The Rhetoric of Death Read online

Something moved behind Guise’s eyes, and he gazed at Charles with new interest. “The south,” he said lazily, “Provence, Languedoc, the filthy strongholds of heresy.” He leaned toward Charles like a cold shadow. “Have you grown so loving to your neighbors—and your kin, perhaps—that heresy no longer troubles you? Holy Scripture commands us to ‘compel them to come in.’ ”

  “If you read further in that same fourteenth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel, you will find that those who refuse are not hunted down and tortured until they accept the invitation. More to the point, can we ever be too loving to our neighbors? Whom Holy Scripture commands us to love as ourselves?”

  “And whose souls we are required to save. Un roi, une loi, une foi, Maître du Luc. Or has your tender heart carried you as far as treason?”

  An insane desire to plunge his little table knife into Guise’s well-padded ribs washed over Charles. He folded his hands tightly in his lap and studied his white knuckles.

  “Consider our Jesuit rule of education,” he said softly. “Our Ratio. About which we cannot possibly disagree. It directs us to make learning pleasurable. Should we not, even more, make the learning and acceptance of God’s true religion pleasurable?”

  Guise sat back, watching him as a cat watches a wounded bird. “A follower of Epicurus, are you? The highest good is pleasure? How interesting.”

  “Epicurus held that pleasure comes from the practice of virtue. And few faithful theologians would dispute that our savior preached love and virtue.”

  “So love and pleasure are one?”

  “Hah, Père Guise, you old dog, you should know,” Montville said loudly from Guise’s other side. “Corrupting our new professor already?” He leaned around Guise, smiling broadly, his eyes warning Charles to smile with him. “I hope your dinner was to your satisfaction, maître?”

  “Very much so,” Charles said warmly, profoundly grateful for the boisterous interruption.

  “Good, you’ll need sustenance to get through your first afternoon of rehearsals.”

  “Ballet!” Guise spat on the floor, narrowly missing Charles’s arm. “Womanish nonsense. A waste of time and money.”

  “I’ll be sure and tell King Louis you said that, next time I’m at court.” Montville laughed, slapping Guise on the back.

  “Our official plan of studies says nothing about ballet!” Guise replied stiffly. “‘Tragoediarum et comoediarum, quas non nisi latinas ac rarissimas esse oportet, argumentum sacrum sit ac pium.’ That is what it says!”

  “Yes, yes.” Montville laughed. “‘Tragedies and comedies should be rare,’ we all know what it says.”

  “It says extremely rare,” Guise snapped. “And pious.”

  “And we send reports to Rome every year and mostly they only object to the expense,” Montville said, the light of battle in his eye. “For plays and ballets alike. How do you explain that?”

  “The Society of Jesus is deeply in need of reform.”

  Montville’s infectious laughter pealed out again. “You become more like our good Jansenists every day!” He leaned closer to Guise. “Is it your old sins troubling you, mon père?”

  Charles’s lips twitched as Guise grew white around the nostrils. But before Guise could answer, the rector rose for the final grace and everyone rose with him.

  Chapter 3

  The final grace’s “amen” echoed from the walls and the professors on the dais filed silently into the passage, to be followed by the boys, table by table. Père Montville hurried Charles outside, past the lay brothers putting a dozen wooden chests down near the doors and setting their lids open to reveal game boards, chessmen, darts, toys, and pastimes for the hour of quiet recreation that followed dinner.

  “Never mind Père Guise,” Montville said, making for the main building’s rear door. “He is a good librarian. But he suffers from the handicap of being a Guise. My advice is to do as I do, try hard to stay out of his way. Now. You will spend this hour with Père Jouvancy.” He flashed Charles a sideways grin. “Though whether you will find it an hour of quiet recreation, I beg leave to doubt.”

