The Rhetoric of Death Read online

  “Is the ballet your creation, Père Jouvancy?”

  “The livret, yes.” The priest picked up the blond wig from his desk and draped it on his fist. It looked like it had caught mange from someone’s lap dog. He frowned at it and looked at Charles’s thick, springy hair. “Nearly a match,” he murmured.

  Charles involuntarily pressed his skullcap more firmly onto his head with his left hand and winced as his old shoulder wound twinged. Yesterday’s wet, cold hours in the saddle had taken their toll.

  “Are you hurt, Maître du Luc?”

  “Just an old war souvenir, mon père.”

  Jouvancy studied him with a gravity Charles had not seen until now. “Where were you wounded?”

  “At the battle of St. Omer.”

  “Ah, the Spanish Netherlands. Perhaps, then, you’ve come to this life as our St. Ignatius did?”

  “In a small way, mon père. As I am a much smaller man. In the year when I was recovering, someone gave me the story of his life to read and—well—here I am.” Wanting to turn the conversation, he said, “Who is dancing the role of Hercules?”

  “Philippe Douté,” Jouvancy said, with a worried sigh. “Our best dancer, who has longed for the starring role in the ballet since he was in the little boys’ grammar class. But, I don’t know why, lately he has not been as attentive as he should be. And last Friday he was so preoccupied and almost discourteous that Beauchamps threatened to replace him, even at this last minute.” The rhetoric professor picked up a wide, feathered hat, put it on the blond wig, and studied the effect. The mange still showed. “Which I truly pray does not happen, because this is Philippe’s last year, and he is a bright, good boy, one of our best. He is also my nephew, I should tell you, so I am not unbiased. But even though he is presently as secretive and sullen as a thwarted courtier, he is a talented dancer and a good scholar. Ah, well, sixteen is a terrible age, all teachers know that.” He smiled at Charles. “Especially those, like you, who are not so very far from it.”

  “Twelve years from sixteen, mon père,” Charles said, trying not to let his irritation make him sound as young as Jouvancy was making him out to be. In spite of his impressive size, people often thought him younger than he was. He supposed the time would come when he would enjoy that, but it had not come yet.

  “Oh, I am not impugning your maturity, Maître du Luc,” Jouvancy said earnestly. “Far from it.” He considered Charles gravely. “I suppose it is your—enthusiasm, I must call it—the impression you give of throwing yourself into things, that makes one think of you as younger than you are.” He eyed Charles for a moment. “As I watched you last night at your supper, I found myself thinking what a bad courtier you would make.”

  Panic lurched in Charles’s stomach. Jouvancy was all too shrewd, and Charles could ill afford to be as transparent as the rhetoric master seemed to find him.

  “Or what a good actor, perhaps?” he suggested lightly.

  Jouvancy blinked. “Well, yes, that, too, I suppose. But I hope you were not acting and that you are indeed glad to be with us.”

  “Assuredly I am glad, mon père! Glad and grateful. I was merely pointing out another way to read the evidence—always a danger of being devoted to rhetorical logic, don’t you find?”

  “Yes, true, there is that.”

  He tried the hat on the brunette wig and Charles watched in silence, giving the tension he had created a moment to settle. Then he asked what tragedy they were playing with the ballet.

  “Clovis—the Frankish king, you know. Though the tragedy seems hardly to matter these days, now that men use their Latin so little, once they leave school. And most women, of course, never learn any.” Jouvancy’s jaw set stubbornly. “But our syllabus requires Latin drama. And—” He stabbed the air with his wig-draped fist and the hat cocked itself at a rakish angle. “—the audience must sit through the Latin if they want to see the ballet, since we have the good sense to alternate the tragedy acts with the ballet parts. And, of course, Clovis has some good swordplay. That always helps hold their interest.”

  “Is this Clovis one of yours?”

  Jouvancy nodded proudly.

  “I look forward to it,” Charles said sincerely. Europe’s vernacular languages might be shouldering Latin aside in many areas of modern life, but Jouvancy’s elegant tragedies were still in demand by rhetoric masters throughout the Jesuit college system. Which pleased Charles deeply, since he loved Latin for itself and the rhetoric master’s Latin was exquisite.

