Читать книгу Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists онлайн

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‘Mademoiselle de Scudéry is writing a new romance, she tells me (it’s all her, you know; Conrart tells me that all the writing in it that tedious, prolix, bombastic fop of a brother does is to put his name to the title page!) and she says that I am to be portrayed in it. Poor Robert is in a sad taking; he thinks you cannot be both in a romance and the Book of Life!’ Robert Pilou looked at his mother with the eyes of an anxious dog, and she smiled at him encouragingly, and assured him that there were many devotees described in romances.

‘I dare swear she will limn me as a beautiful princess, with Robert Pilou as my knight, or else I’ll be—what d’ye call her—that heathen goddess, and Robert Pilou will be my owl!’

Madeleine had been strangely embarrassed for the last few minutes. When she was nervous the sound of her father’s voice tortured her, and feeling the imminence of a favourite story of his about an old lady of Lyons, called Madame Hibou, who had found her gardener drunk in her bed, she felt she would go mad if she had to listen to it again, so to stop him, she said hurriedly, ‘Could you tell us, Madame, whom some of the characters in the Grand Cyrus are meant to depict?’