The Rhetoric of Death Read online

  Charles shook his head, as if to shake the memories out of it, and got to his feet. The trouble with knight errantry—for a Jesuit, at least—was that, just like in the old stories, it involved a lady. And, just like in the old stories, it had set him on a journey, thanks to the long and branching du Luc family grapevine. Another cousin, the newly appointed Bishop of Marseilles, had learned what Charles had done in Nîmes. The bishop had been scandalized, but he had always had a fondness for Pernelle, and family was family. Instead of turning Charles in, he’d leaned hard on several highly placed Jesuits and gotten his rash cousin sent to Paris, as far away as possible from Marseilles and his own unblemished reputation.

  Back on the dust-clouded road, Charles forced his horse into a trot. His thoughts circled back to his mother’s letter. I pray that you will be safe in every way, she’d written. Safe from Pernelle’s wiles, she’d meant, safe in his vocation. But his vocation was already in danger when the letter arrived. He rode wide around a high-wheeled oxcart, calling a greeting in Provençal to the sunburned paysan driving it. The man, nearly as broad-backed as his ox, glowered in silence and Charles heard him spit when he was past. A Huguenot, then, though most followers of The Religion were townsmen, not countryfolk. Charles felt the man’s eyes still on his back. The paysan represented what was troubling Charles’s vocation. The Society of Jesus wielded great spiritual and temporal power, often for good, since it usually took power to fight power’s wrongs. But the Society had done nothing to stop the dragonnades and its voice had been strong among those urging the king to revoke the Edict of Nantes. Jesuits had helped bring this new wave of suffering on the Huguenots and Charles was finding that very hard to live with.

  But his Jesuit life, in other respects, mostly suited him. He loved his church and its ancient ritual, revered its heroic saints, believed its shining promises. He liked teaching rhetoric, loved producing the ballets that went with it. He wanted to come as close to Love as a man could, wanted to reach God’s heart. Through all his Jesuit training, in the heat of every theological argument, his deepest certainty had remained unshaken: that the beginning and end of God was Love, Love beyond human grasp or measure. For him, that trumped all other arguments. For him, cruelty in God’s name was blasphemously wrong. It was as simple as that. And so, for him, nothing was simple now.

  He wiped his sweating face on his cassock sleeve and squinted through the road dust at the northern horizon.

  Chapter 1

  JULY 22, 1686

  Charles leaned at the open window, gazing hungrily at Paris spread before him. Not that he could see much more than the faint outline of roofs, it being the dark of the moon and the sky thick with clouds still spitting rain after a wet day.

  A discordant concert of bells began, from the Carmelites, the Visitandines, the Jacobins, the abbeys of St.-Germain-des-Pres and St.-Geneviève, from Cluny, Port Royal, and all the other religious houses on and around St. Geneviève’s hill, marking the hour and calling monks and nuns to prayers. Midnight, and the twenty-second day of July about to begin. This new day would be his first day at the College of Louis le Grand, and he’d hardly prayed since the old day’s morning, hunched and shivering in the saddle as his hired horse splashed through the downpour and the last long miles to Paris. Jesuits lived together, but they weren’t cloistered and didn’t sing the daily offices in choir. Instead, they prayed them from their breviaries wherever they found themselves. Those at the scholastic level like himself weren’t required to say the offices but they were encouraged to do so, and as the bells ceased, Charles shut his eyes and murmured Matins’ opening psalm. But the approaching rumble of iron-shod wheels over cobbles scattered his silent words like blown leaves and he leaned farther out of the window to see what was happening. The smell preceding the dung cart up the hill enlightened him. And surprised him, too, because waste collectors—in places that had such amenities—usually came near daybreak. But this was Paris, everything was different. Everything seemed possible.

