine:—
‘I lived in adultery away from Thee.... For the friendship of this world is adultery against Thee,’
and her own conscience confirmed them both, for it whispered that her obsession for Mademoiselle de Scudéry was nothing but a subtle development of her amour-propre, and what was more, had swollen to such dimensions as completely to blot out God from her universe.
Well, she stood condemned in all her desires and in all her activities!
What was to be done? With regard to one matter at least her duty was clear. She must confess to Jacques that she had lied to him when she said she loved him.
And Mademoiselle de Scudéry ... would she be called upon to chase her from her heart? Oh, the cruelty of it! The horse-face and the plain gray gown ... the wonderful invention in galanterie made by herself and the Grecian Sappho ... the delicious ‘light fire’ of expectancy ... the desirability of being loved in return ... the deep, deep roots it had taken in her heart. To see the figure in gray serge growing smaller and smaller as earth receded from her, and as her new amours—the ‘invisible things’—drew her up, and up with chill, shadowy arms—she couldn’t, she couldn’t face it!
In mental agony she leaned her elbows on the parapet of the bridge, and pressing her fingers against her eyes, she prayed passionately for guidance.
When she opened them, two gallants were passing.
‘Have you heard the mot Ninon made to the Queen of Sweden?’ one was asking.
‘No, what was it?’
‘Her Majesty asked her for a definition of the Précieuses, and Ninon said at once, “Madame, les Précieuses sont les Jansénistes de l’amour!” ’Twas prettily said, wasn’t it?’ They laughed, and were soon out of sight.
‘Les Précieuses sont les Jansénistes de l’amour!’ Madeleine laughed aloud, as there swept over her a flood of what she imagined to be divine illumination. Her prayer for guidance had been miraculously answered, and in a manner perfectly accordant with her own wishes. It was obviously a case of Robert Pilou’s sacred screen. ‘Profane history told by means of sacred prints becomes sacred history.’ A Précieuse need only have a knack of sacramentalism to become in the same way a Jansenist, for there was a striking resemblance between the two creeds. In their demands on their followers they had the same superb disregard for human weakness, and in both this disregard was coupled with a firm belief in original sin (for the contempt and loathing with which the Précieuses regarded the manners of all those ignorant of their code sprang surely from a belief in ‘original boorishness’ which in their eyes was indistinguishable from ‘original sin’), the only cure for which was their own particular form of grace. And the grace of the Précieuses, namely, l’air galant—that elusive social quality which through six or seven pages of Le Grand Cyrus, gracefully evades the definitions in which the agile authoress is striving to hold it, that quality without which the wittiest conversation is savourless, the most graceful compliment without fragrance, that quality which can be acquired by no amount of good-will or application, and which can be found in the muddiest poet and be lacking in the most elegant courtier—did it not offer the closest parallel to the mysterious grace of the Jansenists without which there was no salvation, and which was sometimes given in abundance to the greatest sinners and denied to the most virtuous citizens? And then—most striking analogy of all—the Précieuses’ conception of the true lover possessed just those qualities demanded from us by Saint Paul and the Jansenists. What finer symbol, for instance, of the perfect Christian could be found than that of the hero of the Astrée, Céladon, the perfect lover?
Yes, in spite of Saint Augustine’s condemnation of the men ‘who blushed for a solecism,’ she could sanctify her preciosity by making it the symbol of her spiritual development, and—oh, rapture—she could sanctify her obsession for Mademoiselle de Scudéry by making it definitely the symbol of her love for Christ, not merely a means of curing her amour-propre. Through her, she would learn to know Him. Had it not been said by Saint Augustine: ‘My sin was just this, that I sought for pleasure, grandeur, vanity, not in Him, but in His creatures,’ by which he surely meant that the love of the creature for the creature was not in itself a sin, it only became so when it led to forgetting the Creator.
So, with singular rapidity this time, ‘La folie de la Croix s’est atténuée.’
It was already twilight. In the Churches they would be celebrating Compline. The choir would be singing: ‘Jube, Domine, benedicere,’ and the priest would answer: ‘Noctem quietam et finem perfectum concedat nobis Dominus omnipotens.’
The criers of wafers were beginning their nocturnal song: ‘La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies!’ It was time to go home; her mother would be anxious; she must try very hard not to be so inconsiderate.
It was quite dark when she reached the petite rue du Paon. She found Madame Troqueville almost frantic with anxiety, so she flung her arms round her neck and whispered her contrition for her present lateness and her former ill-humour. Madame Troqueville pressed her convulsively and whispered back that she was never ill-humoured, and even if she were, it was no matter. In the middle of this scene in came Berthe, nodding and becking. ‘Ah! Mademoiselle is câline in her ways! She is skilled in wheedling her parents—a second Nausicaa!’