The period that ensued was one of great happiness for Madeleine. It was spent in floating on her own interpretation of the Jansenists’ ‘full sea of grace,’ happy in the certainty, secure in the faith, that God in His own good time would grant her desires, and reverse the rôles of fugitive and pursuer. And being set free from the necessity of making her own future, ipso facto she was also released from the importunities of the gnat-like taboos and duties upon the doing or not doing of which had seemed to depend her future success.
She felt at peace with God and with man, and her family found her unusually gentle, calm, and sympathetic.
But Bethel was not yet raised. This was partly due to the inevitable torpor caused by an excess of faith. If it was God’s will that she should have an explanation with Jacques, He would furnish the occasion and the words.
So the evenings slipped by, and Madeleine continued to receive Jacques’s caresses with an automatic responsiveness.
Then, at a party at the Troguins, she met a benevolent though gouty old gentleman, in a black taffeta jerkin and black velvet breeches, and he was none other than Monsieur Conrart, perpetual secretary to the Academy, and self-constituted master of the ceremonies at the ‘Samedis’ of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Madeleine was introduced to him, and her demure attention to his discourse, her modest demeanour, and her discreet feminine intelligence pleased him extremely. She made no conscious effort to attract him, she just trusted God, and, to ring another change on her favourite quolibet, it was as if la Grâce confided to the Graces the secret of its own silent, automatic action. He grew very paternal, patted her on the knee with his fat, gouty hand, and focused his energies on the improvement of her mind instead of the collective mind of the company.
The end of it was that he promised to take her with him to the very next ‘Samedi.’
On the way home, she and Jacques went for a stroll in the Place Maubert, that favourite haunt of petits-bourgeois, where in pathetic finery they aired their puny pretensions to pass for honnêtes gens, or, more happily constituted, exercised their capacity for loud laughter and coarse wit, and the one privilege of their class, that of making love in public.
As a rule, Madeleine would rather have died than have been seen walking in the Place Maubert, but now, when her soul was floating on a sea of grace, so dazzlingly sunny, it mattered but little in which of the paths of earth her body chose to stray; however, this evening, her happiness was a little disturbed by an inward voice telling her that now was the time for enlightening Jacques with regard to her feelings towards him.
She looked at him; he was a lovable creature and she realised that she would sorely miss him. Then she remembered that on Saturday she was going to see Sappho, and in comparison with her the charm of pale, chestnut-haired young men lost all potency. She was going to see Sappho. God was very good!
They were threading their way between squares of box clipped in arabesque. It was sunset, and from a distant shrubbery there came the sounds of children at their play. The pungent smell of box, the voices of children playing at sunset; they brought to Madeleine a sudden whiff of the long, nameless nostalgia of childhood, a nostalgia for what? Perhaps for the vitæ munus (the fulfilment of life) of the Vesper hymn; well, on Saturday she would know the vitæ munus.
She seized Jacques’s arm and, with shining eyes, cried out: ‘Oh, God is exceeding merciful to His chosen! He keeps the promise in the Psalms, He “maketh glad our youth.” When I think on His great goodness ... I want ... I want ... Oh, words fail me! How comes it, Jacques, you do not see His footsteps everywhere upon the earth?’ She was trembling with exultation and her voice shook.
Jacques looked at her gently, and his face was troubled.
‘One cannot reveal Grace to another by words and argument,’ she went on, ‘each must feel it in his own soul, but let it once be felt, then never more will one be obnoxious to doubts on ghostly matters, willy-nilly one will believe to all eternity!’
They found a quiet little seat beside a fountain and sat down. After a moment’s silence Madeleine once more took up her Te Deum.
‘Matter for thanksgiving is never wanting, as inch by inch the veil is lifted from the eyes of one’s spirit to discover in time the whole fair prospect of God’s most amiable Providence. Oh, Jacques, why are you blind?’ His only answer was to kick the pebbles, his eyes fixed on the ground.
Then, in rather a constrained voice, he said: ‘I would rather put it thus; matter for pain is never wanting to him who stares at the world with an honest and unblinking eye. What sees he? Pain—pain—and again pain. It is harsh and incredible to suppose that ’twould be countenanced by a good God. What say you, Chop, to pain?’