  Below him, the small light of hand lanterns swung and flickered as a night watch squad passed, and a few candles burned in windows where Latin quarter scholars—the lucky ones who could afford candles—sat late over their books. Or over wine and argument, more likely, Charles thought, a little enviously. When he’d been a student in Carpentras, enjoying wine with his academic arguing had meant risking expulsion by climbing a wall and going to a tavern. Most arguments, and tavern wine, hadn’t been worth it. This quarter, however, named for the Latin that was still the language of academic life, not only teemed with colleges—secondary schools for boys—but had at its heart the University of Paris, where older students, at least, must have more freedom—even if the wine wasn’t any better. Prayers forgotten, Charles stayed at the window, unwilling to let the darkling city go from his sight.

  This wasn’t his first time away from the south. But nothing—certainly not the little town of Carpentras, not even his two years in the army or his novitiate in bustling Avignon—had prepared Charles for Paris. The heavy rain on this last day of his journey had brought early dusk, and it was long past Compline and dark in earnest by the time he’d ridden past the embankment where the city walls and the St. Jacques gate had once stood and joined the scattering of people hurrying home on horseback and foot. Keeping a wary eye on the fast-moving, lantern-hung coaches and carts, he’d fumbled in his travel purse for coins to give the beggars following his horse in spite of the weather and the late hour. The city had closed around him and he’d welcomed her embrace.

  Now, standing at the window, he felt as though the goddess Fortuna had picked him up by the scruff of the neck and set him down in ancient Athens or Rome. As though, at any moment, the revered ancients whose works he taught would gather under his window to study him, peering into his brain, his heart, his very soul, to see if he was still worthy to pass on their learning. Romans had lived where the College of Louis le Grand stood, just as they had in the countryside where he’d grown up. From the time he could walk, he’d climbed on their ruined statues and played around the broken fluted column leaning at one corner of his father’s olive grove. Part of a black-and-white mosaic plowed up in a field was tiled into his mother’s kitchen fireplace. The Romans’ ghostly presence had fired his imagination and helped to make him a teacher of Latin rhetoric. So strong was his sudden sense of their presence here on the hill they’d called Lutetia, that he stood up straight and smoothed his cassock. But it was the reeking cart and its pair of muttering attendants that stood below him in the street, not Cicero and the rest. Laughing at his foolishness, he reached to pull the window shut, but before he closed it, he kissed his hand to sleeping Paris.

  He latched the casement, glad for its glass against the night’s unseasonable chill, and closed the plain wooden shutter over it. These two little rooms were the first he’d ever had with glassed windows, since most windows in the warmer south—except in churches and grand houses—were still made of oiled paper. He turned to survey his chamber. Its roughly plastered white walls held a narrow, uncurtained bed, a backed but uncushioned chair, an age-blackened wooden chest for his linen, a hanging rail for his cassock, and a small oak table against one wall. A candle stood on a three-legged stool beside the bed and a couple of nichelike plaster shelves were built into the thick walls. The low, massive ceiling beams weighed on the small space, and he fought the urge to crouch as he went to trim his guttering candle’s wick. Neither the chamber nor the even smaller adjoining study had a fireplace, and he was too cold for the fumbling process of finding his flint and tinder in the dark and relighting the candle.

  He shed his cassock, riding breeches, shoes, and stockings and stood in his long linen shirt eyeing the bed’s thin brown blanket. His woolen cloak was still wet, so he spread his cassock on top of the blankets, stirring the candle flame and sending shadows winging out from the crucifix hanging at the foot of the bed. He knelt, said the night prayers, gave thanks for his safe journey and this new assignment, and added praye
rs for Pernelle and her family. Surely, in the two months since he parted from them, they had reached Geneva. Let her—let all of them—be safe, he whispered, leaning his head on his clasped hands. Then he blew out the candle and slid between the coarse and worn flax sheets.

  He woke to freezing feet and the clamor of bells. Peering blearily over the covers, he saw that his feet had neither mattress under them nor blanket over them. A common occurrence and his mother’s fault. His maternal forebears were the Norsemen who’d swept down from the Viking lands long ago to leave their name to Normandy, and their blondness and long bones to future generations. Charles was still gathering his sleep-sodden wits for morning prayers and rubbing one foot against the other for warmth, when a sharp rap at the door made him draw his feet out of sight like a startled turtle.