  “You’ll be sick of play and ballet both before August the seventh,” Jouvancy said, but his brown eyes danced. “To work, then, while your enthusiasm lasts, Maître du Luc!” He draped the wig over the sugar cone and opened the ballet livre.

  Chapter 4

  A bell clanged, and Charles looked up hopefully from the livret in his lap. He’d had more than enough of Hercules-Louis’s anti-Huguenot labors.

  “ . . . And then,” Père Jouvancy prattled on happily, “the ballet’s fourth and final part.” Ballets had parts and entrées where plays had acts and scenes. “The crown of everything that has gone before! This part’s first entrée has Hercules throwing down the giants trying to scale heaven—a compliment to Louis’s piety in destroying the Huguenots, of course. In the second entrée, Hercules razes Troy—that is Louis destroying the nests of heresy. Huguenot churches,” he added helpfully, as though Charles might not get it.

  Charles kept his eyes on the livret and said nothing.

  “And the third entrée—Hercules helping Atlas hold up heaven—that is Louis defending true religion. And then the last entrée and the best!” Jouvancy’s face was as gleeful as a rule-breaking boy’s. “We have a new machine for that one. It’s a seven-headed Hydra representing the Huguenots’ false religion, and the Opera workmen have made it wonderfully dragonish and horrible! Hercules defeats the monster and sends it back to hell, as our crowning compliment to the king and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes!” Fortunately for Charles, Jouvancy rushed on without waiting for a reaction. “Then comes the tragedy’s last act and the ballet’s grand finale—with both casts onstage, of course. And after that, we have the dear old philosopher Diogenes—that’s Père Montville—descending from the heavens with his lantern. If that cloud machine can be stopped from creaking like the gates of hell! Diogenes brings the boys receiving the laurel crowns and the rest of the prizes onto the stage. And then, grace au bon Dieu, we can all breathe!” He threw himself back in his chair and beamed at Charles. “But we cannot breathe yet, because that was the warning bell for afternoon classes. We must hurry.”

  He started for the door and Charles got slowly to his feet, staring at the livret in his hand.

  “Maître du Luc? Is something wrong?”

  “No. That is—I beg your pardon, mon père, I was just thinking.” He put the livret on the desk and joined Jouvancy at the door.

  “Of what?”

  Charles dredged up a smile. “Of what we are readying for the stage.”

  “I am glad to see you take it so seriously! Avaunt, then, into the lists!”

  He plunged down the stairs. Charles followed, thinking that, in spite of his distaste for the strident allegory of both ballet and tragedy, he couldn’t hold the little priest’s enthusiasm against him. He suspected that, for Jouvancy, the stage and the doings of heroes were often more real than the world beyond the college walls. The rhetoric master seemed to see the Edict of Nantes’s revocation the same way he saw Hercules’s labors: as a heroic story ripe for stage effects.

  Outside in the courtyard, the students had put away their games and were scattering to classes. Jouvancy caught up with a group of older boys and shepherded them briskly toward the rhetoric classroom Montville had pointed out earlier. Feeling his mouth go dry, as though he were once more a student dancer about to step onstage, Charles followed in their wake.

  “Your new realm, Maître du Luc,” Jouvancy said over his shoulder, as they went into the weathered stone building and
turned left into the classroom. The big room had the usual beamed ceiling and plain plastered walls, but its tall, small-paned windows flooded it with the day’s sunless light. The students were taking battered plumed hats from pegs along one wall and hanging up their black gowns. In shirts and breeches, and wearing the oddly shabby hats, they took their places on rows of benches. Charles followed Jouvancy to the small dais, eyeing the dusty tapestry in somber browns and greens that hung behind it. The tapestry showed Socrates forced to drink hemlock by his enemies. Feeling the thirty or so pairs of assessing eyes on his back, Charles wondered if drinking hemlock might be easier than facing new students. His heart was thumping and his mouth was still as dry as the morning’s bread. But this happened every time he faced a new class, and he concentrated on gathering spit in his mouth, so he could talk when the moment came.

  “Bon courage,” Jouvancy murmured to Charles with a knowing grin and took his place behind the oak lectern.

