Читать книгу Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists - Hope Mirrlees - Страница 7

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‘On a oublié le temps où elle vivait et combien dans cette vie de luxe et de désœuvrement les passions peuvent ressembler à des fantaisies, de même que les manies y deviennent souvent des passions.’

Sainte-Beuve.—Madame de Sévigné.

It is wellnigh impossible for any one to be very explicit about their own nerves, for there is something almost indecently intimate in a nervous fear or obsession. Thus, although Madeleine’s explanation to Jacques had given her great relief, it had been but partial. She would sooner have died than have told him the real impulse, for instance, that sent her dancing madly up and down the room, or have analysed minutely her feelings towards Mademoiselle de Scudéry.

The seeds of the whole affair were, I think, to be found in the fact that an ancestor of Madame Troqueville’s had been an Italian lady of high family, who had left a strain, fine, fastidious, civilised—in the morbid way of Italy—to lie hidden in obscurity in the bourgeois stock, and to crop up from time to time with pathetic persistence, in a tragically aristocratic outlook, thin features, and the high, narrow forehead that had given to the pallid beauties of the sixteenth century a look of maladif intellect.

To Madeleine it had also brought a yearning from earliest childhood for a radiant, transfigured world, the inhabitants of which seemed first of all to be the rich merchant families of Lyons.

One of her most vivid memories was an occasion on which a strolling company of players had acted a comedy in the house of a leader among these merchants, a certain Maître Jean Prunier. Although the Troquevilles personally did not know the Pruniers, they had a common friend, and he had taken Madeleine and her parents to the performance. They went into an enormous room filled with benches, with a raised platform at one end. The walls and the ceiling were frescoed with various scenes symbolical of Maître Prunier’s commercial prowess. He was shown riding on woolly waves on the back of a dolphin, presenting a casket of gloves to Marie de Médici, marching in crimson robes at the head of the six guilds of merchants. On the ceiling was his apotheosis. It showed him sitting, his lap full of gloves, on a Lyons shawl, which winged Cherubs were drawing through the air to a naked goddess on a cloud, who was holding out to him a wreath made of Dutch tulips. When Madame Troqueville saw it she shook with laughter, much to Madeleine’s surprise.

Maître Prunier and his family sat on the stage during the performance, that they might be seen as well as see. He was a large stout man, and his nose was covered with warts, but his youngest daughter held Madeleine’s eyes spellbound. 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.

Some years later Madeleine was sent to school at a Convent about a mile out of Lyons. One of the scholars was this very Jeanne Prunier. Madeleine would watch her stumbling through the Creed, her fat white face puckered with effort, her stumpy fingers fiddling nervously with her gold chain, and would wonder what great incomprehensible thoughts were passing behind that greasy forehead and as what strange phantasmagoria did she see the world. And that chain—it actually hung round her neck all day long, and when she went home, was taken through the great wooden door of Maître Prunier’s house—the door carved with flowers and grinning faces—and perhaps in a drawer in her bedroom had a little box of its own. And Maître Prunier probably knew of its existence, as doubtless it had been his gift, and thus it had a place in the consciousness of that great man, while she, Madeleine ... he had never heard of her.

Lyons, like most rich provincial towns, was very purse-proud, and this characteristic was already quite apparent in its young daughters at the Convent. Their conversation consisted, to a great extent, in boastings about their fathers’ incomes, and surmises as to those of the fathers of their companions. They could tell you the exact number of gold pieces carried on each girl’s back, and when some one appeared in a new dress they would come up and finger the material to ascertain its texture and richness. Every one knew exactly how many pairs of Spanish gloves, how many yards of Venetian lace, how many pure silk petticoats were possessed by every one else, and how many Turkey carpets and Rouen tapestries and tables of marble and porphyry, how much gold and silver plate, and how many beds covered with gold brocade were to be found in each other’s homes.

As Madeleine’s dresses were made of mere serge, and contemptible guese was their only trimming, and as it was known that her father was nothing but a disreputable attorney, they coldly ignored her, and this made her life in the Convent agonising. Although subconsciously she was registering every ridiculous or vulgar detail about her passive tormentors, yet her boundless admiration for them remained quite intact, and to be accepted as one of their select little coterie, to share their giggling secrets, to walk arm in arm with one of them in the Convent garden would be, she felt, the summit of earthly glory.