Madeleine was pat with her answers from Jansenism—the perfection of man’s estate before the Fall, when there was granted him the culminating grace of free will, his misuse of it by his choice of sin, and its attendant, pain.
Jacques was silent for a moment, and then he said:—
‘I can conceive of no scale of virtues wherein room is found for a lasting, durable, and unremitted anger, venting itself on the progeny of its enemy unto the tenth and twentieth-thousand generation. Yet, such an anger was cherished by your God, towards the children of Adam. Nor in any scale of virtues is there place for the pregnant fancy of an artificer, who having for his diversion moulded a puppet out of mud, to show, forsooth, the cunning of his hand, makes that same puppet sensible to pain and to affliction. Why, ’tis a subtle malice of which even the sponsors of Pandora were guiltless! Then his ignoble chicanery! With truly kingly magnanimity he cedes to the puppet the franchise of free will; but mark what follows! The puppet, guileless and trusting, proceeds to enjoy its freedom, when lo! down on its head descends the thunder-bolt, that it may know free will must not be exercised except in such manner as is accordant with the purposes of the giver. The pettifogging attorney!
‘Yes, your God is bloodier than Moloch, more perfectly tyrant than Jove, more crafty and dishonest than Mercury.
‘Have you read the fourth book of Virgil’s Æneid? In it I read a tragedy more pungent than the cozenage of Dido—that of a race of mortals, quick in their apprehensions, tender in their affections, sensible to the dictates of conscience and of duty, who are governed by gods, ferocious and malign, as far beneath them in the scale of creation as are the roaring lions of the Libyan desert. And were I not possessed by the certainty that your faith is but a monstrous fiction, my wits would long ere now have left me in comparing the rare properties of good men with those of your low Hebrew idol.’
Madeleine looked at him curiously. This was surely a piece of prepared rhetoric, not a spontaneous outburst. So she was not the only person who in her imagination spouted eloquence to an admiring audience!
Although she had no arguments with which to meet his indictment, her faith, not a whit disturbed, continued comfortably purring in her heart. But as she did not wish to snub his outburst by silence—her mood was too benevolent—she said:—
‘Do you hold, then, that there is no good power behind the little accidents of life?’
‘The only good power lies in us ourselves, ’tis the Will that Descartes writes of—a magic sword like to the ones in Amadis, a delicate, sure weapon, not rusting in the armoury of a tyrannical god, but ready to the hand of every one of us to wield it when we choose. Les hommes de volonté—they form the true noblesse d’épée, and can snap their fingers at Hozier and his heraldries,’ he paused, then said very gently, ‘Chop, I sometimes fear that in your wild chase after winged horses you may be cozened out of graver and more enduring blessings, which, though they be not as rare and pretty as chimeras....’
‘Because you choose to stick on them the name of chimeras,’ Madeleine interrupted with some heat, ‘it does not a whit alter their true nature. Though your mind may be too narrow to stable a winged horse, that is no hindrance to its finding free pasturage in the mind of God, of which the universe is the expression. And even if they should be empty cheats—which they are not—do you not hold the Duc de Liancourt was worthy of praise in that by a cunningly painted perspective he has given the aspect of a noble park watered by a fair river to his narrow garden in the Rue de Seine?’
‘Why, if we be on the subject of painted perspectives,’ said Jacques, ‘it is reported that the late cardinal in his villa at Rueil had painted on a wall at the end of his Citronière the Arch of Constantine. ’Twas a life-size cheat and so cunning an imitation of nature was shown in the painting of sky and hills between the arches, that foolish birds, thinking to fly through have dashed themselves against the wall. Chop, it would vex me sorely to see you one of these birds!’
A frightened shadow came into Madeleine’s eyes, and she furtively crossed herself. Then, once more, she smiled serenely.
For several moments they were silent, and then Jacques said hesitatingly:—
‘Dear little Chop ... I would have you deal quite frankly with me, and tell me if you mean it when you say you love me. There are moments when a doubt ... I must know the truth, Chop!’
In an almost miraculous manner the way had been made easy for her confession, and ... she put her arms round his neck (in the Place Maubert you could do these things) and feverishly assured him that she loved him with all her heart.