  Nerving himself to face his new boss, Charles held the heavy door open for Montville and followed him into the gray day’s indoor gloom. Père Joseph Jouvancy, senior rhetoric master, was as famous for his brilliant teaching and his rapport with students as for the elegant Latin tragedies he wrote. Drama in schools run by religious orders was a centuries-old tradition, but dance with it was the Jesuits’ new contribution. Though King Louis no longer danced himself, the French court had been in love with ballet for a hundred years, ever since Queen Catherine de Medici brought it to France from Italy. For persons of any social standing, dancing well was an indispensable part of claiming one’s rightful place in the world. Charles, like most people, had heard the cautionary—and true—tale of the young noble who so disgraced himself by dancing badly at court that he was sent abroad by his father until the resulting scandal died down. The Jesuit college ballets trained dancers for the ballets still staged occasionally at court, and for the frequent and lavish productions at great country chateaus. Unlike those ballets, the Jesuit productions had more or less edifying themes, no female dancers and no romantic plots, yet they still attracted glittering audiences and wealthy patrons for the college.

  Charles stumbled nervously as he and Montville started up a staircase toward a half-open door. Last night, as Jouvancy and Le Picart had kept him company while he ate a late supper, Jouvancy had been cordial and warm, telling hilarious stories of crises in rehearsals and performances over the years. But Charles had quickly seen that the little man was impatient and exacting, with the tireless energy of a squirrel. Now, as he reached the top of the stairs, a murmuring stream of exasperation, punctuated by thumps and the crackle of paper, poured from the half-open door to meet him. Montville knocked lightly, the murmuring broke off, and a high tenor voice called, “Come, come!”

  Putting his head around the door, Montville said, “Here he is, mon père,” clapped Charles on the shoulder and clattered away down the stairs.

  Charles went in and found Jouvancy bent over a desk, scrabbling through an ill-assorted drift of books, loose sheets of paper, quills, a long curly dark wig, a cone-shaped sugar loaf wrapped in blue paper on a pewter plate, glass bottles of red and black ink, a sugar sifter, and a thick roll of wide blue ribbon uncoiling itself over the desk’s edge. Even in the gray light from the tall, many-paned window, Charles could see the cloud of dust rising from his efforts.

  “Yes, yes, good morning to you, too,” the handsome little priest gabbled without looking up and before Charles had said anything. “I am sorry to trouble you with this nonsense, but I am sure that we are of one mind.”

  The sugar sifter slid off the desk and Charles caught it in midair, wondering what nonsense he was being troubled with.

  “Here it is. Sit, sit. You are a sensible young man, I could see that last night, look at what he wants—it is impossible, it is an offense, just look!”

  The rhetoric master thrust a sheaf of sketches at Charles and went back to his frenzied search. Charles put the sugar sifter back on the desk, removed a papier-mâché Roman soldier’s helmet from a straight-backed chair, and sat down.

  “Ah, here it is!” Jouvancy disappeared below the desk and straightened, holding a blond wig. “Well?” He subsided into his chair, glaring at the sketches in Charles’s hand. “Well?”

  “These are beautiful,” Charles said sincerely, riffling through the big, flopping pages filled with drawings of ballet characters.

  Jouvancy’s fine-boned face darkened ominously.

  “Though, of course . . .” Charles fanned the sketches like limp cards and frowned at them, praying that the tirade obviously about to burst forth would tell him what he was frowning at.

  “Look—there!” Jouvancy bounced up again and leaned across the desk, flattening the wigs as he stabbed a finger at the drawing of a dancer wearing a clock on his head. “A messenger delivered these sketches to me a
t dawn. Barely dawn, I wasn’t even dressed. A clock! I ask you, a monstrous black and gold clock! Are my boys tables? How is anyone to dance wearing that? And apparently it chimes—he expects poor Time to tilt his head as he dances and make the cursed thing chime!”

  The harried producer fell back into his chair, shoulders around his ears, hands flung up in a gesture of utter desperation.

  “Um—Monsieur Beauchamps sent these?” Charles hazarded.

  Jouvancy’s nostrils pinched. “Who else?”

