CHAPTER XXXIII
FACE TO FACE WITH FACTS
She awoke next morning to the sense that she must make up her account. How exactly did things stand? She certainly had been neither gauche nor silent the day before. Saint Magdalene had done all she had asked of her, but by so doing had she played her some hideous trick?
She had had absolute faith in Descartes’ doctrine that love proceeds from admiration, and that admiration is caused by anything rare and extraordinary. She was rare, she was extraordinary, but had she aroused admiration? And even if she had, could it not be the forerunner of hate as well as of love?
Alas! how much easier would be self-knowledge, and hence, if the Greeks were right, how much easier too would be virtue, if the actions of our passions were as consistent, the laws that govern them as mechanical, as they appear in Descartes’ Treatise. Moreover, how much easier would be happiness if, docile and catholic like birds and flowers, we were never visited by these swift, exclusive passions, which are so rarely reciprocal.
No, if Mademoiselle de Scudéry did not feel for her d’un aveugle penchant le charme imperceptible, the Cestus of Venus itself would be of no avail. Even if she had not cut herself off from the relief of her dances by bringing them to a climax beyond which their virtue could not function, this had been, even for their opiate, too stern and dolorous a fact.
Circumstances had forced her bang up against reality this time. She must find out, once and for all, how matters stood, that is to say, if she had aroused the emotion of admiration. She must have her own suspicions allayed—or confirmed. The only way this could be done, was to go to the Chevalier’s house and ask him. The spoken word carried for her always a strange finality. Suspense would be unbearable; she must go now.
She dressed hurriedly, slipped on her mask and cloak, and stole into the street. The strange antiphony of the hawkers rang through the morning, and there echoed after her as she ran the well-known cry: Vous désirez quelque ch-o-o-se? This cry in the morning, and in the evening that of the Oublieux.—La joie! la joie! Voilà des oublies! ... Did one answer the other in some strange way, these morning and evening cries? It could be turned into a dialogue between Fate and a mortal, thus:—
Fate: Vous désirez quelque cho-o-o-se?
Mortal: La joie! la joie!
Fate: Voilà—l’oubli.
On she ran, careless of the surprise of the passers-by, over the Pont-Neuf, already busy, and driving its motley trade, then along the Quais on the other side, past the Louvre, and up the Rue de Richelieu, where the Chevalier lived. She had naturally never been to his rooms, but she knew where they were. She slipped in at the main doorway and up the long stairs, her heart beating somewhere up in her throat. She knew he lived on the second landing. She knocked many times before the door was opened by a lackey in a night-cap. He gaped when he first saw her, and then grinned broadly.
‘Mademoiselle must see Monsieur? Monsieur is abed, but Mademoiselle doubtless will not mind that!’
‘Tell Monsieur that Mademoiselle Troqueville must see him on urgent business,’ Madeleine said severely.
The lackey grinned again, and led her through a great bare room, surrounded by carved wooden chests, in which, doubtless, the Chevalier kept his innumerable suits of clothes. They served also as beds, chairs, and tables to the Chevalier’s army of lackeys and pages, for some were lying full length on them snoring lustily, and others, more matinal, were sitting on them cross-legged, and, wrapped in rugs, were playing at that solace of the vulgar—Lasquinet. Madeleine felt a sudden longing to be one of them, happy, lewd, soulless creatures!
She was shown into an elegant little waiting-room, full of small inlaid tables and exquisite porcelain. The walls were hung with crayon sketches, and large canvasses of well-known ladies by Mignard and Beaubrun. Some of them were in allegorical postures—there was the celebrated Précieuse, Madame de Buisson, holding a lyre and standing before a table covered with books and astronomical instruments ... she was probably meant to represent a Muse ... she was leering horribly ... was it the Comic Muse?
It must have been for about a quarter of an hour that Madeleine waited, sitting rigid and expressionless.
At last the Chevalier arrived, fresh from his valet’s hands, in a gorgeous Chinese dressing-gown, scented and combed. He held out both his hands to her and his eyes were sparkling, to Madeleine it seemed with a sinister light, and she found herself wondering, as she marked the dressing-gown, if he were Descartes. Anything was possible in this Goblin-world.
She suddenly realised that she must find the ‘urgent business’ that had wrenched the Chevalier from his morning sleep. She could not very well blurt put ‘Did Mademoiselle de Scudéry like me?’ but what could she say?
