Hope Mirrlees

“ I would that people were more inclined to such pleasant antics!’
‘In good earnest I did not,’ said Madeleine severely. ‘But I feigned not to be interested when she talked, and averted my eyes from her as if the sight of her worked on my stomach. Oh! what will she think of me?’
‘Well, I don’t know, Chop,’ Jacques said dubiously; ‘it seems you used arts to show yourself in such colours as ’twould be hard to like!’
‘Do people never take likings to bashful, surly people?’ she persisted.
‘I fear me they are apt to prefer smooth-spoken, courtly ones,’ he answered with a smile. ”

“ In fact, the whole scene at the Hôtel de Rambouillet must be forgotten, and that quickly, for it had been a descent into that ruthless world of reality in which Madeleine could not breathe. That world tyrannised over by the co-sovereigns Cause and Effect, blown upon by sharp, rough winds, and—most horrible of all—fretted with the counter-claims on happiness of myriads of individuals just as ‘square’ and real as she. In such a world how could she—with such frightful odds against her—hope for success, for here she was so impotent, merely a gauche young girl of no position? ”

“ Rarely has this unwelcome guest timed his visit with a more tantalising inopportuneness, or has shown himself more ungallant than to-day when he keeps a poor poet from the inspiration of beauty and beauty from its true mate, wit. But over one circumstance at least it bears no sway: that circumstance is that I remain, Mademoiselle, Your sincere and humble servitor,
‘Conrart.’
In all this fustian Madeleine’s ‘quick wit’ did not miss the fact that lay buried in it, hard and sharp, that she was not to be taken to Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s that afternoon. ”

“ Thus, in this book, Madeleine sees the trivial, disorderly happenings of her life as a momentous battle waged between a kindly Power who had written on tablets of gold before the world began that she should win her heart’s desire, and a sterner and mightier Power who had written on tablets of iron that all her hopes should be frustrated, so that, finally, naked and bleeding, she might turn to Him. And having this conception of life all her acquaintances become minor daimones, friendly or hostile, according as they seem to serve one power or the other. ”

“ If they had been boys, uproariously contemptuous, they would have twitted Madeleine with her lie, but being girls, they merely sneered and ignored her. She felt like a spirit that, suspended in mid-air, watches the body it has left being torn to pieces by a pack of wolves. Days of dull agony followed, but she felt strangely resigned, as if she could go on bearing it for ever and a day.
It was during the Fronde, and Jeanne and her friends had a cult for Condé and Madame de Longueville, the royal rebels. ”

“ Berthe leered and winked. ‘Well, Mademoiselle,’ she said, ‘Love is one thing—marriage is another. Monsieur Jacques could not give Mademoiselle a coach and a fine hôtel in the Rue de Richelieu. I understand Mademoiselle exceeding well, in that we are not unlike in some matters,’ and she gave her grotesque grin. ‘As for me, I would never wed with a man except he could raise me to a better condition than mine own—else what would it profit one? But if some plump little tradesman were to come along——’
‘But did you hold that I would wed with Monsieur Jacques?’ Madeleine persisted. ”

“ Here and there this delicate mass of colour was freaked with the sombre soutanes of magistrates and the black silk of dowagers. The Four Fiddles could be heard tuning up through the hubbub of mutual compliments. Madeleine felt as if she were gazing at it all from some distant planet. Then Madame Troguin bustled up to them.
‘Good-evening, friends, you are exceeding welcome. You must all have a glass of Hippocras to warm you. It operates so sweetly on the stomach. I am wont to say a glass of Hippocras is better than any purge. ”

“ She had lovely golden hair for one thing, and then, although she looked no older than Madeleine herself, who was about seven at the time, she was dressed in a velvet bodice covered with Genoese point, and—infinitely grander—she was actually wearing what to Madeline had always seemed one of the attributes of magnificent eld, to wit, a real stomacher, all stiff with busks and embroidered in brightly coloured silks with flowers and enchanting beasts—a thing as lovely and magical as the armour of Achilles in the woodcut that hung in the parlour at home. ”

“ For it was Amour-Propre that had played her this scurvy trick and had upset her poor little boat ‘drifting oarless on a full sea’—not of Grace but of Chance. After all, Jansenism, Cartesianism, her mother’s philosophy of indifference, had all the same aim—to give a touch of sea-craft to the poor human sailor, and to flatter him with the belief that some harbour lies before him. But they lie, they lie! There is no port, no rudder, no stars, and the frail fleet of human souls is at the mercy of every wind that blows. ”

“ Madame Troqueville would perhaps be sewing, Madeleine would come up to her and say in a voice of resigned determination: ‘Mother, if you will but give me precise instructions what to do, I will relieve you of this business.’ Then, having wrested it from her unwilling mother, she would leave it half finished and run off to dance—feeling she had discharged her conscience. The virtue did not lie in a thing accomplished, but in doing something disagreeable—however useless. The boredom of using her hands was so acute as to be almost physical pain. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Conrart smiled good-naturedly.
‘Oh, ’twill pass, I dare swear, as soon as you have seen Sappho. There is an indescribable mixture of gentleness and raillery in her manners that banishes bashfulness for ever from her ruelle.’
‘Well, I must confess I did not find it so, to say truth she didn’t charm me; her ugliness frightened me, and I thought her manners as harsh as her voice,’ Madeleine found herself saying. Conrart opened his small innocent eyes as wide as they would go. ”

