CHAPTER II
A PARTIAL CONFESSION
At supper that evening Madeleine seemed intoxicated with happiness. She laughed wildly at nothing and squeezed Jacques’s hand under the table, which made him look pleased but embarrassed. Monsieur Troqueville was also excited about something, for he kept smiling and muttering to himself, gesticulating now and then, his nostrils expanding, his eyes flashing as if in concert with his own unspoken words. Jacques burst into extravagant praise of Madame Pilou, couched, as was his way, in abrupt adjectives, ‘She is crotesque ... she is gauloise ... she is superb!’
‘My dear Jacques,’ said Madame Troqueville, smiling, ‘You would find dozens of women every whit as crotesque and gauloise in the Halles. I’ll take you with me when I go marketing some day.’
‘Very well, and I’ll settle down and build my harem there and fill it with Madame Pilous,’ said he, grinning. ‘If I had lived in the days of Amadis de Gaul she should have been my lady and I’d have worn ... a hair shirt made of her beard!’
Madeleine, who did not, as a rule, much appreciate Jacques’s wit, laughed long and excitedly. Her mother looked at her, not sure whether to rejoice at or to fear this sudden change from languid gloom. Jacques went on with his jerky panegyric. ‘She is like some one in Rabelais. She might have been the mother of Gargantua, she——’
‘Gargamelle! Gargamelle was the mother of Gargantua!’ cried Madeleine eagerly and excitedly.
‘As you will, Gargamelle, then. Why doesn’t she please you, Aunt? It is you that are really the Précieuse, and Madeleine is at heart a franque gauloise,’ and he looked at Madeleine wickedly.
‘That I’m not ... you know nothing of my humour, Jacques.... I know best about myself, I am abhorrent of aught that is coarse and ungallant.... I am to seek why you should make other people share your faults, you——’ Madeleine had tears of rage in her eyes.
‘You are a sprouting Madame Pilou, beard and all!’ teased Jacques. ‘No, you’re not,’ and he stopped abruptly. It was his way suddenly to get bored with a subject he had started himself.
‘But Madeleine,’ began Madame Troqueville, ‘what, in Heaven’s name, prompted you to refuse to meet Mademoiselle de Scutary?’
‘De S-c-u-d-é-r-y,’ corrected Madeleine, enunciating each letter with weary irritation.
‘De Scudéry, then. You are such a goose, my child; in the name of Our Lady, how can you expect——’ and Madame Troqueville began to work herself up into a frenzy, such as only Madeleine was able to arouse in her.
But Madeleine said with such earnestness, ‘Pray mother, let the matter be,’ that Madame Troqueville said no more.
Supper being over, Monsieur Troqueville, wearing an abstracted, important air, took his hat and cloak and went out, and Madame Troqueville went to her spinning-wheel.
Jacques and Madeleine went up to her bedroom, to which they retired nearly every evening, nominally to play Spelequins or Tric-trac. Madame Troqueville had her suspicions that little of the evening was spent in these games, but what of that? Jacques’s mother had left him a small fortune, not large enough to buy a post in the Parlement, but still a competency, and if Madeleine liked him they would probably be able to get a dispensation, and Madame Troqueville would be spared the distasteful task of negotiating for a husband for her daughter. Her passion for Madeleine was not as strong as a tendency to shudder away from action, to sit spellbound and motionless before the spectacle of the automatic movement of life.
Jacques was now learning to be an attorney, for although his father had been an advocate, his friends considered that he would have more chance on the other side. Jacques docilely took their advice, for it was all one to him whether he eventually became an advocate or an attorney, seeing that from the clerks of both professions were recruited ‘les Clercs de la Bazoche’—a merry, lewd corporation with many a quaint gothic custom that appealed to Jacques’s imagination.
They had a Chancellor—called King in the old days—whom they elected annually from among themselves, and who had complete authority over them. That year Jacques reached the summit of his ambition, for they chose him for the post.
He had never seen Madeleine till her arrival in Paris two months before. At that time he was fanning the dying embers of a passion for a little lady of the Pays-Latin of but doubtful reputation.