‘Dear Rhodanthos, I cursed my valet for not being winged when I heard it was you, and—as you see—my impatience was too great for a jerkin! What brings you at this hour? That you should turn to me in your trouble, if trouble it is, is a prettier compliment than all les fleurettes of all the polite Anthologies. What has metamorphosed the Grecian rose into a French lily?’
Madeleine blushed, and stammered out that she did not know. Then the Chevalier took matters into his own hands. This behaviour might smack of the reign of Louis XIII., but it was very delicious for all that.
He took her in his arms. Madeleine lay there impassive. After all, it saved her the trouble of finding a reason; for the one thing that was left in this emotional ruin was the old shrinking from people knowing how much it mattered. But as to what he might think of her present behaviour, ’twas a matter of no moment whatever. She held him at arm’s length from her for a minute.
‘Tell me,’ she said archly, ‘did you find yesterday a pleasant diversion?’ His cheeks were flushed, and there was the dull drunken look in his eyes which is one of the ways passion expresses itself in middle-aged men. ‘Come back to me!’ he muttered thickly, without answering her question.
‘First tell me if you found it diverting!’ she cried gaily, and darted to the opposite end of the room. He rushed after her.
‘Don’t madden me, child,’ he muttered, and took her in his arms again. Again Madeleine broke away from him laughing.
‘I won’t come to you till—let me see—till you tell me if I took the fancy of Mademoiselle de Scudéry.’ She was, when hard-driven, an excellent actress, and the question tripped out, light and mocking, as if it had just been an excuse for tormenting him. There she stood with laughing lips and grave, wind-swept eyes, keeping him at bay with her upraised hand. ‘In earnest,’ she cooed tormentingly, ‘you must first answer my question.’ For a moment, the pedagogue broke through the lover.
‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry is an exquisitely correct lady, her sense of social seemliness amounts to genius. She could hardly approve of a hamadryad ... Madeleine!’ and he made a dash for her. But she ducked and turned under his outstretched arms, and was once more at the opposite end of the room. The flame of her wish to know began to burn up her flimsy rôle.
‘I—promise you—anything—afterwards, but—pray tell me—did Mademoiselle de Scudéry make any mention to you of me?’ she panted.
‘’Tis no matter and she did, I....’
‘Tell me!’ And somehow Madeleine’s voice compelled obedience.
‘What strange vision is this? Well, then, as you are so desirous of knowing ... Mademoiselle de Scudéry ... well, she is herself a lady, and as such cannot be over sensible to the charms of her own sex——’
‘Well?’
‘Well, do not take it ill, but also she always finds it hard to pardon a ... well ... a ... er ... a certain lack of decorum. I told her she erred grievously in her judgment of you, but, it seems, you did not take her fancy, and she maintained’—(The Chevalier was rather glad of the opportunity of repeating the following words, for not being in propria persona, they escaped incivility and might be beneficial.) ‘She maintained that your manners were grossier, your wit de province, and that even if you lived to be as old as the Sybil, “you would never be an honnête femme”.... Maintenant, ma petite Reine——’
But Madeleine was out of the room—pushing her way through the lackeys ... then down the staircase ... then out into the street ... running, running, running.
Then she stood still and began to tremble from head to foot with awful, silent laughter. Fool that she was not to have seen it before! Why, the Sapphic Ode was but another statement of the Law she had so dreaded—that the spurner of love must in his turn inevitably be spurned! Who flees, she shall pursue; who spurns gifts, she shall offer them; who loves not, willy-nilly she shall love. As the words stood, the ‘she’ did not necessarily refer to the object of Sappho’s desire. Fool, fool, she had read as a promise what was intended as a warning. She was being punished for spurning the love of Jacques.
What a strange irony, that just by her effort to escape this Law she had brought down on herself the full weight of its action! To avoid its punishment of her amour-propre she had pretended to be in love with Jacques, thereby entangling herself in a mass of contradictions, deceit, and nervous terrors from which the only means of extricating herself was by breaking the law anew and spurning love. Verily, it was a fine example of Até—the blindness sent by the gods on those they mean to destroy.
Well, now the end had come, and of the many possibilities and realities life had held for her, nothing was left but the adamant of desire which neither the tools of earth can break, nor the chemistry of Hell resolve.