CHAPTER XIX
THE PLEASURES OF DESPAIR
The disappointment had indeed been a shattering blow, and its effects lasted much longer than the failure at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. For then her vanity or, which is the same thing, her instinct of self-preservation, had not allowed her to acknowledge that she had been a social failure. But this disappointment was a hard fact against whose fabric saving fancy beat its wings in vain. Sometimes she would play with the thought of suicide, but would shrink back from it as the final blow to all her hopes. For, supposing she should wake up in the other world, and find the old longing gnawing still, like Céladon, when he wakes up in the Palace of Galathée? She would picture herself floating invisible round Mademoiselle de Scudéry, unable to leave any footprint on her consciousness, and although this had a certain resemblance to her present state, as long as they were both in this world, there must always be a little hope. And then, supposing that the first knowledge that flashed on her keener, freer senses when she had died was that if only she had persevered a year longer, perhaps only a month longer, the friendship of Mademoiselle de Scudéry would have been hers! She took some comfort from the clammy horror of the thought. For, after all, as long as she was alive there must always be left a few grains of hope ... while she was alive ... but what if one night she should be wakened by the ringing of a bell in the street, and running to the window see by the uncertain light of the lantern he held in one hand, a macabre figure, looking like one of the Kings in the pack of cards with which Death plays against Life for mortal men, the stiff folds of his old-world garment embroidered with skulls and tears and cross-bones! And what would he be singing as he rang his bell?:—
‘Priez Dieu pour l’âme de la Demoiselle de Scudéry qui vient de trépasser.’
Vient de trépasser! Lying stiff and cold and lonely, and Madeleine had never been able to tell her that she loved her.
Good God! There were awful possibilities!
She was haunted, too, by the fear that God had not deserted her, but had resolved in His implacable way that willy-nilly she must needs eventually receive His bitter gift of Salvation. That, struggle though she would, she would be slowly, grimly weaned from all that was sweet and desirable, and then in the twinkling of an eye caught up ‘to the love of Invisible Things.’ ‘One cannot resist the inward Grace;’ well, she, at least, would put up a good fight.
Then a wave of intense self-pity would break over her that the all-powerful God, who by raising His hand could cause the rivers to flow backwards to their sources, the sun to drop into the sea, when she approached Him with her prayer for the friendship of a poverty-stricken authoress—a prayer so paltry that it could be granted by an almost unconscious tremble of His will, by an effort scarcely strong enough to cause an Autumn leaf to fall—that this God should send her away empty-handed and heart-broken.
Yes, it was but a small thing she wanted, but how passionately, intensely she wanted it.
If things had gone as she had hoped, she would by now be known all over the town as the incomparable Sappho’s most intimate friend. In the morning she would go to her ruelle and they would discuss the lights and shades of their friendship; in the afternoon she would drive with her in le Cours la Reine, where all could note the happy intimacy between them; in the evening Sappho would read her what she had written that day, and to each, life would grow daily richer and sweeter. But actually she had been half a year in Paris and she and Sappho had not yet exchanged a word. No, the trials of Céladon and Phaon and other heroes of romance could not be compared to this, for they from the first possessed the estime of their ladies, and so what mattered the plots of rivals or temporary separations? What mattered even misunderstandings and quarrels? When one of the lovers in Cyrus is asked if there is something amiss between him and his mistress, he answers sadly:—
‘Je ne pense pas Madame que j’y sois jamais assez bien pour y pouvoir être mal.’
and that was her case—the hardest case of all. In the old sanguine days at Lyons, when the one obstacle seemed to be that of space, what would she have said if she had been told how far away she would still be from her desire after half a year in Paris?
One day, when wandering unhappily about the Île Notre-Dame, with eyes blind to the sobriety and majestic sweep of life that even the ignoble crowd of litigants and hawkers was unable to arrest in that island that is at once so central and so remote, she had met Marguerite Troguin walking with her tire-woman and a girl friend. She had come up to Madeleine and had told her with a giggle that they had secretly been buying books at the Galerie du Palais. ‘They are stowed away in there,’ she whispered, pointing to the large market-basket carried by the tire-woman, ‘Sercy’s Miscellany of Verse, and the Voyage à la Lune, and the Royaume de Coquetterie; if my mother got wind of it she’d burn the books and send me to bed,’ at which the friend giggled and the tire-woman smiled discreetly.
‘They told us at Quinet’s that the first volume of a new romance by Mademoiselle de Scudéry is shortly to appear. Oh, the pleasure I take in Cyrus, ’tis the prettiest romance ever written!’ Marguerite cried rapturously. ‘I have heard it said that Sappho in the Sixth volume is a portrait of herself, I wonder if ’tis true.’
‘It is, indeed, and an excellent portrait at that, save that the original is ten times wittier and more galante,’ Madeleine found herself answering with an important air, touched with condescension.