“ Madame Troqueville took her in her arms in an agony of anxiety. At first Madeleine kicked and screamed, irritated at the possibility of her mother trying to alleviate the facts. Then she yielded to the comfort of her presence and sobbed out that Conrart could not take her to Mademoiselle de Scudéry.
How gladly would Madame Troqueville have accepted this explanation at its face value! A disappointment about a party was such a poignant sorrow in youth and one to which all young people were subject. ”

“ When she opened her eyes, there was the Magdalene as absorbed as before in the intensity of her own emotion. Le Brun’s dramatic chiaroscuro brings little comfort to suppliants—the eternal impassivity of the Buddha is far less discouraging than an eternal emotion in which we have no part.
Madeleine felt the chill of repulse. Perhaps in Paradise as on earth the Saints were sensible to nothing but the cycle of the sacred Story, and knew no emotions but passionate grief at the Crucifixion, ecstasy at the Resurrection, awe at the Ascension, and child-like joy as the Birth comes round again. ”

“ Suddenly he turned into Julie de Rambouillet, but the emotion of the intimacy was just as poignant. This dream haunted her all the following day. Then in a flash it occurred to her that it had been sent from above as a direct answer to prayer. Obviously love for some one else was the antidote to amour-propre. This was immediately followed by another inspiration. Ordinary love was gradually becoming a crime in the code of the Précieuses, and ‘l’amitié tendre’ the perfect virtue. But would it not be infinitely more ‘gallant’ and distinguished to make a woman the object of that friendship? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Du Raincy sighed sentimentally.
‘Well, Monsieur, tell us what is la Jeunesse?’ said Godeau.
‘La Jeunesse?’ he cried. ‘La Jeunesse est belle; la Jeunesse est fraîche; la Jeunesse est amoureuse,’ he cried, rolling his eyes.
‘But she rarely enters the Royaume du Tendre,’ said a little man as hideous as an ape—terribly pitted [211] by smallpox—whom they called Pellisson, with a look at Mademoiselle de Scudéry. That lady smiled back enigmatically, and Madeleine found herself pitying him from the bottom of her heart for having no hope of ever getting there himself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then, as if by a miracle, her father was also seized by a longing to go to Paris, and finally a complete déménagement was decided upon. What wonder if Madeleine felt that the gods were upon her side?
But once in Paris, she was brought face to face with reality. It had never struck her that a meeting with Mademoiselle de Scudéry might be a thing to need manœuvring. Days, weeks, went by, and she had not yet met her. She began to realise the horror of time, as opposed to eternity. ”

“ In the outer world Madeleine might with time have jettisoned the perilous stuff of youth and have sailed serenely the rough, fresh sea of facts. In the inner world, there was one thing and one thing only that could happen to her: life is the province of free-will, art the province of fate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You’ll never learn anything worth the knowing out of books. I have lived nearly eighty years, and my Missal and Æsop his fables are near the only two books I have ever read. What you can’t learn from life itself is not worth the learning——’
‘But Madeleine has grown into such an excessive humour for books, that she wholly addicts herself to them!’ cried Madame Troqueville indignantly. ”

“ Madeleine hung her head and then confessed her theory about the Wax, and how she had tried upon reality the plastic force of her will.
Jacques threw out his hands in despair.
‘Oh, Chop!’ he cried, ‘it is a sin to turn to such maniac uses the cleanest, sweetest good sense that ever man has penned! That passage about the wax is but a figure! The only way to compass what we wish is to exercise our will first on our own passions until they will take what ply we choose, and then to exercise it on the passions of others. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Life is like a blind and limitless expanse of sky, for ever dividing into tiny drops of circumstances that rain down, thick and fast, on the just and unjust alike. Art is like the dauntless, plastic force that builds up stubborn, amorphous substance cell by cell, into the frail geometry of a shell. These two things are poles apart—how are they to meet in the same work of fiction?
One way is to fling down, pêle-mêle, a handful of separate acts and words, and then to turn on them the constructive force of a human consciousness that will arrange them into the pattern of logic or of drama. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hylas, hélas!... Jacques was limping ... Vulcan was lame, wasn’t he? ‘In the smithy of Vulcan weapons are being forged that will smash up your world of galanterie and galamatias into a thousand fragments!’
‘Why, Chop, you look sadly!’ he cried, with sudden contrition. ‘’Tis finished and done with, and these coxcombs’ impudence bred them, I can vouch for it, a score of bruises apiece! Chop, come here! Why, the most modish and galant folk have oftentimes had the strangest visionnaires for fathers. ”

“ All this time a long shabby citizen in a dirty jabot had been trying in vain to catch Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s eye. Now he burst out with,—
‘A propos of words—er—of words,’ and he spat excitedly—on Madame Cornuel’s silk petticoat. She smiled with one corner of her mouth, raised her eyebrows, then pulling a leaf, gingerly rubbed the spot, and flung it away with a little moue of disgust. The shabby citizen, quite unconscious of this by-play, which was giving exquisite pleasure to the rest of the company, went on: ‘What do you think then of my word affreux—aff-reux—a-f-f-r-e-u-x? ”

“ For in Madeleine there was this much of rationalism—perverted and scholastic though it might be—that for her most fantastic superstitions she always felt the need of a semi-philosophical basis.
Suddenly she remembered Jacques’s words in the Place Maubert: ‘’Tis the will that Descartes writes of—a magic sword like to the ones in Amadis.’ To will, was not that the same as to desire? Mère Agnès had insisted on the importance of desiring. She had talked about the adamant of desire that neither the tools of earth can break nor the chemistry of Hell resolve. ”