  Every Jesuit college that staged ballets hired a layman as dancing master and the great Pierre Beauchamps was Louis le Grand’s. Beauchamps was to the world of dance what the pope was to Holy Church and Charles could hardly believe his luck in getting to work with him. The greatest dancing master in France, probably in all of Europe, Beauchamps had danced with the king in court ballets and had gone from strength to strength, first as Louis’s dancing master, then as director of the King’s Twenty-Four Violins, director of the Royal Academy of Dancing, and now dancing master for the Royal Academy of Opera. But Charles did see what the problem was. All dancers, amateur and professional, were used to unwieldy headdresses as part of their costumes. In his student days at Carpentras, Charles had danced the role of Spring with a small cage full of live birds on his head. That had been bad enough, but this clock was three feet tall. Though it would be anchored to a leather cap and tied on, it would be the rare student who could keep the thing from tipping over while making it chime in time to his steps and the music.

  Jouvancy shifted in his chair, tapping a finger on the desk and scowling as though Charles were a promising pupil failing to live up to his promise.

  “Mon père,” Charles said quickly, “Maître Beauchamps sometimes brings his Opera professionals in to dance for you, does he not? Perhaps—one of them could wear the clock?”

  “I am sorry to see that you miss the point, Maître du Luc. Pierre Beauchamps is trying to alter my ballet livret. Mine! Again. Do I change the steps he sets the dancers? No, I do not. In my livret, there is no Time character. Instead, there is a beautiful minuet for the four seasons, wearing simple garlands—flowers, fruit, leaves, bare twigs—to show time’s passage.”

  Charles smiled politely. He and everyone else had seen those same dancing seasons a hundred times. Aside from the technical problems, his artistic sympathies were with Beauchamps.

  “You say Maître Beauchamps has done this before? Tried to change your livret, I mean?”

  Charles knew perfectly well that this duel of wills between professor-librettist and hired dancing master was a fixture of every ballet production in every college, even without formidable personalities like Jouvancy and Beauchamps involved. But the more he knew about the lay of the land here, the better.

  Jouvancy put a trembling hand to his forehead. “He does it every ballet,” he said in a resonant whisper, and became before Charles’s eyes every persecuted, aging monarch in the history of drama. “It is why I am as you see me, a man old before my time.”

  Charles bit his tongue to keep from laughing, thinking that Jouvancy, who was probably in his middle forties, could have made a fine career in Molière’s company. With the sense of delivering his next line, Charles said what he suspected the rhetoric master was waiting to hear.

  “With your permission, mon père . . .” Wickedly, he hesitated, and Jouvancy shot him an impatient look. “Perhaps—if it would be of use—I could convey your judgment to M. Beauchamps and free you for other things?” Charles finished brightly.

  Jouvancy let his hand fall from his face. His large gray eyes were luminous with a finely judged opening of hope.

  “You?”

  “Yes, mon père,” Charles said gravely. “I would be honored to be of service.” And just stopped himself from adding, “Your Majesty.”

  “Very well.” Jouvancy’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction. “It is all one to me,” he added mendaciously. “Speak to him—no, inform him—this afternoon. I cannot be bothered, the whole thing is beneath me. The man must be taught that he cannot dictate in this manner to a learned theoretician. Telling him so will be good practice for you.” Jouvancy grinned suddenly and came offstage. “And whether it will or not, none of these boys would be upright at the end of a pirouette with that thing on his head. But don’t tell him that.”

  “But surely he knows?”

  “Hmph. He thinks he has only to show them, shake his stick at them, yell at them, and they become gods of the dance. No matter if he is demanding that they dance on their hands in a sack. No theory, that’s the trouble with Beauchamps. But he is just a practitioner, so what can one expect? A great one, I grant you that—but a practitioner all the same. The man cares nothing for theory.”

  Charles kept his mouth shut. He was all too familiar with the age-old theoretician vs. practitioner argument, but calling Beauchamps just a practitioner was like calling the pope just a priest.

  “A chiming clock!” Jouvancy snorted. “The ancients would never think of anything so absurd!”

  “Well, they didn’t have clocks,” Charles said reasonably.

  “True. But never forget, the arts are for imitating nature, Maître du Luc. ‘The monkeys of nature,’ as our dear Père Menestrier says so well in his learned treatise on ballets. Are there clocks in nature? No, there are not clocks in nature.”

  “But there is time,” Charles murmured, admiring a sketch for the Horizon’s shimmering costume, half black, half white.

