Читать книгу Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists онлайн

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‘Yes, ’tis good for the spleen—the doctor told me so—also, if you will, ’tis a caprice——’

‘How ravishing to be a woman!’ sighed Jacques. ‘One can be as great a visionnaire as one will and be thought to have rare parts withal, whereas, if a man were to pass his time in cutting capers up and down the room, he’d be shut up in les petites maisons.[1] How comes it that you want to know Mademoiselle Scudéry more than any one else?’

‘I cannot say, ’tis just that I do, and the wish has worked so powerfully on my fancy that ’tis become my only thought. It has grown from a little fancy into a huge desire. ’Tis like to a certain nightmare I sometimes have when things swell and swell.’

‘When things swell and swell?’

‘Yes, ’tis what I call my Dutch dream, for it ever begins by my being surrounded by divers objects, such as cheeses and jugs and strings of onions and lutes and spoons, as in a Dutch picture, and I am sensible that one of them presently, I never know which ’twill be, will start to swell. And then on a sudden one of them begins, and it is wont to continue until I feel that if it get any bigger I shall go mad. And in like manner, I hold it to be but chance that it was Mademoiselle de Scudéry that took to swelling, it might quite well have been any one else.’