The Rhetoric of Death Page 6

  The boys nodded that they understood and withdrew from the hat-defined stage. Jacques Douté took his place in what would eventually be a wing, downstage of the curtain. When the cast had made a pocket of stillness and silence in the noise of the tragedy rehearsal, Charles banged the end of a bench on the floor three times, signaling the beginning in the best Molière tradition. Jacques Douté tripped twice on his way to the center of the stage’s width, but when he began to speak, it was with the ease and confidence of the great Molière himself. As Charles listened, he wondered if Molière, who had been a day student at Louis le Grand when he was still only little Jean Poquelin, had shown his talent even then and been allowed to act and dance. And if he had gone through a clumsy period, and what his teacher had done to train him out of it. Jacques got through his prologue faultlessly, gestured magnificently to open the invisible curtain, and was nearly run over as the Nemean lion and his suite, Hercules’s first challenge, galloped onstage. The six boys paced at speed through their puzzlelike floor pattern and rushed off. Philippe Douté entered and stalked through his solo’s pattern. The lion ensemble returned and wove energetically around him. Philippe barely looked at them. But whenever he faced upstage, he gazed intently out of the long windows.

  Entrée by entrée and floor pattern by floor pattern, the ballet’s first part ground on. The sullen Hercules/Louis was bearing down on the mythological Hesperides and its golden apples—a political allegory for coveted and prosperous Holland—when Jouvancy clapped his hands and shouted for silence. An elegant man in his fifties, in shoes with red heels and a sky blue coat and breeches, stood in the doorway. With a flourish of his be-ribboned, silver-headed walking stick, he swept off his wide-brimmed beaver hat and bowed. Charles caught his breath as the boys murmured “Bonjour, Maître Beauchamps,” and bowed in return. Jouvancy led the dancing master to Charles and introduced them, Charles managed some awestruck words of greeting and admiration, and there were more bows. Then Pierre Beauchamps surveyed the ballet cast and glanced at Charles’s livret.

  “So we have arrived at the enchanting Hesperides,” he muttered under his breath. “Would that we had, Maître du Luc. Would that we may by the seventh day of August.” He turned to the students. “Very well. The approach to the Hesperides again, messieurs, if you please. Take your places. We begin with Hercules’s solo. With music and steps. Perfect steps.”

  The dancers melted into position. Beauchamps’s thin, stooped manservant, whose long bony face was creased in what looked like a permanent mask of worry, flipped his greasy tail of brown hair over his shoulder and opened a wooden box. He took out a small fiddle, a violon du poche, and dusted it with the skirt of his jacket. Beauchamps took the fiddle, tucked it under his chin, nodded sharply at the dancers, and began to play. All dancing masters were, of necessity, musicians, but Beauchamps was nearly as accomplished a musician as he was a dancer. But the stage remained empty and the music stopped.

  “Philippe Douté!” Beauchamps thundered, looking furiously around the room.

  The cast and Charles looked, too, but Philippe was nowhere to be seen. Heels rapping like hammer blows on the bare wooden floor, Beauchamps strode to an open window and stuck his head out.

  “Philippe! Where are you? Get in here and dance before I use your guts for fiddle strings!”

  “Um—he was by an open window when you came in, Maître Beauchamps,” a small, slight blond boy said. “Looking out. And then—he stepped over the sill while everyone was bowing to you. He went toward the latrine. Perhaps he isn’t feeling well.” The boy put a hand discreetly on his belly.

  The dancing master rolled his eyes at Charles. “Maître du Luc, will you be so good as to see if Hercules is in the privy?”

  Charles was nearly at the door before he realized that he didn’t know where the latrine was, but Jacques Douté caught up with him and pointed to the southeast corner of the courtyard.

  “Through the arch there, on the left behind the screen of rose bushes, Maître du Luc.” The wind whined across the court and whipped Charles’s cassock around his legs. Behind him, the fiddle began again as Beauchamps drove Hercules’s suite to the Hesperides without its leader. Overhead, clouds scudded past in a sky more like November than July. Half hoping that Philippe really was ill rather than playing the fool, Charles hurried through the arch Jacques had pointed out and into a smaller courtyard. Skirting the hedge of old roses, he stopped in the doorway of the long, low, wooden latrine building.

