CHAPTER XXXI
THE END OF THE ‘ROMAN’
Madeleine listened to Jacques’s light footsteps going down the long flight of stairs, and knew that he had gone for ever. With this knowledge came a sense of peace she had not known for days, and one of sacramental purity, such as must have filled the souls of pious Athenians when at the Thargelia the Pharmakoi were expelled from the city.
Yes, just in time she had discovered the true moral of the Sapphic Ode and the story of Nausicaa, to wit, that the gods will break their promises if man fails to perform the necessary rites and ceremonies. Ritually, her affairs were in exquisite order. By her sacrilegious Communion (she still shuddered at the thought of it) she had consolidated her cult for the powerful Saint Magdalene, and at the same time cut out of her heart the brand of God, by which in the fullness of time the ravishing Angel would have discovered his victim. And, finally, by her dismissal of Jacques, she had rid herself of a most malign miasma. The wax of reality lay before her, smooth and white and ready for her moulding. All she had to do now was to sparkle, and, automatically, she would arouse the passion of Admiration.
Suddenly she remembered another loose thread that needed to be gathered up. The roman of her dances had not been brought to a climax.
An unwritten law of the style gallant makes the action of a roman automatically cease after a declaration of love. Nothing can happen afterwards. What if she should force time to its fullness and make a declaration? It would be burning her boats, it would be staking all her happiness on this last meeting, for if it were a failure hope would be dead. For, owing to her strange confusion of the happenings of her dances with those of real life, the roman of the one having been completed, its magical virtue all used up, its colophon reached, she felt that the roman of the other would also have reached its colophon, that nothing more could happen. But for great issues she must take great risks ... dansons!
Sappho and Madeleine are reclining on a bank, the colour and design of which rival all the carpets in the bazaars of Bagdad. There is no third person to mar their ravishing solitude à deux. Madeleine is saying,—
‘I must confess, Madame, that your delicious writings have made me a heretic.’
Sappho laughs gaily. ‘Then I tremble for your fate, for heretics are burned.’
‘In that case I am indeed a heretic, for a flame has long burned me,’ says Madeleine boldly. But Sappho possesses in a high degree the art of hearing only what she chooses, and she says, a trifle coldly,—
‘If my writings have made you a heretic, they must themselves be heretical. Do they contain Five Propositions worthy of papal condemnation?’
‘Madame, you are resolved to misunderstand me. They have made me a heretic in regard to the verdict of posterity as to the merits of the ancients, for since I have steeped myself, if I may use the expression, in your incomparable style I have become as deaf as Odysseus to the siren songs of Greece and Rome.’
‘That is indeed heresy,’ cries Sappho with a smile that shows she is not ill-pleased. ‘I fear it will be visited by excommunication by the whole College of Muses.’
‘The only punishment of heresy—you have yourself said so—is ... flame,’ says Madeleine, gazing straight into the eyes of Sappho. This time she is almost certain she can perceive a blush on that admirable person’s cheek—almost certain, for the expression of such delicate things as the Passions of Sappho must need itself be very delicate. Descartes has said that a blush proceeds from one of two passions—love or hate. En voilà un problème galant!
‘To justify my heresy, permit me, Madame, to recall to your mind a poem by your namesake, the Grecian Sappho,—
‘That man seems to me greater than the gods who doth sit facing thee and sees thee and hears thy delicate laughter. When this befalls me my senses clean depart ... all is void ... my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth, drop by drop flame steals down my slender veins ... there is a singing in mine ears ... my eyes are covered with a twin night.
She pauses, but Sappho laughs—perhaps not quite naturally—and cries,—
‘Mademoiselle, your heresy still stands unjustified!’
‘Why, Madame, how could any one of taste take pleasure in verse so devoid of wit, of grace, of galanterie ... so bare, so barbarous, after they have been initiated into the Parnassian Mysteries of your incomparable verse and prose? Why, what I have quoted is the language of lexicographers and philosophers, not the divine cadences of a poet. Put in metre Descartes’ description of the signs by which the movements of the Passions may be detected, namely,—
‘“The chief signs by which the Passions show themselves are the motions of the eyes and the face, changes of colour, trembling, languor, faintness, laughter, tears, moans, and sighs,” and you will have a poem every whit as graceful and well-turned!
‘The poem of Sappho I. is a “small thing” ... but if it had proceeded from the delicious pen of Sappho II. it would have been a “rose”!’
‘And how should I have effected this miracle?’ asks Sappho with a smile.