  Charles sat down in one of the platform’s two carved oak chairs, but before Jouvancy could begin speaking, a boy of sixteen or so raced in. As he peeled off his gown, Charles recognized him as the boy who’d stopped to watch the lay brother’s juggling before dinner. Tall and slim in his black breeches and a bright yellow silk shirt, the boy grabbed a hat and slid onto a bench, seemingly impervious to the tense silence. His fellows looked studiously straight ahead. Jouvancy fixed the boy with a long, quelling stare but, to Charles’s surprise, no interrogation followed.

  “Let us stand and pray, messieurs,” Jouvancy said, releasing Yellow Shirt from his scrutiny.

  Jouvancy commended their enterprise to God and the boys crossed themselves, put their hats back on, and sat down. The rhetoric master beamed at them.

  “I have now the very great pleasure of presenting my new assistant and your new professor,” he said. “The learned young chevalier of rhetoric, and sometime chevalier of arms, just like our dear St. Ignatius: Maître Charles du Luc.”

  Charles went to the lectern and the students rose. As one, they swept off their hats and executed a beautiful ensemble bow. Charles gave them a lesser bow, as his age and ecclesiastical status dictated, though he was sorry he had no hat to flourish, skullcaps being socially useless. The boys ceremoniously replaced their hats and resumed their seats. Once seated, though, they surprised Charles by plucking the old hats off again and stuffing them under the benches.

  “I thank you for your most courteous welcome, messieurs,” he said, smiling at them. “I am lately come from the Society’s college at Carpentras, where I taught rhetoric and produced ballets and plays. I am most honored to be at Louis le Grand and I trust that our association will be both a pleasant and a profitable one. I know that Père Jouvancy holds you to the highest standard, in the rhetoric of the body as in the rhetoric of words. I, too, shall hold you to that standard.”

  He stepped back and Jouvancy took his place.

  “Two weeks.” Jouvancy glowered over the lectern at the rows of boys. “Two more weeks to put a perfect Clovis and a perfect Hercules on our stage. Both of which are now, as you too well know, as far from perfection as the east is from the west.” His gaze settled on Yellow Shirt. “And so, from this day, you will work like demons. Or I will personally flay you alive.”

  Yellow Shirt stared at the floor, but most of Jouvancy’s audience traded sideways looks. Some of the faces were bright with upwelling laughter, but some wore startled frowns. A few boys crossed themselves.

  “Oh, for the bon Dieu’s sweet sake, that was a simile!” Jouvancy barked. “A figure of speech! This is a senior rhetoric class and you cannot even recognize a figure of speech?”

  A pink-cheeked boy of fifteen or so, with guileless blue eyes and a thatch of straight brown hair like a roof, put up his hand.

  “Yes, Monsieur Beauclaire?” Jouvancy said, still glaring at the students.

  “Mon père, would you not rather have us work like angels? That would also be a simile.”

  Snorts of laughter broke out and turned instantly into bouts of coughing.

  “I suspect that angels take things a good deal easier than their infernal counterparts, Monsieur Beauclaire.” Jouvancy’s eyes were dancing now, but his expression was professorially sober. “Being sure of divine grace, you understand.”

  The class nodded as solemnly as a college of Cardinals. Charles grinned broadly, and Jouvancy dusted his hands together as though he and Beauclaire had clarified the theological problems of the age.

  “Now,” he said briskly. “The cast of Clovis here in front of the dais and mark out your stage. Bring your scripts. Labors cast, speakers as well as dancers, mark your stage there against the windows.”

  The students exploded in a whirlwind of movement. Benches were stacked and pushed against walls, tragedy scripts flew from piles on a side table, and the students sorted themselves into their places. The shabby condition of the hats explained itself as Charles counted fifteen ballet cast members, including Yellow Shirt, scattering the hats along invisible lines to mark out a stage with the long open windows as its back wall. Jouvancy thrust a ballet livret into Charles’s hands.

  “Make the speakers say their lines, and the dancers walk their floor patterns.”

  Charles nodded. Floor pattern, the path a dancer traced on the stage, was as much part of a dance as the steps. And that it be accurate was doubly important, given all the singers, speakers, scenery, and machines with whom dancers usually shared the stage.

  “No steps,” Jouvancy said, “floor patterns only. Their spacing needs work. And see that they come readily on their cues. M. Beauchamps will rehearse the steps and music when he comes. Those waiting for a cue,” he said, raising his voice, “stand in your correct place and no talking. Anyone playing the fool, Maître du Luc will bring to me for flaying.”