One hot summer’s day, it happened that both she and a member of the Sacred Circle—a girl called Julie Duval—felt faint in Chapel. A nun had taken them into the Refectory—the coolest place in the Convent—and left them to recover. Madeleine never quite knew how it happened, but she suddenly found herself telling Julie that her mother was the daughter of a Duke, and her father the son of an enormously wealthy merchant of Amsterdam; that he had been sent as quite a young man on a political mission to the Court of France, where he had met her mother; that they had fallen passionately in love with one another, and had been secretly married; when the marriage was announced the parents of both were furious, owing to her father’s family being Protestant, her mother’s Catholic, and had refused to have anything more to do with their respective offspring; that her father had taken the name of Troqueville and settled in Lyons; that some months ago a letter had come from her paternal grandfather, in which he told them that he was growing old and that, although a solemn vow prevented him from ever looking again on the face of his son, he would like to see his grandchild before he died, would she come to Amsterdam?; that she had refused, saying that she did not care to meet any one who had treated her father as badly as he; that the old man had written back to say that he admired her spirit and had made her his sole heir, ‘which was really but a cunning device to take, without tendering his formal forgiveness, the sting from the act whereby he had disinherited my father, because he must have been well aware that I would share it all with him!’ (Unconsciously she had turned her father into a romantic figure, to whom she was attached with the pious passion of an Antigone. In reality she gave all her love to her mother; but the unwritten laws of rhetoric commanded that the protagonists in this story should be father and daughter.)

Julie’s eyes grew rounder and rounder at each word.

‘Jésus, Madeleine Troqueville! what a fine lady you will be!’ she said in an awed voice. Madeleine had not a doubt that by the next morning she would have repeated every word of it to her friends.

In the course of the day she half came to believing the whole story herself, and sailed about with measured, stately gait; on her lips a haughty, faintly contemptuous smile. She felt certain that she was the centre of attention. She was wearing her usual little serge dress and plain muslin fichu, but if suddenly asked to describe her toilette, she would have said it was of the richest velvet foaming with Italian lace. She seemed to herself four inches taller than she had been the day before, while her eyes had turned from gray to flashing black, her hair also was black instead of chestnut.

Mythology was one of the subjects in the Convent curriculum—a concession to fashion made most unwillingly by the nuns. But as each story was carefully expurgated, made as anterotic as possible, and given a neat little moral, Ovid would scarce have recognised his own fables. The subject for that day happened to be Paris’s sojourn as a shepherd on Mount Ida. When the nun told them he was really the son of the King of Troy, Madeleine was certain that all the girls were thinking of her.

Several days, however, went by, and no overtures were made by the Sacred Circle. Madeleine’s stature was beginning to dwindle, and her hair and eyes to regain their ordinary colour, when one morning Jeanne Prunier came up to her, took hold of the little medallion that hung round her neck on a fine gold chain, and said: ‘Tiens! c’est joli, ça.’

This exclamation so often interchanged among the élite, but which Madeleine had never dreamed that any object belonging to her could elicit, was the prelude to a period of almost unearthly bliss. She was told the gallant that each of them was in love with, was given some of Jeanne’s sweet biscuits and quince jam, and was made a member of their Dévises Society. The dévise designed for her was a plant springing out of a tabouret (the symbol of a Duchess); one of its stems bore a violet, the other a Dutch tulip, and over them both hovered the flowery coronet of a Duke—wherein was shown a disregard for botany but an imaginative grasp of Madeleine’s circumstances.

At times she felt rather condescending to her new friends, for the old man could not live much longer, and when he died she would not only be richer than any of them, but her mother’s people would probably invite her to stay with them in Paris, and in time she might be made a lady-in-waiting to the Regent ... and then, suddenly, the sun would be drowned and she would feel sick, for a Saint’s day was drawing near, and they would all go home, and the girls would tell their parents her story, and their parents would tell them that it was not true.

The Saint’s day came in due course, and after it, the awful return to the Convent. Had they been undeceived about her or had they not? It was difficult to tell, for during the morning’s work there were few opportunities for social intercourse. It was true that in the embroidery class, when Madeleine absent-mindedly gave the Virgin a red wool nose instead of a white one, and the presiding nun scolded her, the girls looked coldly at her instead of sympathetically; then in the dancing lesson as a rule the sacred ones gave her an intimate grin from time to time, or whispered a pleasantry on the clumsy performance of some companion outside the Sacred Circle, but this morning they merely stared at her coldly. Still their indifference might mean nothing. Did it, or did it not?

’Un, deux, trois,

Marquez les pas,

Faites la ré-vé-ren-ce,’

chanted the little master.

How Madeleine wished she were he, a light, artificial little creature, with no great claims on life.