  “Still sleeping, I see.”The lay brother sent the door bouncing back against the wall. He set a tray on the table and flung open shutter and casement to a flood of morning light that turned his red hair to a shock of flame. Charles grimaced. The light was as accusatory as the brother’s voice. It was obviously long past five o’clock, the normal rising time in a Jesuit college.

  “Bon jour, mon frère,” Charles said, trying to reclaim some dignity.

  The lay brother, lean and wiry under the heavy canvas apron over his shorter version of the Jesuit cassock, looked to be still in his teens, a good ten years younger than Charles.

  “It’s half after six,” the brother said. “Those bells were for first classes. But I was told to let you sleep. Since you were so late getting here.” He stared down his long thin nose at Charles, who couldn’t tell whether the boy disapproved of all lateness, or was simply envious of his chance to stay in bed.

  “I am Maître Charles du Luc, mon frère. May I know your name?”

  “I am Frère Denis Fabre.” His disapproving gaze shifted to Charles’s feet, showing again beyond the end of the bed. “Your bed is too short,” he said, as though Charles had made away with part of it during the night. He turned to the table and began taking things off the tray. “The assistant rector, Père Montville, wants to see you,” he said over his clattering. “Immediately.”

  Charles shot out of bed and hurriedly straightened its covers. “Mon Dieu, why didn’t you say so sooner?”

  “You were asleep sooner. Here’s shaving water. And something to break your fast. The bread is stale. And the water won’t be hot now.”

  “Good, fine, thank you.” Charles was searching in his bag for his razor. “Where do I go when I’m ready?”

  “I’ll have to show you, won’t I?” Frère Fabre drifted out of the room, sighing faintly.

  Charles rolled his eyes, laughing in spite of himself, and dug his razor out of his bag. He shaved himself badly in the cold water and got a crick in his neck peering at his greenish reflection in the little round mirror he’d brought. He nearly choked himself trying to get quickly through the dry bread and cheese. But in spite of his hurry, he uncorked his little pot of wine vinegar, salt, alum, and honey and gave his teeth a sketchy cleaning with the end of the towel. Not something most people would have done, but another thing he had to thank his mother for. He cleaned his teeth most days, and he even washed with water fairly often, instead of only changing his linen or wiping himself down with a dry towel. He took his brother Jesuits’ warnings about the likely consequences of his eccentric habits in good part and went his way, usually free of lice and, so far, with all his teeth.

  He recorked the pot and pulled on his cassock. With a final gulp of heavily watered wine to dull the sting of his tooth cleaner, Charles clapped a new skullcap on his head for extra warmth and hurried into the passage. The lay brother, slumped against the wall and whistling tunelessly under his breath, broke off abruptly and was running a critical eye over him, when the door across from Charles’s opened and a thick-bodied Jesuit with long, curling black hair emerged. Ignoring both Fabre and Charles, he swept toward the stairs with his Roman nose in the air.

  “Your cap is crooked, maître,” Fabre said to Charles laconically.

  Gravely, Charles straightened it. “Better?”

  Fabre nodded curt approval and loped down the stairs. After two narrow flights, the bare wooden stairs widened and became pale stone. A grand, stone balustraded curve decanted the two of them into an anteroom between the college’s tall double front doors and the grand salon, where the rector, Père Le Picart, and the senior rhetoric master, Père Jouvancy, had briefly greeted Charles the night before. Fabre led Charles across the salon to another anteroom and stopped at a closed door. Before he could knock, the door opened and a Jesuit backed slowly through it.

  “But, mon père,” he was saying earnestly, “I beg you, you cannot imagine what this glorious painting would add—”

  “I can imagine what our superior, our good Paris Provincial—not to mention Rome—would say about the cost,” someone beyond the door said tartly. “No, and again no. I am sorry.”

