The Book of Shadows

by James Reese

  The priest’s arrival did not go unnoticed, for his predecessor, recently deceased, had been bloodless and devout; unpopular, that is. And so Louis was welcomed to Q——. His affability, his learning, his looks—suffice to say he was soon the dinner guest of choice among the privileged of Q——. And as easily as he’d accessed the finest dining rooms of Q——, so too did he win his way into the finest boudoirs. Thus did his troubles begin.

  For the priest was a man of appetites and particular tastes. A man “proud to have the courage of his own perversions,” as he was wont to say. True, he’d taken a vow of celibacy, but what of it? No self-respecting cleric gave the vow a second thought once uttered. As Louis said to a mistress on the eve of his ordination, “a promise to perform the impossible is not binding.” Besides, didn’t the Church have troubles enough—the Huguenot rebels, ever-increasing corruption, et cetera? Louis had no fear of the zealots of the Society of Jesus and the Congregation of the Oratory, for he knew much of their own depredations. Why, he reasoned, would the Church bother to delve into the doings, into the metaphorical breaches—or britches—of a simple parish priest? And hadn’t he gotten this far without depriving himself?

  At the age of fourteen he’d been sent off to the Jesuit College of B——. The brothers—famous disciplinarians—taught an elegant Latin, and the latest in optics, geography, mathematics, dramatics, and manners. There, Louis had been caught engaging in “private entertainment.” Threatened that a second offense would lead to expulsion, Louis tried to behave. For a period spanning the four great feasts of the Church, he did not indulge himself. Not overly so. Unreasonable, thought he, for God or man to expect more of him.

  His seventeenth summer was passed at the shore in the company of a bachelor uncle, whose maid, for a halfpenny per lesson, continued the boy’s “education.” With the discovery of women, Louis happily saw the number of his suitors double.

  Sexually, no need of the boy’s went unmet. Spiritually, he believed in his god; less so in the Church proper. Self-satisfaction was his sole creed.

  His contentment, his charms, and his successes bred in the boy a measure of arrogance and he heeded not at all those who warned that such conceit would one day pose a problem. Said he, in later years: “What finer tribute might a man know than to be mistrusted by the stupid for being clever, envied by the inept for making good, loathed by the dull for his wit, by the boors for his breeding, and by the ugly for his successes?”

  …As word spread of the new confessor, the women of Q——discovered sins heretofore unheard of. They grew desperate for pardon. Had he not arrived, these women (and some men, too) would have one day clogged the very Gates of Hell if they’d in fact done half of what they confessed to. Within weeks of his arrival, Father Louis was overworked, satisfied, and very tired.

  Suspicions rose, giving rise in turn to rumors. The seeds of enmity were sown.

  Still, Father Louis carried on. Every Sunday the aisles of St. Pierre were crowded with the desirous and newly devout. And there, in the center of the first pew, sat the Prosecutor of Q——with his wife and child, a girl of fourteen named Madeleine.

  In Q——the seasons turned. It was six, nearly seven months after his arrival in Q——that Father Louis first heard the confession of the Prosecutor’s wife. The Prosecutor had denied his wife at first. Warned by men of his acquaintance, he forbore; finally, in proportion too direct to withstand, his wife withdrew from him. Went cold. The Prosecutor relented: his wife was scheduled for Wednesdays, in the early afternoon.

  One such afternoon, as the confessor came from the Prosecutor’s parlor, closing the double doors behind him while tackling too the brass buttons of his waistcoat, he literally stumbled upon young Madeleine.

  The picture of grace. Long and lithe, with a plait of black hair, pale skin, and warm brown eyes. “Marriageable,” as is said; ripe.

  Louis struck with every weapon in his arsenal. He worked upon Madeleine’s mother, who finally agreed to speak to her husband. Father Louis was right, said she: the girl needed a tutor. Yet again, the Prosecutor relented, and Father Louis began to tutor Madeleine.

  Madeleine de la Mettrie—for that was the girl’s full name, the noble particule, de, purchased long ago, by her father’s father—fell in love. Deeply, as a girl will but once or twice. She lost all sense of self. In her mind, she was one with her lover. Yes, Father Louis became her lover. (Madeleine confessed this as the priest sat silently on the sill.)

  But first there’d been that strange courtship, those first few Friday afternoons sitting side by side in the Prosecutor’s study. It had taken some time, but Louis succeeded in convincing Madame that a chaperone was unnecessary.

  And at first, they did study.

