The Rhetoric of Death Read online

  Then Montville had appeared at Joly’s door and swept Charles away to tour the college. They’d started at the opulent chapel on the south side of the Cour d’honneur, as the main court was called, and from there Montville had chivied him over the entire property, explaining who taught what to whom and where, and where they all lived, ate, and studied. A secondary school, like all the Jesuit colleges, Louis le Grand’s students ranged from about ten to twenty years old. Its syllabus of studies followed the plan laid down by St. Ignatius and was based on Latin and Greek writers of the ancient world. The general shape of the Paris college’s life would be familiar to any Jesuit, but as Montville had said, each college also had its uniqueness. Louis le Grand was known as the nursery of France’s great men. The college’s day students outnumbered its pensionnaires, or boarding students, by nearly four to one. But the pensionnaires, the five hundred or so boys from noble and wealthy upper-bourgeois families, were its heart. It was these boys who acted and danced in the elaborate schedule of plays and ballets for a large and influential audience.

  “An astronomy class?” Charles had said, peering through a window at perhaps a hundred half-grown, black-gowned boys crowded cheek by jowl on benches, windowsills and floor, listening to a small bespectacled Jesuit turning a large, wood-mounted globe of the heavens as he lectured. “Are all the classes so large?”

  “No, not at all, those are day boys.” Montville had shrugged. “We try not to turn any qualified boy away, whether or not he can pay. We also have a handful of scholarship boys, who live together in a dortoir and are counted with the pensionnaires. Most of the day students are Parisians. They sleep and eat at home, or in cheap student lodgings. If we hadn’t been able to expand our property as much as we have, we’d have to sit them on bales of hay in the street and teach them there, like the university did a few hundred years ago. Fortunately, we’ve bought, stolen, won—depending on who tells the tale—a number of neighboring college properties, most of them defunct or derelict. Mans, Marmoutier, most of les Cholets. But it’s taken decades, and without our Père La Chaise—the king’s confessor—speaking for us at court, we’d still be arguing over the loot, so to speak. Some of it, I may say, cost us a good deal to repair. Ceilings coming down, rooms you couldn’t swing a cat in, rats fighting the fleas for floor space. But on the whole good bargains, and our classes are spread over all of them. The University of Paris, our less than good neighbor across the rue St. Jacques, is sick with envying our property. And our popularity. But what do they expect? The lackwits still teach as though it were eleven hundred-something and poor Peter Abelard were on the faculty!”

  The acquisitions had turned Louis le Grand into a minotaur’s maze of largely old and ill-matched buildings, most built of weather-blackened stone, a few half-timbered in the old fashion, some five stories high, some only two. Blue slate roofs pitched at clashing angles sprouted a mushroom growth of chimneys and dormer windows, an exuberant roofline further punctuated with towers as ill assorted as the buildings. The largest tower, on the south side of the Cour d’honneur, had bells and its own windows. A smaller tower at the southeast corner had a bell and a clock, and a windowed hexagonal tower on the north side looked to Charles like it might be an observatory. Though what anyone hoped to see through the clouds of this northern sky, he couldn’t imagine.

  The mélange of buildings was honeycombed with courtyards. The vast Cour d’honneur, which opened from the street passage leading from the postern door and the rue St. Jacques, was graveled, with a few old trees around its edges shading a half dozen stone benches. The other courts were smaller, some invitingly green with turf and big plane trees, like the fathers’ garden near the rue de Rheims, enclosed now on two sides by the sparkling new stone of the main college library. Montville and Charles had passed a chattering group of Englishmen leaving the garden, and Montville had explained that visitors came from all over to marvel at Louis le Grand’s enormous collection of books. Then he’d walked Charles through the quiet, shady court where the pensionnaires lived with their tutors in private rooms and small dortoirs, then under a classical archway and back into the Cour d’honneur.

  Now, as they crunched across the grayish gravel, Montville pointed to the range of windows reaching nearly to the ground floor on the main court’s east side.