But her fears became a certainty, when going into the closet where they kept their pattens and brushes, Jeanne commanded her in icy tones to take her ‘dirty brush’ out of her, Jeanne’s, bag. And that was all. 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. They taught their parrots at home to repeat lines of Mazarinades, they kept a print of Condé at the battle of Rocroy in their book of Hours, and had pocket mirrors with his arms emblazoned on the back, while Madame de Longueville simpered at them from miniatures painted on the top of their powder boxes or the backs of their tablets. As the nuns, influenced by the clergy, were strong Royalists, and looked upon Condé as a sort of Anti-Christ, the girls had to hide their enthusiasm.

Some weeks after Madeleine’s fall, it was announced that on the following Wednesday there was to be a public demonstration in favour of Condé and the Frondeurs, and that there would be fireworks in their honour, and that some of the streets would be decorated with paper lanterns.

On Wednesday Jeanne and Julie came to Madeleine and ordered her to slip out of her window at about eight o’clock in the evening, go down to the gate at the end of the avenue, and when they called her from the other side, to unbolt it for them. They then went to one of the nuns and, pleading a headache, said they would like to go to bed, and did not want any supper.

During the last weeks Madeleine had lost all spirit, all personality almost, so she followed their instructions with mechanical submission, and was at the gate at the appointed time, opened it, let them in, and all three got back to bed in safety.

About a week later, all the girls were bidden to assemble in the Refectory, where the Reverend Mother was awaiting them with a look of Rhadamanthine severity.

‘Most grievous news had been given her concerning a matter that must be dealt with without delay. She would ask all the demoiselles in turn if they had left their bedrooms on Wednesday evening.’

‘No, Madame.’

‘No, Madame,’ in voices of conscious rectitude, as one girl after another was asked by name. It was also the answer of Jeanne and Julie. Then: ‘Mademoiselle Troqueville, did you leave your bedroom on Wednesday evening?’

There was a pause, and then came the answer: ‘Yes, Madame.’

All eyes were turned on her, and Julie, covertly, put out her tongue.

‘Mesdemoiselles, you may all go, excepting Mademoiselle Troqueville.’

Madeleine noticed that the Reverend Mother had a small mole on her cheek, she had not seen it before.

Then came such a scolding as she had never before experienced. Much mention was made of ‘obedience,’ ‘chastity,’ ‘Anti-Christ,’ ‘the enemies of the King and the Church.’ What had they to do with walking across the garden and opening a gate? Perhaps she had shown too much leg in climbing out of the window—that would, at least, account for the mention of chastity.

The Reverend Mother had asked if any one had left their bedroom—that was all—and Madeleine had. And to her mind, dulled, and, as is often the case, made stupidly literal by sheer terror, this fact had lost all connection with Jeanne’s and Julie’s escapade, and seemed, by itself, the cause of this mysterious tirade. It certainly was wrong to have left her bedroom—but why did it make her ‘an enemy of the King’?

She found herself seizing on a word here and there in the torrent and spelling it backwards.

‘Example’ ... elpmaxe ... rather a pretty word! la chastité ... étitsahc al ... it sounded like Spanish ... who invented the different languages? Perhaps a prize had once been offered at a College for the invention of the best language, and one student invented French and got the prize, and another nearly got the second, but it was discovered in time that he had only turned his own language backwards, and that was cheating.... Jésus! there was a little bit of wood chipped out of the Reverend Mother’s crucifix! But these thoughts were just a slight trembling on the surface of fathoms of inarticulate terror and despair.

Then she heard the Reverend Mother telling her that it would be a sign of grace if she were to disclose the names of her companions.

In a flash she realised that she was supposed to have done whatever it was that Jeanne and Julie had done on Wednesday evening.

‘But, Madame, I didn’t ... ’twas only——’

‘Mademoiselle, excuses and denials will avail you nothing. Who was the other lady with you?’

‘Oh, it isn’t that ... there were no others, at least ... ah! I am at a loss how I can best make it clear, but we are, methinks, at cross-purposes.’

But her case was hopeless. She could not betray Jeanne and Julie, and even if she had wished to, she was incapable just then of doing so, feeling too light-headed and rudderless to make explanations. Finally she was dismissed, and walked out of the room as if in a trance.

She was greeted by a clamour of questions and reproaches from the girls. Jeanne and Julie were in hysterics. When they discovered that she had not betrayed them, they muttered some sheepish expressions of gratitude, and to save their faces they started badgering her in a half-kindly way for having got herself into trouble so unnecessarily; why could she not have said ‘No’ like the rest of them? Madeleine had no satisfactory answer to give, because she did not know why herself. In sudden crises it seemed as if something stepped out from behind her personality and took matters into its own hands, and spite of all her good-will it would not allow her to give a false answer to a direct question. And this although, as we have seen, she could suddenly find herself telling gratuitous falsehoods by the gross.