  Pulling the door shut harder than was strictly necessary, the disappointed Jesuit muttered a greeting to Charles and clumped dispiritedly away. Fabre tapped on the door and it flew open.

  “No, I tell you! Oh. Sorry, not you.” The speaker’s middle-aged pudding face relaxed into a beaming smile and he bowed slightly. “I am Père Montville, assistant rector here. You must be Maître du Luc. Come in, come in,” he said, as Charles bowed in return. “So long as you don’t want me to buy paintings. Thank you for delivering him, Frère Fabre.” He ushered Charles into his tiny office. “Every Jesuit wants something for his pet enthusiasm,” he sighed. “More paintings for the chapel, more telescopes, maps, books, I don’t know how the bursar keeps his sanity. And when he says no, they come to me!” He waved Charles to the only other chair in the room. “And you, I suppose, will want more ballet costumes.”

  “But yes, mon père,” Charles said, ingenuously wide-eyed. “And all cloth of gold, please.”

  “Don’t even think it.” Montville laughed. “Well, Maître du Luc, you are welcome to Louis le Grand! This morning we will see to the details of your life with us and get you settled in. A Jesuit college is, of course, a Jesuit college, but all have their differences, too. First, though, I must write you into my ledger of our scholastics.” He thumped the enormous leather-bound book lying on his desk. “Then you will see our rector, Père Le Picart. I know you met him last night with Père Jouvancy, but he wishes to talk with you further. I think you will find that we are fortunate in our rector—though his ability to see straight into our souls and out the other side can be a touch disconcerting.”

  Montville laughed, but his description of the rector’s perspicacity made Charles’s stomach tighten, in light of his recent activities.

  “After that,” Montville went on, “you must go to the clothing master. Your cassock, if I may say so, is showing the effects of your journey. Do you need anything else?”

  “Perhaps another shirt, mon père, if he has one to spare. Other than that, I think I am well supplied.”

  “Good. When the clothing master has finished with you, he will take you to the prefect of studies, who will work out your teaching schedule. And if, after all that, you are still standing, I will give you a tour of the school, which will end at the refectory and dinner. After dinner, you will go to Père Jouvancy.” He shook his head, laughing. “Père Jouvancy is excused from dinner the last two weeks before a show, because no matter how often anyone reprimands him, he simply forgets to come to eat.” Montville eyed Charles speculatively. “They have been rehearsing the tragedy and ballet since late May, you know. It’s quite unusual to get a new rhetoric assistant this far into summer show preparations.” He raised an inquisitive eyebrow, but Charles refused the bait. “Well, well, far be it from us to question the will of our superiors, especially when it brings us such a good gift. So. Your father’s name?” He picked up a quill and opened the ledger.

  Chapter 2

  The warning bell was ringing for dinner and Charles’s head was
spinning as Montville led him back to the main courtyard after the promised tour. It had already been spinning when the tour started. Père Le Picart, a lean man in his forties with eyes as gray as the North Sea, had been less formidable than Montville had painted him, smiling gently and nodding approval as Charles answered questions about his studies and his teaching experience. But there had been unspoken questions in his cool gray eyes, and Charles had gone to his next appointment with some sense of escape. The clothing master Frère Dupont had scuttled around his dark room, searching through the piles of black cassocks as he measured Charles with his eye and shook his head at how much of him there was to clothe. When a cassock with enough hem to let down had been found, and a new linen shirt to go under it, Dupont had dismissed him to the prefect of studies, assuring him that the new garments would be taken to his chamber. Père Joly, the prefect of studies, eagle-beaked and ascetic-looking, had told Charles in the fewest possible words that he would be assisting in a morning grammar class and spending his afternoons working with Père Jouvancy to ready the ballet and tragedy. Joly had added austerely that such a light schedule was only for now, and that after the performance, Charles could expect more classes added to his day.