Part 3 — CHAPTER XXXIV OUT INTO THE VOID

So it was all over.

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 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.

She laughed bitterly when she remembered her certainty of her own election, her anger against the mighty hands slowly, surely, torturing her life into salvation. She laughed still more at her faith in a kind, heavenly Father, a rock in a weary land, a certain caterer of lovely gifts. How had she ever been fool enough to believe in this? Had she no eyes for the countless proofs all round her that any awful thing might happen to any one? People, just as real and alive as she was herself, were disfigured by smallpox, or died of plague, or starved in the streets, or loved without being loved in return; and yet, she had wrapped herself round in an imaginary ghostly tenderness, certain in her foolish heart that it was against the order of the universe that such things should happen to her.

And as to Mademoiselle de Scudéry, she knew that the whole business had been a foolish vision, a little seed growing to grotesque dimensions in a sick brain, and yet this knowledge was powerless to stem the mad impetus of her misery.

How she longed for Jacques during these days, for his comforting hands, his allégresse, his half-mocking patience. She saw him, pale and chestnut-haired with his light, mysterious, beckoning eyes—so strangely like the picture by Da Vinci in the Louvre of Saint John the Baptist—marching head erect to his bright destiny down the long white roads of France, and he would never come back.

And yet, she had hinted to Madame Pilou that the fable of the dog and the shadow is the epitome of all tragedy. Somewhere inside her had she always known what must happen?

First, this time of faultless vision. And then, because—though hope was dead—there still remained ‘the adamant of desire,’ she began once more to dance. But with hope were cut the cables binding her to reality, and it was out into the void that she danced now.

EPILOGUE THE RAPE TO THE LOVE OF INVISIBLE THINGS

‘Art springs straight out of the rite, and her first outward leap is the image of the god.’—Jane Harrison.

Some years later a troupe of wits, in quest of the ‘crotesque,’ were visiting the well-known lunatic asylum—‘les petites maisons.’

‘And now for the Pseudo-Sappho!’ cried one. ‘She, all said, is by far the most delicious.’

They made their way to where a woman sat smiling affably. She greeted them as a queen her courtiers.

‘Well, Alcinthe. Mignonne has been drooping since you were here, and cooing that all the doves have left the Royaume de Tendre. Where is dear Théodite? Ma chère, I protest that he is the king of les honnêtes gens.’

The wits laughed delightedly. Suddenly one had an idea.

‘Did not the ancients hold that in time the worshipper became the god? Surely we have here a proof that their belief was well founded. And if the worshipper becomes the god then should not also the metamorphosis of the lover into his mistress—Céladon into Astrée, Cyrus into Mandane—be the truly gallant ending of a “roman”?’

He drew out his tablets,—

‘I must make a note of that, and fashion it into an epigram for Sappho.’