Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/44

Rh responds: "Ah! madame, understand that there is in this world a cake of tribulations for you to share with your useless son, made from scattered tares, ground in the mill of sorrow, kneaded with cold water in the trough of infidel and disobedient presumption, baked in the furnace of self-love, of which the eating has been a fig poisoning the architects and their posterity, until the unleavened meal has been put in the cask of human nature." And, again, in answer to some appeal of hers he declares his own unworthiness in still more mystic and astounding fashion: "Who is deserted, is abysmed in the desert; seeking the desert and not finding it; and, finding it, is yet the more bewildered; and a poor guide is he to guide another out of the desert, and to lead another into the desert desired. The desert starves him with mortiferous hunger, although he be full to the eyes; goading his desire but to satisfy it and impoverish it with poverty." Margaret at length is herself in fault. This last message is too hard for her. She beseeches Briçonnet to speak more plainly in a letter which pathetically endeavours to copy his own extraordinary style. "Demetaphorise yourself," she entreats him. "The poor wanderer cannot understand the good which is in the desert, for lack of knowing that she is deserted. Prithee, for kindness' sake, run not so swiftly through the desert that she cannot follow you in order that the abyss invoked by the abyss may whelm in its abysm the poor wanderer Margaret." But Briçonnet cannot refrain from pursuing so fructiferous a metaphor as that which the last sentence of the Duchess offers. He replies at once, without demetaphorising: "The abyss which prevents all abysses, which in saving from the abyss whelms in the abyss