‘Are you acquainted with her?’ the two girls asked in awed voices.
‘Why, yes, I am well acquainted with her, she has asked me to attend her Samedis.’
And afterwards she realised with a certain grim humour that could she have heard this conversation when she was at Lyons she would have concluded that all had gone as she had hoped.
During this time she did not dance, because that would be a confession that hope was not dead. That it should be dead she was firmly resolved, seeing that, although genuinely miserable, she took a pleasure in nursing this misery as carefully as she had nursed the atmosphere of her second coup de grâce. By doing so, she felt that she was hurting something or some one—what or who she could not have said—but something outside herself; and the feeling gave her pleasure. All through this terrible time she would follow her mother about like a whimpering dog, determined that she should be spared none of her misery, and Madame Troqueville’s patience and sympathy were unfailing.
Jacques, too, rose to the occasion. He lost for the time all his mocking ways, nor would he try to cheer her up with talk of ‘some other Saturday,’ knowing that it would only sting her into a fresh paroxysm of despair, but would sit and hold her hand and curse the cruelty of disappointment. Monsieur Troqueville also realised the gravity of the situation. On the rare occasions when the fact that some one was unhappy penetrated through his egotism, he was genuinely distressed. He would bring her little presents—a Portuguese orange, or some Savoy biscuits, or a new print—and would repeat over and over again: ‘’Tis a melancholy business! A melancholy business!’ One day, however, he added gloomily: ‘’Tis the cruellest fate, for these high circles would have been the fit province for Madeleine and for me,’ at which Madeleine screamed out in a perfect frenzy: ‘There’s no similarity between him and me! none! NONE! NONE!’ and poor Monsieur Troqueville was hustled out of the room, while Jacques and her mother assured her that she was not in the least like her father.
Monsieur Troqueville seemed very happy about something at that time. Berthe told Madeleine that she had found hidden in a chest, a galant of ribbons, a pair of gay garters, an embroidered handkerchief, and a cravat.
‘He is wont to peer at them when Madame’s back is turned, and, to speak truth, he seems as proud of them as Mademoiselle was of the bravery she bought at the Fair!’ and she went on to say that by successful eavesdropping she had discovered that he had won them as a wager.
‘It seems that contrary to the expectations of his comrades he has taken the fancy of a pretty maid! He! He! Monsieur’s a rare scoundrel!’ but Madeleine seemed to take no interest in the matter.
The only thing in which she found a certain relief was in listening to Berthe’s tales about her home. Berthe could talk by the hour about the sayings and doings of her young brothers and sisters, to whom she was passionately devoted. And Madeleine could listen for hours, for Berthe was so remote from her emotionally that she felt no compulsion to din her with her own misery, and she felt no rights on her sympathy, as she did on her mother’s, whom she was determined should not be spared a crumb of her own anguish. In her childhood, her imagination had been fascinated by an object in the house of an old lady they had known. It was a small box, in which was a tiny grotto, made of moss and shells and little porcelain flowers, out of which peeped a variegated porcelain fauna—tiny foxes and squirrels and geese, and blue and green birds; beside a glass Jordan, on which floated little boats, stood a Christ and Saint John the Baptist, and over their heads there hung from a wire a white porcelain dove. To many children smallness is a quality filled with romance, and Madeleine used to crave to walk into this miniature world and sail away, away, away, down the glass river to find the tiny cities that she felt sure lay hidden beyond the grotto; in Berthe’s stories she felt a similar charm and lure.
She would tell how her little brother Albert, when minding the sheep of a stern uncle, fell asleep one hot summer afternoon, and on waking up found that two of the lambs were missing.
‘Then, poor, pretty man, he fell to crying bitterly, for any loss to his pocket my uncle takes but ill, when lo! on a sudden, there stood before him a damsel of heroic stature, fair as the fleurs de lys on a royal banner, in antic tire and her hair clipped short like a lad’s, and quoth she, smiling: “Petit paysan, voilà tes agneaux!” and laying the two lost lambs by his side, she vanished. And in telling what had befallen him he called her just “the good Shepherdess,” but the curé said she could be no other than Jeanne, la Pucelle, plying, as in the days before she took to arms, the business of a shepherdess.’
Then she would tell of the little, far-away inn kept by her father, with its changing, motley company; of the rustic mirth on the Nuit des Rois; of games of Colin-maillard in the garret sweet with the smell of apples; of winter nights round the fire when tales were told of the Fairy Magloire, brewer of love-potions; of the sotret, the fairy barber of Lorraine, who curled the hair of maidens for wakes and marriages, or (if the curé happened to drop in) more guileless legends of the pretty prowess of the petit Jésus.
Madeleine saw it all as if through the wrong end of a telescope—tiny and far-away.