  “Philippe Douté? Are you here? Are you ill?”

  Birds fluttered in and out of the latrine’s low eaves, but nothing else disturbed the dark, malodorous quiet. Charles took a few steps inside and was peering along the row of seats when unseen hands shoved him hard between the shoulders. He crashed to his knees and heard someone pound away across the gravel court. Charles scrambled up. Jouvancy’s nephew or not, he thought grimly, this time Philippe Douté would get what was coming to him. A flash of yellow disappeared through a second narrow arch, and Charles followed it into a yet smaller courtyard, which was empty and surrounded on three sides by outbuildings. Its fourth side was a high wall with a wooden gate. The sound of running feet was loud beyond it.

  “Philippe! Don’t be an idiot, come back!”

  The gate was locked. Cursing his old wound, Charles jumped for the top of the wall, hauled himself up with his good arm until he could get a leg over, and dropped into the narrow cobbled way that ran behind the college. The boy was out of sight, but his running echoed between the walls that hemmed both sides of the lane. Charles’s long legs ate up the distance. And where the lane turned sharply left, he caught another flash of yellow and a glimpse of black hair. He put on a burst of speed and emerged into the rue St. Jacques, only to flatten himself against a building as a carriage flew past inches from his nose. Dodging the end of a ratcatcher’s pole hung with pungent evidence of the catcher’s skill, he darted into the street. A panting, leather-aproned man pushing a bundle-laden handcart stopped beside him and lowered the cart’s handles to the ground for a rest. Intent on the hunt, Charles vaulted onto the cart so he could see over the crowd.

  “What are you doing, you crazy priest?” The man pulled angrily on Charles’s cassock. “Get off my cart!”

  Charles overbalanced and landed in a passing group of students wearing short scholar’s gowns. “Did you see a boy in a yellow shirt run past just now?” he asked breathlessly.

  Smiling unpleasantly, the students closed around him and looked him insolently up and down. Charles added the short gowns to the hostile faces and came up with the unwelcome answer that these were University of Paris students. Though new to the city, he was well aware that its university hated Jesuits in general and Louis le Grand in particular, deploring its influence, its progressive humanist theology, its modern teaching methods, its ballet and drama. Most of all, the university hated the Jesuit college’s enjoyment of so much tantalizing property just across the street.

  “Why do you want this boy in a yellow shirt, Jesuit?” one of the students drawled, recognizing the distinctive Jesuit cassock, which wrapped to the side instead of buttoning. “Good luck to him, he’s well away from your lies.”

  “And what are you doing out without your priest hat?” another taunted.

  Charles whirled as the second speaker plucked off his skullcap from behind and tossed it to one of his friends, who threw it into the gutter in the middle of the street. Hands twitching with the urge to thrash the lot of them, Charles planted his feet and locked eyes with each boy in turn. They seemed to register his height and breadth of shoulder for the first time and drew closer together.

  “Perhaps you didn’t hear me, messieurs,” Charles said pleasantly. “Did any of you see a boy in a yellow shirt just now?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Then I thank you for your help, messieurs,” Charles said, sounding as though they were all in someone’s salon and still showing his teeth in what might be taken for a smile by the unwary.<
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  The boys walked quickly away, casting apprehensive glances over their shoulders. Charles went to see if his new skullcap was salvageable. It was true that he shouldn’t be in the street without his hat, but he hadn’t planned on chasing a runaway Hercules out into Paris. Sadly, he surveyed his new skullcap, which rested like a funerary offering on a very dead cat and definitely was not salvageable. He left it where it was and started back to the college, zig-zagging through the traffic and peering down side streets and into shops in case Philippe was hiding somewhere. He guessed, though, that the boy was long gone, absorbed into the melee of the streets.