  He flashed Charles a smile and hurried away to the actors at the other end of the room, obviously in his element. Clutching his livret, Charles advanced on the ballet cast, thinking that Louis’s court was probably a more forgiving audience than this wary huddle of teenaged boys. He remembered only too well how it felt to face a new professor, an unknown quantity who could make life miserable if he chose. He stopped in front of them.

  “You began rehearsing this ballet in May, I understand, messieurs. And I have only this morning read the livret. May I rely on you to help me catch up?”

  To his relief, most of them nodded. The irrepressible boy with the thatched head stepped forward.

  “Yes, Monsieur Beauclaire?”

  “Is it true, maître, that you were a soldier?” Beauclaire glanced toward Jouvancy at the front of the room and lowered his voice. “A real one, I mean. Not just a church soldier.”

  Charles balanced for a moment on the horns of that dilemma and, in the interests of getting on with the rehearsal, took the easy way out.

  “I fought in the Spanish Netherlands, yes.”

  Enthralled, the boys crowded closer and questions poured out.

  “Were you a mousquetaire? Did you have a sword? Were you wounded?”

  “Yes to all three. But I am a truer soldier now, you know.” He said it because he was expected to say it, and because thinking of himself like that had been part of wanting to be a Jesuit. The soldier image had always hovered over the Society of Jesus, founded as it had been by an ex-soldier. But that image was irreparably tarnished for Charles now, and the word “soldier” coupled with religion made him cringe.

  “How were you wounded?” someone said. “Didn’t you have armor?”

  “Mousquetaires don’t wear armor,” Beauclaire said loftily. “My brother is a mousquetaire.” He frowned consideringly. “Maître du Luc, I see a fault of logic. Weapons are forbidden in the college, of course, but the church kills heretics. So why should you not be able to still carry your musket and sword when you go outside the college?”

  Remembering tales of the armed and armored processions of Paris clerics during the Wars of Religion, Charles mentally awarded Beauclaire a
n “alpha” for logic. But he held up a restraining hand, glad for once for the rule that only questions relevant to the class should be discussed.

  “You pose an interesting and important question, Monsieur Beauclaire. Our task, though, is to rehearse this ballet. You might not mind being flayed alive by Père Jouvancy, but I would, especially on my first day. So let us turn to Hercules and his labors. We will start with the prologue. Who speaks it?”

  A gangling boy with fine reddish hair stepped forward, stumbled over his feet, and was saved by another boy grabbing the back of his shirt.

  “I’m clumsy, me,” the stumbler said equably over the chorus of laughter. He pushed his white linen shirt back into his breeches. “That’s why I only get to talk, maître.”

  His voice was a beautiful light tenor. Past cracking, Charles hoped.

  “And your name?”

  “Jacques Douté, maître.” He bowed too low and Charles put out an arm to keep him on his feet.

  “Let us hear you then, Monsieur Douté. The rest of you, take your places, wherever you are when the ballet begins. Who is Hercules?”

  Yellow Shirt, staring out a window as though Charles were not there, held up a languid hand.

  “Step forward, please, monsieur,” Charles said crisply. “You are?”

  Charles had deduced the boy’s name. But he wasn’t about to ignore more rudeness, Jouvancy’s nephew or not. With an elaborate sigh, Yellow Shirt turned from the window.

  “I am Philippe Douté.”

  Charles locked eyes with the boy and raised an eyebrow, waiting for the expected and courteous “maître.” When it was grudgingly given, he said, “You and Monsieur Jacques Douté are brothers?”

  “Cousins, maître,” Jacques said brightly, when Philippe didn’t answer. “But Père Jouvancy is only Philippe’s uncle, not mine. His mother was Père Jouvancy’s sister, you see, and so—”

  “Thank you.” Charles held up a hand to stem the tide of family history. “We will hope that Monsieur Philippe Douté dances more generously than he speaks. If Monsieur Jacques Douté gets through his speech without mistakes, we will continue with the first entrée, but without steps or music. You will enter promptly on your cue, walk the floor pattern of your dance briskly, paying particular attention to your spacing with regard to your fellow dancers, and exit. Entendu?”