Then the Troquevilles had arrived, and, to his horror, he began to fall in love with Madeleine. Although remarkably cynical for his age, he was nevertheless, like all of his contemporaries, influenced by the high-flown chivalry of Spain, elaborated by the Précieuses into a code where the capital crime was to love more than once. In consequence, he was extremely surly with Madeleine at first and laid it on himself as a sacred duty to find out one fault in her every day. Her solemnity was unleavened by one drop of the mocking gaiety of France; in an age of plump beauties she seemed scraggy; unlike his previous love, she was slow and rather clumsy in her movements. But it was in vain, and he had finally to acknowledge that she was like one of the grave-eyed, thin-mouthed beauties Catherine de Médici had brought with her from Italy, that her very clumsiness had something beautiful and virginal about it, and, in fact, that he was deeply in love with her.
When he had told her of his new feelings towards herself she had replied with a scorn so withering as to be worthy of the most prudish Précieuse of the Marais. This being so, his surprise was as great as his joy when, about a week before the dinner described in the last chapter, she announced that he ‘might take his fill of kissing her, and that she loved him very much.’
So a queer little relationship sprang up between them, consisting of a certain amount of kissing, a great deal of affectionate teasing on Jacques’s side, endless discussions of Madeleine’s character and idiosyncrasies—a pastime which never failed to delight and interest her—and a tacit assumption that they were betrothed.
But Jacques was not the gallant that Madeleine would have chosen. In those days, the first rung of the social ladder was le désir de parroistre—the wish to make a splash and to appear grander than you really were—and this noble aspiration of ‘une âme bien née’ was entirely lacking in Jacques. Then his scorn of the subtleties of Dandyism was incompatible with being un honnête homme, for though his long ringlets were certainly in the mode, they had originally been a concession to his mother, and all Madeleine’s entreaties failed to make him discard his woollen hose and his jerkin of Holland cloth, or substitute top boots for his short square shoes. Nor did he conform in his wooing to the code of the modish Cupid and hire the Four Fiddles to serenade her, or get up little impromptu balls in her honour, or surprise collations coming as a graceful climax to a country walk. Madeleine had too fine a scorn for facts to allow the knowledge of his lack of means to extenuate this negligence.
In short, the fact could not be blinked that Jacques was ignoble enough to be quite content with being a bourgeois.
Then again, in Metaphysics, Jacques held very different views from Madeleine, for he was an Atheistic follower of Descartes and a scoffer at Jansenism, while in other matters he was much in sympathy with the ‘Libertins’—the sworn foes of the Précieuses. The name of ‘Libertin’ was applied—in those days with no pornographic connotation—to the disciples of Gassendi, Nandé, and La Motte le Vayer. These had evolved a new Epicurean philosophy, to some of their followers merely an excuse for witty gluttony, to others, a potent ethical incentive. The Précieuses, they held, had insulted by the diluted emotions and bombastic language their good goddess Sens Commun, who had caught for them some of the radiance of the Greek Σωφροσύνη. One taste, however, they shared with the Précieusues, and that was the love of the crotesque—of quaint, cracked brains and deformed, dwarfish bodies, and of colouring. It was the same tendency probably that produced a little earlier the architecture known as baroque, the very word crotesque suggesting the mock stalactitic grottoes with which these artists had filled the gardens of Italy. But this very thing was being turned by the Libertins, with unconscious irony, via the genre burlesque of the Abbé Scarron, into a sturdy Gallic realism—for first studying real life in quest of the crotesque, they fell in love with its other aspects too.
Madeleine resented that Jacques continued just as interested in his own life as before he had met her—in his bright-eyed vagabondage in Bohemia, his quest after absurdities on the Pont-Neuf and in low taverns. She hated to be reminded that there could be anything else in the world but herself. But in spite of her evident disapproval, he continued to spend just as much of his time in devising pranks with his subjects of La Bazoche, and in haunting the Pont-Neuf in quest of the crotesque.
Another thing which greatly displeased Madeleine was that Jacques and her father had struck up a boon-companionship, and this also she was not able to stop.
That same evening, when they got into her room, they were silent for a little. Jacques always left it to her to give the note of the evening’s intimacy.
‘What are you pondering?’ he said at last.
‘’Twould be hard to say, Jacques.... I’m exceeding happy.’
‘Are you? I’m glad of it! you have been of so melancholy and strange a humour ever since I’ve known you. There were times when you had the look of a hunted thing.’
‘Yes, at times my heart was like to break with melancholy.’
Jacques was silent, then he said suddenly, ‘Has it aught to do with that Scudéry woman?’
Madeleine gave a start and blushed all over. ‘What ... what ... how d’you mean?’
‘Oh! I don’t know. I had the fancy it might in some manner refer to her ... you act so whimsically when mention is made of her.’
