Читать книгу Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists онлайн

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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.)