  “Your senior rhetoric classroom, maître.”

  “How many are in the class?”

  “Only thirty or so. We try to keep the boarders’ classes smaller. And you wouldn’t want a hundred boys in your ballet! The lay brothers and workmen from the Opera will build your stage out from the classroom windows. Your performers change costumes in the classroom and the windows let them come and go from the stage. We cover the whole courtyard with a canvas awning; do they do that at Carpentras? I suppose the sun is the problem there, but here it’s rain. If it rains enough, though, the canvas collects puddles and sags and—well, you can imagine what happens then! You might start praying now for the miracle of a dry performance day!” Montville cocked an eye at the clouds. “Early summer was stifling,” he said, as a fine rain began to spatter on their hats. “Though you’d never think it now!”

  “I hope this cold and wet won’t hurt the harvest,” Charles said. “At home, it promised well, after too many years of drought.”

  “Too much drought, too much rain, always too much hunger. And too little charity,” Montville said soberly.

  “Much too little charity,” Charles agreed. And not least because the king sees only his passion for a wholly Catholic France instead of his people’s needs, he thought, but didn’t say. Color and movement caught his eye and he exclaimed with pleasure at a sudden fountain of colored balls rising and falling across the courtyard.

  “Oh, dear,” Montville murmured, as they stopped to watch. “Poor Frère Moulin refuses to believe that we are not all panting to see his juggling. The courtyard proctor is going to enjoy this.”

  Charles saw that Frère Fabre, his dour nursemaid of the morning, was standing beside the juggling lay brother, gazing spellbound at the spinning balls. All over the court, heads were turning. An older student on his way to dinner dropped surreptitiously out of his classmates’ double line to watch. The juggler said something to him, but as the boy moved closer, another boy ran back from the line and grabbed his sleeve. The first boy shook him off angrily. The newcomer shrugged and hurried toward the refectory, and the first boy began talking to the juggler. Fabre abruptly turned his attention from the juggling to the talk, and what looked like an argument quickly blossomed between him and the student. Charles marveled at the ease with which the juggler, looking in surprise from the student to Fabre, kept the balls rising and falling without mishap. But the bright moment the spinning balls had made in the gray morning ended as the courtyard proctor and another Jesuit bustled toward the little group. The proctor bore down on the juggler, who caught the balls and stowed them so deftly in his apron that they might never have existed. The other Jesuit upbraided the student. Fabre faded unobtrusively toward the refectory.

  “Come, Maître du Luc, even if you are not hungry, I am!”

  Montville steered Charles toward the court’s northeast corner, where lines of boys streamed through the refectory’s wide door. Its windows wore metal grids against balls and other missiles of play, Charles noticed, as he looked up at the tower clock.

  “Eleven? You eat later here. The Carpentras college eats at 10:30.”

  “In Paris, the hours for everything get later all the time—the influence of Versailles, I always think. But our king does not have to teach boys at half past six in the morning.”

  Inside the building, they passed a broad staircase and turned along a right-hand passage.

  “We eat with the older boys,” Montville said. “The younger boarders’ refectory is down the other way.”

  They went into an enormous room with soaring rafters, full of boys standing around closely crowded long tables covered with linen cloths. Under the eyes of their tutors
and the college proctors, the boys kept their noise to a reasonably civilized level, but the room still hummed like a giant beehive.

  Montville led Charles up onto the hall’s dais, where they bowed to Père Le Picart, who stood waiting at the end of the dais table until all its places were filled. Charles and Montville made their way behind the professors standing silently at their places, along a wall painted in faded, old-fashioned red-and-blue checkerboards and stripes. Montville stopped at his own chair and gestured Charles to the empty place at the table’s end. The rector moved to his place at the long table’s center, facing the rest of the hall. Miraculously, the noise drained away like water out of a stone sink. Le Picart said a Latin grace, all crossed themselves, and chairs and benches scraped over the floor’s worn, honey-colored stone.