  The cacophony that was Paris traffic—voices, feet, hooves, rattling wheels, barking dogs—beat against Charles’s ears as he walked. Everyone and everything shared the square-cobbled pavement and shouting matches erupted constantly, everyone being certain that the bon Dieu had put the next open foot of pavement there for him or her alone. Charles wove his way among the high-wheeled, painted carriages, students in short gowns, white-, black-, and brown-robed clerics on foot and on mules, professors lost in private fogs of thought, coiffed and basket-laden serving girls, the scavenging dogs, ragged street porters with loaded wooden carrying frames on their backs, and bewigged gentlemen whose ice-white linen gleamed against the jewel colors of their skirted coats as they swept iron-tipped canes before them to clear a path. Over it all, bawling street vendors cried everything from “brooms, brooms,” to “Portugal, Portugal,” which sounded so warmly exotic but meant shriveled little oranges.

  Charles wondered why on earth Philippe had run. Running away from the college was not a light offense. Nor was shoving a professor to the ground in the process, though now that his temper had cooled, Charles didn’t intend to report that. But even without that black mark, Philippe had almost certainly lost his place in the ballet, if not in the college. Charles had seen him watching the classroom windows before he vanished, seen that his mind was anywhere but on his dancing. Had something—or someone—in the courtyard drawn him away? Jouvancy had said that the boy was bright. But he was also sixteen, and sixteen, whether bright or dull, wasn’t known for its wisdom.

  Charles rang the bell at the college’s small postern door to the right of the formal entrance and then stepped back to look up at the carved and painted tympanum above the tall double doors. When the Jesuits opened their Paris college more than a century ago, they’d called it the College of Clermont. Now the tympanum said “Collegium Magni Ludo,” The College of Louis the Great, and was topped by a crown and the royal fleur de lis, which proclaimed King Louis XIV’s patronage.

  A lay brother opened the postern and Charles hurried through the echoing stone-vaulted passage to the Cour d’honneur, toward the sound of Beauchamps’s violin. The dancing master was still driving the harried, and now heroless, dancers toward the mythical Hesperides. With a sigh for the ephemeral allure of earthly paradises, Charles went to report his failure to find Philippe Douté.

  Chapter 5

  When Charles finally gained the quiet of his chamber that night, he was too tired even to look out the window at Paris. He stripped down to his shirt, fell into bed, and stretched out, past caring whether his feet hung over the edge. He fell asleep between one thought and the next, to dream that he was dancing a gigue while Pernelle played Beauchamps’s little fiddle.

  When he woke, he was curled into a tight ball and the day’s first light was gray around the shutters. He said the waking prayers, yawned his way to the window to open shutters and casement, and leaned out. Across St. Jacques, the dome capping the university’s new church was just visible in the growing light. The air was blessedly mild and birds poured their songs into the early quiet. A sharp rap at the door made him turn reluctantly from the window as Frère Fabre came in, sloshing water out of a pitcher. The brother set the pitcher down, rubbed with his foot at the puddle, and then glared at his wet shoe.

  “Shaving will make you late for Mass.” He squelched out of the room. Charles sighed and mopped up the water, shaved, and cleaned his teeth. He was tying the cincture around his cassock when a second rap on the door was followed immediately by Fabre’s red head. “The Mass bell’s about to go, come on, I’ll show you a short way to the chapel.”

  Charles clapped an old, darned skullcap on his head and followed his self-appointed guide. This main building of the college had once been a grand family hotel, as townhouses were called, the Hôtel au Cour de Langres. Grandeur still lingered on the ground floor, where visitors were received. But in the century and a quarter since the Society had acquired the property, the upper floors had been reconfigured again and again to accommodate the growing college and were now haphazard mazes of small chambers, studies, cramped salons, dead-end passages, and low doorways. Fabre led Charles around corners, up and down inconsequential steps waiting like traps in dark passages, and finally down a last steep flight of stairs to a small door set into a corner.

  The door opened on an echoing dimness and a soft rustling, a sound like homing birds folding their wings, as Jesuits and students gathered. At the chapel’s east end, the high altar gleamed with gold and silver. Where the aisles crossed, a faux dome’s painted angels and saints spilled from a tender blue summer sky, and reached their plump hands down to struggling mortals. Charles loved these joyously painted ceilings, with their message that heaven and earth could touch, that mortals could reach heaven from the earth’s muddy ground. He found a place on the end of a backless bench and settled to the business of opening himself to the Mass.