Madeleine laughed nervously, and examined her nails with unnecessary concentration, and then with eyes still averted from Jacques, she began in a jerky, embarrassed voice, ‘I’m at a loss to know how you discovered it ... ’tis so foolish, at least, I mean rather ’tis so hard to make my meaning clear ... but to say truth, it is about her ... the humour to know her has come so furiously upon me that I shall go mad if it cannot be compassed!’ and her voice became suddenly hard and passionate.
‘There is no reason in nature why it should not. Old Pilou said she would contrive it for you, but you acted so fantastically and begged her not to, funny one!’
Madeleine once more became self-conscious. ‘I know ... it’s so hard to make clear my meaning.... ’Tis an odd, foolish fancy, I confess, but I am always having the feeling that things won’t fall out as I would wish, except something else happens first. As soon as the desire for a thing begins to work on me, all manner of little fantastical things crop up around me, and I am sensible that except I compound with them I shall not compass the big thing. For example ... for example, if I was going to a ball and was eager it should prove a pleasant junketing, well, I might feel it was going to yield but little pleasure unless—unless—I were able to keep that comb there balanced on my hand while I counted three.’
‘Don’t!’ cried Jacques, clasping his head despairingly. ‘I shall get the contagion.... I know I shall!’
‘Well, anyway,’ she went on wearily, ‘I was seized by the notion that ... that ... that it wouldn’t ... that I wouldn’t do so well with Mademoiselle de Scudéry unless I met her for the first time at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and it must be there, and if the Marquise be of so difficult access, perchance it can’t be compassed.... Oh! I would I were dead,’ the last words came tumbling out all in one breath.
‘Poor little Chop!’ said Jacques sympathetically. (It was the fashion, brought to Paris by the exiled King of England, to call pets by English names, and Jacques had heard a bulldog called ‘Chop,’ and was so tickled by the name, that he insisted on giving it to Madeleine that he might have the pleasure of often saying it).
‘’Tis a grievous thing to want anything sorely. But I am confident the issue will be successful.’
‘Are you? Are you?’ she cried, her face lighting up. ‘When do you think the meeting will take place? Madame de Rambouillet is always falling ill.’
‘Oh! Old Pilou can do what she will with all those great folk, and she has conceived a liking for you.’
‘Has she? Has she? How do you know? What makes you think so?’
‘Oh, I don’t know ... however, she has,’ he answered, suddenly getting distrait. ‘Is it truly but as an exercise against the spleen that you pass whole hours in leaping up and down the room?’ he asked after a pause, watching her curiously.
Madeleine blushed, and answered nervously:—
‘Yes, ’tis good for the spleen—the doctor told me so—also, if you will, ’tis a caprice——’
‘How ravishing to be a woman!’ sighed Jacques. ‘One can be as great a visionnaire as one will and be thought to have rare parts withal, whereas, if a man were to pass his time in cutting capers up and down the room, he’d be shut up in les petites maisons.[1] How comes it that you want to know Mademoiselle Scudéry more than any one else?’
‘I cannot say, ’tis just that I do, and the wish has worked so powerfully on my fancy that ’tis become my only thought. It has grown from a little fancy into a huge desire. ’Tis like to a certain nightmare I sometimes have when things swell and swell.’
‘When things swell and swell?’
‘Yes, ’tis what I call my Dutch dream, for it ever begins by my being surrounded by divers objects, such as cheeses and jugs and strings of onions and lutes and spoons, as in a Dutch picture, and I am sensible that one of them presently, I never know which ’twill be, will start to swell. And then on a sudden one of them begins, and it is wont to continue until I feel that if it get any bigger I shall go mad. And in like manner, I hold it to be but chance that it was Mademoiselle de Scudéry that took to swelling, it might quite well have been any one else.’
Jacques smiled a little. ‘It might always quite well have been any one else,’ he said.
Madeleine looked puzzled for a minute and then went on unhappily, ‘I feel ’tis all so unreal, just a “vision.” Oh! How I wish it was something in accordance with other people’s experiences ... something they could understand, such as falling in love, for example, but this——’
‘It isn’t the cause that is of moment, you know, it’s the strength of the “passion” resulting from the cause. And in truth I don’t believe any one could have been subject to a stronger “passion” than you since you have come to Paris.’
‘So it doesn’t seem to you extravagant then?’ she asked eagerly.