  Lay brothers set green and yellow tin-glazed basins—faience, they were called in the south—along the center of the table. Charles winced as Frère Fabre plunked a basin down beside the rector and sent a wave of steaming sauce onto the tablecloth. Charles’s neighbor offered him a crusty loaf, and Charles realized that he’d seen him twice before, once when he’d come out of the rooms across from Charles’s early that morning, and just now with the proctor in the courtyard, putting an end to the juggling and berating the student who’d stopped to watch.

  “You are our new rhetoric man, are you not?” The Jesuit, whose thick black curls might almost have been a wig, drew a serving basin close and used the spoon ready in the dish to help himself to chicken stew fragrant with the smell of ginger.

  Charles made his nod half a bow. “I am Maître Charles Matthieu Beuvron du Luc, mon père. And very glad to be here.”

  “As you should be,” the man said, without smiling or introducing himself. His eyes raked Charles. “A surprising assignment for a simple scholastic. And from the south. As your accent sadly proclaims.”

  Charles let the rudeness about his origins and accent pass. Louis le Grand was without doubt the most coveted teaching assignment in the five French Jesuit provinces. He certainly wouldn’t be here if Bishop du Luc hadn’t leaned hard on the head of the Paris Province. Which, of course, was how things usually worked. Someone knew someone—and too often something—which the someone would much rather not have known, and there you were. On the other hand, of course, it might well be of no great consequence to a busy Jesuit Provincial where a lowly scholastic made himself useful.

  “Being here is a great honor,” Charles said mildly, pouring his small plain glass half full of wine and adding water.

  “The highest honor for someone like you. I see you eat in the Italian fashion,” the man said, as Charles picked up the fork lying beside a matching spoon. “Louis’s style is good enough for me.”

  Charles’s neighbor dipped his thick fingers into his bowl and carried a mound of chicken and vegetables to his mouth. A drop splashed onto his cassock, and Charles turned his head away to hide his smile at the old-fashioned affectation. The king, so it was said, still forbade forks at his table—though only at court—but even he probably ate stew with his spoon. And the Paris college, Charles knew, had used forks for a hundred years, ever since a Jesuit inspector from Rome had been appalled at the state of the college tablecloths after so many fingers were wiped on them and recommended the Italian innovation. Although from what Charles could see of the cloths on the students’ tables, forks hadn’t made all that much difference.

  “This is good,” Charles said. “Rosewater in it as well as ginger, isn’t there?”

  “Rosewater, yes. Old-style cooking, usually. No luxury here. But what there is, is generally good enough.” The man gave him a sharp sideways glance. “Du Luc, your name is?”

  Charles nodded, sighing inwardly. One of his hopes when he joined the Society had been that the noisy, glittering show of nobility would be less important. He had very quickly learned that influence was influence, and that Jesuits were as shameless as everyone else about using it.

  “The Comtes de Vintimille du Luc?” his neighbor said. “Originally from Nice?”

  “We are descended from them, yes.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed and he studied Charles. “You are related, then, to the newly appointed Bishop of Marseilles. Young for a bishop. Very sound against the Jansenists, though.”

  The mention of his cousin made Charles’s breath catch in his throat. He forced a smile and nodded. He was all too familiar with Bishop du Luc’s ire toward the Catholic followers of the theologian Cornelius Jansen, whose austere piety sometimes made them seem more like Huguenots than Catholics. But the less said about Bishop du Luc, the less chance anyone would discover what had really gotten Charles to Paris.

  “What do you teach, mon père?” he asked his still anonymous neighbor politely.

  “I am in charge of the student library. We have an extraordinarily fine collection here, nearly thirty thousand volumes in our new main library. I also have the honor to act as confessor to many at court.” He managed to look simultaneously down his nose and sideways at Charles. “I am Père Sebastian Victoire Louis Anne of the House of Guise.”