‘I think, Madame, you would have used that excellent device of the Muse Galante which I will call that of Eros Masqué.’
‘Eros Masqué? Is he unseen then as well as unseeing?’
‘On his first visit, frequently, Madame. And this droll fact—that lovers pierced by as many of his arrows as Saint Sebastian by those of the Jews are wont to ignore the instrument by which they have got their wounds—has been put to pretty use by many poètes galants. For example, an amorous maiden or swain doth describe divers well-known effects of the tender passion, and then asks with a delicious naïveté, “Can it be Love?” And this simple little question, if inserted between each of the symptoms enumerated by Sappho, would go far to giving her poem the esprit it so sadly lacks. But, Madame, far the most ravishing of all the poems of Eros Masqué are your own incomparable verses in the sixth volume of “Cyrus”:—
‘Ma peine est grande, et mon plaisir extrême,
Je ne dors point la nuit, je rêve tout le jour;
Je ne sais pas encore si j’aime,
Mais cela ressemble a l’amour.
‘Voyant Phaon mon âme est satisfaite,
Et ne le voyant point, la peine est dans mon cœur
J’ignore encore ma defaite
Mais peut-être est-il mon vainqueur?
‘Tout ce qu’il dit me semble plein de charmes!
Tout ce qu’il ne dit pas, n’en peut avoir pour moi,
Mon cœur as-tu mis bas les armes?
Je n’en sais rien, mais je le crois.
‘Do not these verses when placed by the side of those of the Grecian Sappho justify for ever my heresy?’
‘I should be guilty myself of the heresy of self-complacency were I to subscribe your justification,’ cries Sappho with a delicious air of raillery.
‘Madame, the device of Eros Masqué serves another purpose besides that of charming the fancy by its grace and drollery.... It makes Confession innocent, for although that Sacrament is detested by Précieuses as fiercely as by Protestants, the most precise and prudish of Précieuses could scarce take umbrage at a Confession expressed by a string of naïve questions.’
‘There, Madame, you show a deplorable ignorance of the geography of the heart of at least one Précieuse. I can picture myself white with indignation on receiving the Socratic Confession you describe,’ says Sappho, but the ice of her accents thaws into two delicious little dimples.
‘“Mais votre fermeté tient un peu du barbare,” to quote the great Corneille,’ cries Madeleine with a smile. ‘You called it a Socratic Confession, alluding I presume to the fact that it was cast in the form of questions, but a Socratic Confession, if my professors have not misled me, is very close to a Platonic one. Can you picture yourself white with rage at receiving a Platonic Confession?’
‘Before I can answer that question you must describe to me a Platonic Confession,’ says Sappho demurely.
‘’Tis the confession of a sentiment the purity and discreetness of which makes it the only tribute worthy to be laid at the feet of a Précieuse. Starting from what Descartes holds to be the coldest of the Passions, that of Admiration, it takes its demure way down the slope of Inclination straight into the twilight grove of l’Amitié Tendre—
‘Auprès de cette Grote sombre
Oh l’on respire un air si doux;
L’onde lutte avec les cailloux,
Et la lumière avec l’ombre.
‘Dans ce Bois, ni dans ces montagnes
Jamais chasseur ne vint encore:
Si quelqu’un y sonne du Cor
C’est Diane avec ses compagnes.
‘These delicious verses of the gentle Tristan might have been a description of the land of l’Amitié Tendre, so charmed is its atmosphere, so deep its green shadows, so heavy its brooding peace. For all round it is traced a magic circle across which nothing discordant or vulgar can venture.... Without, moan the Passions like wild beasts enchained, the thunder booms, the lightning flashes, and there is a heap as high as a mountain of barbed arrows shot by Love, all of which have fallen short of that magic circle.
‘Happy they who have crossed it!
‘Madame, I called the Grecian Sappho a barbarian.... Barbarian or no she discovered hundreds of years ago the charm by which the magic circle can be crossed ... the charm is simple when you know it; it is merely this ... take another maiden with you. It has never been crossed by man and maid, for in sight of the country’s cool trees and with the murmur of its fountains in their ear they have been snatched from behind by one of the enchained passions, or grievously wounded by one of the whizzing arrows ... Madame, shall we try the virtue of the Grecian Sappho’s charm?’
And Sappho murmurs ‘yes.’
So Madeleine put her fate ‘to the touch, to win or lose it all,’ and there was something exhilarating in the thought that retreat now was impossible.