Of course Madeleine was in terrible disgrace, and penance was piled on penance. The Sacred Circle was friendly to her again, but this brought no comfort now, and the severe looks of the nuns put her in a perpetual agony of terror.

About a week went by, and then one day, when she was sitting in the little room of penance, the door was thrown open and in rushed Julie turned into a gurgling, sniffing whirlwind of tears.

‘The Reverend Mother’ ... sob ... ‘says I must’ ... sob ... ‘ask your forgiveness’ ... scream, and then she flopped down on the floor, overcome by the violence of her emotion. It was clear to Madeleine that in some miraculous way all had been discovered, but she did not feel particularly relieved. The ‘movement of the passions’ seemed to have been arrested in her. She sat watching Julie with her clear, wide-open eyes, and her expression was such as one might imagine on the face of an Eastern god whose function is to gaze eternally on a spectacle that never for an instant interests or moves him. She did not even feel scorn for Julie, just infinite remoteness.

Julie began nervously to shut and open one of her hands; Madeleine looked at it. It was small and plump and rather dirty, and on one of its fingers there was a little enamelled ring, too tight for it, and pressing into the flesh. It looked like a small distracted animal; Madeleine remembered a beetle she had once seen struggling on its back. Its smallness and dirtiness, and the little tight ring and its suggestion of the beetle, for some reason touched Madeleine. A sudden wave of affection and pity for Julie swept over her. In a second she was down beside her, with her arms around her, telling her not to cry, and that it didn’t matter. And there she was found some minutes later by the Reverend Mother, from whom she received a panegyric of praise for her forgiving spirit and a kiss, which she could well have dispensed with.

Then the whole thing was explained; an anonymous letter had been sent to the Reverend Mother saying that the writer had seen, on the evening of the demonstration in favour of Condé, two girls masked and hooded, evidently of position, as they had attendants with them, and that they were laughing together about their escape from the Convent. The Reverend Mother had never thought of connecting with the affair Jeanne’s and Julie’s early retirement that evening. Now she had just got a letter from Maître Prunier informing her that it had come to his knowledge that his daughter and her great friend had been walking in the town that same evening. He had learned this distressing news from one of his servants whom Jeanne had got to accompany her on her escapade. He bade the Reverend Mother keep a stricter watch on his daughter. She had sent for Jeanne and Julie and they had told her that it was only through coercion that Madeleine had played any part in the escapade.

Then the Reverend Mother and Julie went away, and Jeanne came in to offer her apologies. She also had evidently been crying, and her mouth had a sulky droop which did not suggest that her self-complacency had shrivelled up, like that of Julie. Madeleine found herself resenting this; how dare she not be abject?

The two following sentences contained Jeanne’s apology:—

(a) ‘The Reverend Mother is a spiteful old dragon!’ and she sniffed angrily.

(b) ‘Will you come home for my Fête Day next month? There is to be a Collation and a Ball and a Comedy,’ and she gave the little wriggle of her hips, and the complacent gesture of adjusting her collar, which were so characteristic.

A few weeks ago, this invitation would have sent Madeleine into an ecstasy of pleasure. To enter that great fantastic door had seemed a thing one only did in dreams. As Jeanne gave her invitation she saw it clearly before her, cut off from the house and the street and the trees, just itself, a finely embossed shield against the sky. It was like one of the woodcuts that she had seen in a booth of the Fair that year by a semi-barbarian called Master Albert Dürer. Woodcuts of one carrot, or a king-fisher among the reeds, or, again, a portion of the grassy bank of a high road, shown as a busy little commonwealth of bees and grasses, and frail, sturdy flowers, heedless of and unheeded by the restless stream of the high road, stationary and perfect like some obscure island of the Ægean. The world seen with the eyes of an elf or an insect ... how strange! Then she looked at Jeanne, and suddenly there flashed before her a sequence of little ignoble things she had subconsciously registered against her. She had a provincial accent and pronounced volontiers, voulentiers; she had a nasty habit of picking her nose; Madeleine had often witnessed her being snubbed by one of the nuns, and then blushing; there was something indecently bourgeois in the way she turned the pages of a book.

The ignoble pageant took about two seconds for its transit, then Madeleine said, ‘I am much beholden to you, albeit, I fear me I cannot assist at your Fête,’ and dropping her a curtsey she opened the door, making it quite clear that Jeanne was to go, which she did, without a word, as meek as a lamb.

In Madeleine’s description of this scene to Jacques long afterwards she made herself say to Jeanne what actually she had only thought; many young people, often the most sensitive, hanker after the power of being crudely insolent: it seems to them witty and mature.

That night Madeleine was delirious, and Madame Troqueville was sent for. It was the beginning of a long illness which, for want of a better name, her doctor called a sharp attack of the spleen.