  When the Mass was over, the rest of the morning’s business claimed him. He followed his colleagues to the small and private fathers’ refectory for bread, cheese, and watered wine set out informally on the dais table. He ate his share standing beside Père Montville and successfully avoided Père Guise. Most of the talk was about Philippe Douté’s flight and continuing absence from the college, and Charles found himself answering a barrage of questions about going after the boy. From there, he went to his morning assignment as assistant in a grammar class on Cicero, where he listened to eleven- and twelve-year-olds translate and corrected their efforts. At the dinner bell, he returned to the refectory to eat undistinguished pea soup and mutton stew, the pleasure of Guise’s absence making up for the blandness of the food. When he arrived in the rhetoric classroom after the recreation hour, he found Père Jouvancy and Maître Beauchamps toe to toe and nose to nose. Jouvancy looked as though he had not slept.

  “You are not listening, mon cher Maître Beauchamps,” Jouvancy snapped. “Even if my nephew comes back—and pray God he does—he will forfeit his place in the ballet. You must find another Hercules.”

  “Another Hercules?” Beauchamps’s widening smile showed little yellow teeth that reminded Charles of a fox’s. “Oh, but of course!” The dancing master gestured at the room, which was filling with boys. “He grows on trees, Hercules. I have only to reach out and pluck him.” He thrust his face even closer to Jouvancy’s. “There is no other Hercules ripening in your little orchard, mon père.”

  “No. There is not. But you were already threatening to replace my poor Philippe because of his behavior. You have a half dozen Opera dancers who could do Hercules in their sleep, even at this late date. Be so good as to choose one and bring him tomorrow.”

  Jouvancy swept away to his actors. Beauchamps ground his teeth, his shoe ribbon bouncing as he tapped one of his beautifully made shoes. With a sinking heart, Charles realized that in the distraction of Philippe’s flight yesterday, he had failed to address the question of the chiming clock headdress. Fortunately, Jouvancy hadn’t yet asked him about it. But now was definitely not the moment to confront the dancing master.

  Jouvancy led everyone in a short and uncharacteristically militant prayer and dismissed them to mark out their practice stages. Armand Beauclaire and Jacques Douté tried to ask him about Philippe, but he waved them away without answering and Charles set them to moving benches. After a brief, tense conference, Beauchamps and Charles
started the cast on the Hesperides section of the ballet, beginning with the ensemble gigue for Hercules’s suite.

  The music began to ripple from Beauchamps’s fiddle and Charles settled on a bench with a ballet livret in his lap, ready to prompt anyone who forgot his entrance and exit cues. The dancing master sawed away, stamping the rhythm on the floor when the dancers lost the beat, and yelling corrections. What Beauchamps was able to pull from the students amazed Charles. As he watched, he thought how lucky he was to live in an age when dancing had reached the very height of perfection. At once lively and dignified, it really was the true expression of the soul, as the best classical principles inherited from the ancient writers directed it should be. Arms, hands, and fingers were held softly curved, arms were never raised above the shoulder, legs never higher than a forty-five degree angle from the hip. Feet in their heeled and ribboned shoes flashed like knives in small, precise steps and jumps. Dancers pirouetted as smoothly as cream pouring from a pitcher, balanced as solidly as statues. When all went well, not the slightest sign of effort showed. Charles sighed with satisfaction.

  Then he frowned and looked down at his own feet. They were twitching, sketching the gigue’s steps as the dancers did them, and he realized that his body was remembering what his mind had long forgotten. Dances and their music were often passed among colleges and reused for different characters in different ballets. Between them, he and the Carpentras ballet master had taught this gigue to a suite of comets a year or so ago, in a ballet about the classical myths behind the names of the constellations. The six dancers in the suite all had the same steps, though their floor patterns differed. Charles had taught the part that Armand Beauclaire, yesterday’s logician with the thatched head, now had. He winced as Beauclaire, an accomplished technician—with, apparently, no ear for music—strayed further and further from the melody.