The prince was amazed that such a simple idea had never occurred to him, and he consulted the holy brethren of the Society of Jesus, with whom he had close contacts.
A few days later, at one of the wonderful parties given by Hélène at her summer villa on Stone Island she was introduced to a M. Jobert, a fascinating middle-aged man with snow-white hair and brilliant black eyes, a lay member of the Jesuit brotherhood (a ‘short-robed’, lay member), who spent a long time in conversation with Hélène out in the garden under the illuminations and to the strains of music about the need to love God, and Jesus, and the Sacred Heart, and the consolations afforded by the one true Catholic faith in this life and the next. Hélène was deeply moved, and several times both of them found themselves on the verge of tears, with their voices trembling. A dance partner then called Hélène away, breaking the thread of the conversation with her future ‘director of conscience’, but the following evening M. Jobert called on Hélène alone, and soon after that he became a regular visitor.
One day he took the countess along to a Catholic church, and there she was led forward to kneel at an altar. The fascinating, middle-aged Frenchman laid his hands on her head, and she experienced a sensation that she later described as something akin to a breath of fresh air wafting into her soul. This, they explained, was the ‘grace of God’.
Then a long-robed abbé was brought to her; he heard her confession, and absolved her from her sins. Next day she took delivery of a casket containing the Sacred Host, which was left with her for use in her own home. Some days later Hélène learnt with pleasure that she had been admitted into the true Catholic Church, and in a day or two the Pope himself would hear about her and send her some sort of document.
Everything that was done to her, and around her, during this period; all the attention lavished on her by so many clever men, gratifying and refined as it was in all its forms; and the dovelike purity of her present condition (she wore nothing but white dresses and white ribbons throughout) was most enjoyable, but not for a moment did she let the enjoyment distract her from her goal. And since this was a matter of low cunning, in which the stupid person always wins out over the bright one, Hélène had soon cottoned on to the main motivation behind all the fine words and splendid ceremonies involved in her conversion to Catholicism, which was to get good money out of her for the Jesuit cause (hints had already been heard), and she now refused to pay up until she had undergone the various formalities necessary to free her from her husband. To her way of thinking, the real purpose of every religion was to preserve the decencies and still satisfy human desire. And with this in mind she took advantage of a consultation with her spiritual adviser to ask how far she was bound by her marriage.
They were sitting together in an alcove by a drawing-room window. It was dusk. The scent of flowers wafted in through the window. Hélène was wearing a white dress, transparent over shoulders and bosom. The sleek, well-fed abbé, with his podgy, clean-shaven chin, his good strong mouth and his white hands clasped unthreateningly round his knees, was sitting close to Hélène. A subtle smile played on his lips, a discreet admiration of her beauty shone from his eyes, and he looked her in the face once or twice as he outlined his attitude to this problem. Hélène grinned warily as she stared back at his curly hair and his clean-shaven, dark-shadowed cheeks, and waited anxiously for the conversation to move in a new direction. But the abbé, even as he made no secret of drinking in the beauty of his companion, was also much enjoying his own skilful handling of the situation.
The director of conscience explained his thinking, which went as follows.
‘Without knowing the full significance of what you were undertaking, you took a vow of conjugal fidelity to a man who, for his part, was committing an act of sacrilege when he entered into holy wedlock with no faith in its religious significance. That marriage did not have the dual significance it should have had. Nevertheless, your vow was binding upon you. You have broken it. What kind of sin did you commit? A venial sin or a mortal sin? A venial sin, because you committed it without malice aforethought. If now, with the object of bearing children, you were to marry again, your sin could be forgiven. But still the question has two aspects to it. In the first pl . . .’