  The man rolled the syllables of his name off his tongue as though proclaiming an addition to Holy Writ. Charles choked on a mouthful of bread. Dear God, the House of Guise. Instigators of the Wars of Religion, leaders of the Huguenot-hunting Catholic League. Nearly kings of France, with the help of the League’s Guise-financed army. The irony of getting away with rescuing Pernelle, only to become the colleague and tablemate of a Guise, made Charles uncertain whether to weep or toast the bon Dieu’s sense of humor. Still coughing, Charles picked up his wineglass. Guise turned his broad back and began talking to his other neighbor.

  Charles gulped wine, catching his breath, and gazed up at the faded stars between the ceiling’s wide black beams. No luxury here, Guise had said. The little yellow stars, the Virgin’s symbols, did indeed need repainting. Even dull and chipped and faded, though, they comforted him. Mary’s stars made him think of the glittering sky of his childhood in the dry nights of the south. Until he got too big to curl up in the stone window-seat, he’d moved his bedding there most clear nights and fallen asleep watching the sky through the open shutter, imagining that Mary had spread her star-strewn cloak over the sleeping world to keep it safe. He emptied his glass, reached for a pitcher, and drew back his hand. There was no point in trying to drown the Guises of the world in watered wine. And even if there were, he couldn’t go fuddled to his first day of rehearsal.

  He turned his attention to eating and watching the sea of students in front of him. In spite of the proctors’ frowns, the boys gestured energetically as they talked. The black sleeves of their scholar’s gowns fell back, lighting the dim room with flashes of white linen and the occasional sheen of richly colored silk. Most of the boys were European, but there were two who had to be the Chinese students he’d been told about, and several others with an exotic slant to eyes or cheekbones. As his eye wandered over the faces, he saw the handsome black-haired youth who had stopped to watch the lay brother’s juggling. Charles jumped as Guise, still turned away from him, slapped the table.

  “. . . they serve God and their king. Souls are saved. No faithful servant of the Church—or the Society of Jesus—can deplore that.”

  Charles reached for a strawberry tart from the platter that had appeared on the table, and craned his neck to see who Guise was lecturing. Several places away, a hawk-nosed old man shook his head, his wispy white hair waving like feathers around his skullcap. Charles caught the word heretic and then the old man sat back in his chair, disappearing from view.

  “Old woman,” Guise said savagely under his breath.

  Wanting more than anything not to talk about heretics, Charles stuffed the whole tart into his mouth, turned his head away from Guise, and pretended to be absorbed in the checkerboard pattern that continued around the side wall.

  “And you?” Guise demanded at his back. “Do you agree with me?”

  “About what?” Charles sai
d, around the mouthful of pastry and without turning.

  “Heretics.”

  Hoping to give deliberate offense so that Guise would leave him alone, Charles chewed the rest of his tart and swallowed before he turned. Guise was still waiting, his nostrils pinched with anger.

  “Saving souls is part of what God requires of us,” Charles said evenly.

  “And are you squeamish about the method, like old Dainville?”

  An updraft of anger seared Charles’s chest and heated his face. Squeamish? Method? Squeamish about the king’s dragoons tying his uncle Jean Marc du Luc’s new young wife to a bedpost and refusing to release her until she recanted her faith? While her frail newborn screamed for food? Annette du Luc had pleaded through the night to be allowed to feed the sick child. Finally, her little boy’s misery was too much and before the sun rose, she agreed to become Catholic. But the baby died, worn out with sickness, terror, hunger, and wailing. Annette died, too, because she wrested a knife from a half-drunk dragoon and attacked the soldier who had kept her from her child. Jean Marc had been sent to the galleys. That had been more than a year ago, and no one knew whether he still lived, or even whether to hope he did, considering what everyone knew about the living death of galley slaves. Charles forced words through his anger.

  “Our Savior is a God of love, Père Guise.”

  Guise’s sculptured lip curled. “Is it loving to let heretic souls be damned?”

  “Is it loving to torture them into false conversion?” Charles shot back. “Is it loving to kill children?”