‘Only as all outside one’s own desires do seem extravagant.’ He sat down beside her and drew her rather timidly to him. ‘I’m confident ’twill right itself in the end, Chop,’ he whispered. She sprang up eagerly, her eyes shining.
‘Do you think so, Jacques ... in sober earnest?’
‘Come back, Chop!’ In Jacques’s eyes there was what Madeleine called the ‘foolish expression,’ which sooner or later always appeared when he was alone with her. It bored her extremely; why could he not be content with spending the whole time in rational talk? However, she went back with a sigh of resignation.
After a few minutes she said with a little excited giggle, ‘What do you think ... er ... Mademoiselle de Scudéry will think of me?’
Jacques only grunted, the ‘foolish expression’ still in his eyes.
‘Jacques!’ she cried sharply, ‘tell me!’ and she got up.
‘What will she think of you? Oh! that you’re an ill-favoured, tedious little imp.’
‘No, Jacques!’
‘A scurvy, lousy, bombastic——’
‘Oh! Jacques, forbear, for God’s sake!’
‘Provincial——’
‘Oh! Jacques, no more, I’ll scream till you hold your tongue ... what will she think of me, in sober earnest?’
‘She’ll think——’ and he stopped, and looked at her mischievously. Her lips were moving, as if repeating some formulary. ‘That you are ... that there is a “I know not what about you of gallant and witty.”’ Madeleine began to leap up and down the room, then she rushed to Jacques and flung her arms round his neck.
‘I am furiously grateful to you!’ she cried. ‘I felt that had you not said something of good omen ere I had repeated “she’ll think” twenty times, I would never compass my desires, and you said it when I had got to eighteen times!’ Jacques smiled indulgently.
‘So you know the language she affects, do you?’ said Madeleine, with a sort of self-conscious pride.
‘Alas! that I do! I read a few volumes of the Grand Cyrus, and think it the saddest fustian——’
‘Madame Pilou said she had begun another ... do you think ... er ... do you think ... that ... maybe I’ll figure in it?’
‘’Tis most probable. Let’s see. “Chopine is one of the most beautiful persons in the whole of Greece, as, Madame, you will readily believe when I tell you that she was awarded at the Cyprian Games the second prize for beauty.”’ Madeleine blushed prettily, and gave a little gracious conventional smile. She was imagining that Mademoiselle de Scudéry herself was reading it to her. ‘“The first prize went, of course, to that fair person who, having learnt the art of thieving from Mercury himself, proceeded to rob the Graces of all their charms, the Muses of all their secrets. Like that of the goddess Minerva, hers is, if I may use the expression, a virile beauty, for on her chin is the thickest, curliest, most Jove-like beard that has ever been seen in Greece——”’
‘Jacques! it’s not——’
‘“Madame, your own knowledge of the world will tell you that I speak of Madame Pilou!”’ Madeleine stamped her foot, and her eyes filled with angry tears, but just then there was a discreet knock at the door, and Berthe, the Troqueville’s one servant, came in with a cup and a jug of Palissy faience. She was fat and fair, with a wall-eye and a crooked mouth. Her home was in Lorraine, and she was a mine of curious country-lore, but a little vein of irony ran through all her renderings of local legends, and there was nothing she held in veneration—not even ‘la bonne Lorraine’ herself. Her tongue wagged incessantly, and Jacques said she was like the servant girl, Iambe—‘the prattling daughter of Pan.’ She had been with the Troquevilles only since they had come to Paris, but she belonged to the class of servants that become at once old family retainers. She took a cynically benevolent interest in the relationship between Jacques and Madeleine, and although there was no need whatever for the rôle, she had instituted herself the confidante and adviser of the ‘lovers,’ and from the secrecy and despatch with which she would keep the two posted in each other’s movements, Monsieur and Madame Troqueville might have been the parental tyrants of a Spanish comedy. This attitude irritated Madeleine extremely, but Jacques it tickled and rather pleased.
‘Some Rossoli for Mademoiselle, very calming to the stomach, in youth one needs such drafts, for the blood is hot, he! he!’ and she nodded her head several times, and smiled a smile which shut the wall-eye and hitched up the crooked mouth. Then she came up to them and whispered, ‘The master is not in yet, and the mistress is busy with her spinning!’ and the strange creature with many nods and becks set the jug and cup on the table, and continuing to mutter encouragement, marched out with soft, heavy steps.
Madeleine dismissed Jacques, saying she was tired and wanted to go to bed.