Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists

It was no longer a taunt but the prayer of a humble familiar asking for its mistress’s orders, or, rather, of Love the Pedlar waiting to sell her what she chose. She opened her...

In the middle of the seventeenth century a family called Troqueville came from Lyons to settle in Paris. Many years before, Monsieur Troqueville had been one of the four hundred...

In time she recovered, or at least was supposed to have recovered, but she did not return to the Convent, and her mother still watched her anxiously and was more than ever incli...

For the next few days Madeleine danced and desired and repeated mechanically to herself: ‘I _will_ get the love of Mademoiselle de Scudéry,’ feeling, the while, that the facets...

‘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 s...

Madeleine’s bitter self-reproaches for her own weakness were of no avail. She had to acknowledge once and for all that she had not the force to stand out against another persona...

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 em...

The next morning—the morning of _the_ day—Madeleine woke up with the same feeling of purification; she seemed to be holding the day’s culmination in her hands, and it was made o...

At about six o’clock on Wednesday evening a hired coach came to take them to the Troguin’s. To a casual eye it presented a gorgeous appearance of lumbering gilt, but Madeleine n...

A few days after the dinner at Madame Pilou’s Madeleine was dancing Mænad-like up and down her little room. Then with eyes full of a wild triumph she flung herself on her bed.

When Mass was over, Madeleine walked home with her parents in absolute silence. She was terribly afraid of losing the flavour of her recent experience. She specially dreaded Jac...

‘Oh, he often comes to me and says, “Tell me a story, Berthe,” like that, “tell me a story, Berthe,” and I’ll say, “Do you think I have nothing better to do, sir, than tell you...

She got out of bed, and, after having first rubbed her face and hands with a rag soaked in spirit, was splashing them in a minute basin of water—her thoughts the while in Lesbos...

Madeleine walked up the petite rue du Paon, in at the baker’s door, and upstairs. She still felt numbed, but knew that before her were the pains of returning circulation; Madame...

By Friday, Madeleine was in a fever of nervousness. In the space of twenty-four hours, she would know God’s policy with regard to herself. Oh! could He not be made to realise th...

The scruples with regard to having compromised with an uncompromising God which Madeleine entertained in spite of herself were silenced by the determination of settling things w...

The disappointment had indeed been a shattering blow, and its effects lasted much longer than the failure at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. For then her vanity or, which is the same...

Tradition taught that the order had been founded on the summit of Mount Carmel by Elias himself. Its earliest members were the mysterious Essenes, but they were converted to Chr...

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 k...

The period that ensued was one of great happiness for Madeleine. It was spent in floating on her own interpretation of the Jansenists’ ‘full sea of grace,’ happy in the certaint...

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 Mag...

The sane and steady procedure of the last few weeks—to prepare for the arousing of Admiration in Mademoiselle de Scudéry by a course in the art of pleasing—now seemed to Madelei...

As he had promised, Jacques brought her the works of Descartes, and she turned eagerly to their pages. Here, surely, she would find food sweeter to her palate than the bitter ca...

It stood to reason that _l’amitié tendre_ could only spring from the seeds of Admiration. It behoved her, then, to make herself worthy of Admiration. The surest way of achieving...

‘She is a marvellous personage,’ she cried out, ‘her sanctity is almost corporeal and subject to sense. And she has the most fragrant humility, she talked of herself as though t...

Had she been the dupe of malicious gods? Yes, if within that malign pantheon there was a throne for her old enemy, _Amour-Propre_. For it was _Amour-Propre_ that had played her...

During the days that followed, Madeleine wallowed in Semi-Pelagianism. With grateful adoration, she worshipped the indulgent God, who had hung upon a Cross that everything she a...

It was the day before the meeting. Early next morning the Chevalier de Méré was to call for her in his coach and drive her out to Conrart’s house. He was also taking that tireso...

With the return of hope quite involuntarily Madeleine began once more to pray. But to whom was she praying? Surely not to the hard, remote God of the Jansenists, for that, she k...

All next day Madeleine had the feeling of something near her which she must, if she wished to live, push away, away, right out of her memory. Her vanity was too vigilant to have...

It was the Sunday of the octave of the _Fête-Dieu_—the Feast of _Corpus Christi._ God Himself had walked the streets like Agamemnon over purple draperies. The stench of the city...

‘I knew you would have to pass this way, and I have been waiting for you this half-hour,’ said Jacques. ‘Well, how went the encounter?’ That Madeleine was not in despair was cle...

‘No! I came back by the Île and there I chanced on Monsieur Conrart walking with a friend’—Madeleine went deadly white—‘And I went up and accosted him. He has such a good-nature...

If you remember, when Madeleine had realised that the feast of Saint Magdalene was approaching, an idea had flashed into her head which she had not then dared to entertain. But...

Ainsi de ce désir que le primitif croyait être une des forces de l’univers et d’où il fit sortir tout son panthéon, le musulman a fait Allâh, l’être parfait auquel il s’abandonn...

Certes, il m’a plu souvent qu’une doctrine et même qu’un système complet de pensées ordonnées justifiât à moi-même mes actes; mais parfois je ne l’ai pu considérer que comme l’a...

‘_En effet, si on laisse aller le Christianisme sans l’approfondir et le régénérer de temps en temps, il s’y fait comme une infiltration croissants de bon sens humain, de toléra...