  Jouvancy chuckled. “All right, Maître Charles du Luc. I see we will get on together. And whether we do or not, we have a ballet to present in just two more weeks. Not to mention the tragedy.” He cocked his head, his eyes bright with curiosity. “Though I am pleased to have you here, I have been wondering—so late in our rehearsals, a bare two weeks before a show, is a peculiar time to acquire an assistant. Not that I am ungrateful, of course.” He waited hopefully.

  Smiling blandly, Charles shrugged and gave the answer he’d prepared. “My superiors decided I had been at Carpentras long enough. In addition to teaching at the school, I had also been a student there, you know.”

  “I see. Well, your arrival comes just as I am realizing that this production is hopeless.”

  “Hopeless? Do they really dance so badly?”

  “No, no, thanks to Beauchamps, they dance very well, most of them. But they do not care why they dance. They do not care that the dance is meant to show every movement of the emotions and the eloquence of the soul shining through the body. Without that, it is nothing. Yet these wretched boys only want to show the shapely leg, jump higher than their confrères, and wear the richest costume. Though surely you know all that. Boys are boys, even at little Carpentras.”

  “True,” Charles laughed. “But as long as they didn’t trip over their feet and the ballet amused parents and patrons, the rector there was satisfied.” Though Charles hadn’t been. Only rarely had he come across a boy who had it in him to make what he danced burn with beauty. “After all, the ballets are to adorn the yearly prize-giving and provide some enjoyment for the boys near the end of the school year, are they not, mon père?”

  “Of course, but you are at Louis le Grand now. The king himself is our patron, my dear Maître du Luc, which means that he helps pay for the ballet. As well as the year’s academic prizes. Do you have any idea what those suitably bound tomes we give as prizes cost? So the ballet must be superb, because we cannot afford to lose the king’s money! Anything less would be an insult, since King Louis was such a very gifted dancer himself. And I do not say that only because he is the king. Look.”

  He pointed to the wall behind Charles. Charles turned in his chair and saw a gilt-framed painting of a half-grown boy in a golden tonneau—a stiff, tight-waisted coat standing out over his breeches like a very short skirt. The coat’s full sleeves were tied with yellow ribbons at elbow and wrist, and the shoes, heeled and square-toed, sported rayed golden suns. The boy’s face was still softly rounded and his silky light
brown hair curled on his shoulders. He wore a crown with golden rays, and above it a tall sheaf of waving white plumes.

  “That is the king,” Jouvancy said reverently. “Only fourteen, dancing as France’s Rising Sun in Cardinal Mazarin’s Ballet of Night. I was there and I tell you, it was magnificent. My father wanted me to see the king reclaim his kingdom after the horrors of the nobles’ revolt—the Fronde, that was, before your time. Anyway, the room—in the Petit-Bourbon palace—was crowded beyond belief, and my father and I, being of little importance, were shoved away in a corner. It was February, but the room was stifling from the crowd, and I soon fell asleep on the floor—I was just ten. The ballet really did last all night, twelve hours. My father shook me awake at daybreak and lifted me up onto his shoulders in time to see our young Rising Sun come in at the east windows. Ah—” Something of the ten-year-old’s wonder on that long-past morning glowed on Jouvancy’s face. “It seemed to me that the sun himself had truly danced down into our midst. He did his sarabande down the room, with all the Graces dancing in his train. All around me courtiers were weeping and kneeling. Such a fine dancer he was, a beautiful dancer.” Jouvancy sighed. Then he laughed and returned to the present. “Though you’d never think it to look at him now,” he said, glancing down somewhat complacently at his own trim figure, “because he has become a very fine eater. Not fat, really. Just—ah—solid.”

  In spite of his current feelings about Louis XIV, Charles was moved by this glimpse of the young monarch reclaiming his kingdom. But he still didn’t much want to talk about the king.

  “What is this year’s ballet called, mon père?”

  “ Les Travaux d’Hercules. Hercules represents Louis, of course.”

  Of course. So much for not talking about the king. And these labors of Hercules-Louis would inevitably include revoking the Edict of Nantes and outlawing the Huguenots, because college ballet, like court ballet, referred to real people and events. The people and events were always veiled under layers of allegory and symbol, but recognizable to the educated audience that easily read the code of Greek and Roman heroes and their myths.