  How Madeleine thrilled at Louis’s threats! He balanced a small riding crop across his knees, slapped it against his thigh each time the girl stumbled over her Ovid. They each of them reveled in the tension. Finally, one day, after Madeleine willfully translated “to stick” as “to prick,” Louis told her to stand and raise high her skirts. She cried. He insisted. She begged, and did as she was told. He slapped the crop, once, crisply, against the upper, inner part of her thigh. Though she’d been wearing stockings (a mistake she’d not make twice), the welt lasted three days. Madeleine cherished it. After that, her Ovid only got worse.

  Their Fridays became Saturdays too, then Mondays, and so on. The Prosecutor protested. His wife began to wonder. Madeleine, for her part, learned Latin and much, much more.

  Soon there was a secret in Q——. A secret that would be nine months in the keeping.

  Madeleine was no longer seen in the streets. Louis, with the cooperation of the family’s cook, passed letters to Madeleine, tiny missives she’d find beneath her morning bowl of porridge or tucked among a basket of plums. He wrote not of love but of need; and he promised to win her release. The priest had to pick through the family’s refuse for Madeleine’s responses, for the cook dared not pass them on more directly than that. Madeleine’s letters told how her father beat her, how he’d made her soak for hours in a bath that was two parts water and one part mustard, a concoction reputed to loose a man’s seed from the womb. Worse was suffered by her mother, whom the Prosecutor accused of the most vile complicity and faithlessness. The letters told how each woman was confined to her room, the windows of which—shuttered from the outside—were chained within. They told how Madeleine’s body was changing, and spoke of her undeniable delight in the growing manifestation of their love. Too, she begged for rescue.

  Publicly, the Prosecutor denied everything. His wife and child had gone to care for a sick relation, said he; he denied their very presence in his house. One night, not long into her captivity, Madeleine’s mother fled, fearing her husband and hating her daughter.

  Then one morning there appeared tacked to the Prosecutor’s door, as to the doors of many shops on the square, and even the church, an “Ode to the Public Prosecutor’s Bastard Grandchild,” to be sung (as it was in all the less reputable pubs) to the tune of “J’ai rencontré un allemend.”

  Something had to be done, and something was.

  The cook was sent away, for the Prosecutor sensed her sympathies; in her stead came an elderly zealot best described as Madeleine’s Keeper, or Wrangler, for she tended to the girl as though she were an unruly animal. She communicated corporally, refusing to speak to “the expectant.” She tugged at Madeleine’s braid if the girl was slow in responding to a directive, issued tersely or with a pointed finger, and she’d stamp her foot to summon the girl, or rap at the kitchen ceiling with a broom when Madeleine was to descend to her daily meal. Yes, one meal daily: of bitter herbs boiled down to gruel; into which went antimony pellets—these, when passed whole, were retrieved from Madeleine’s waste bucket, rinsed, and returned to her gruel in the hope that the resultant purging might loose “the item within” from its hold. Ants’ eggs, too, were stirred into the gruel, for it was known to her that ants’ eggs, if ingested, would undo
a devil pregnancy. And Madeleine was made to soak twice daily in her mustard bath.

  Madeleine wrote letters; but when a passel was discovered by the Prosecutor and returned to her, whole paragraphs drowned in spills of wine-dark ink, she desisted. (In truth, she kept on: she wrote at night, when it was thought she slept, and slipped the letters to priest and progeny into an envelope glued to the bottom of her bureau.)

  As for Father Louis, he’d last seen Madeleine three days before her sudden “disappearance.” Save for the sole time he dared knock at the Prosecutor’s door, he’d not tried to contact the girl. And with the cook’s dismissal, he’d no avenue. So he went about his life. Yes, he heard his private confessions with less ardor than before; and it was whispered that some wind had gone from the priest’s sail, but what was he to do? This he asked of himself and God; receiving no reply, he did nothing.

  Then, five Sundays into Madeleine’s sequestration, Father Louis was attacked as he entered St. Pierre. The Prosecutor paid a laborer ten sous to strike the cleric with a brass-handled cane as he took the first step leading up to the church. Father Louis, cracked across the back of the neck, fell to his knees. The laborer walked away, unpursued.

  This was but the latest and most public offense. There’d been others, quite petty—one involved the dung of the priest’s stolen horse, another featured scrolled scripture tied to thrown rocks—but this was the first assault upon the priest’s person.

  Of course, Father Louis and all of Q——knew the Prosecutor was behind these attacks. What was the priest to do? What would the Prosecutor and his accomplices do next? What were they capable of? Angered by his three-week-long inability to turn his head to the left, the priest struck upon a plan:

  Violence against the person of a priest was sacrilege, blasphemy in action! He would go to the Parliament of Paris, the chancellor, to Louis XIII himself if need be! He would demand justice! Demand that his enemies—and weren’t they, by association, enemies of the Church?—be sought and dealt with severely.

  What’s more, he’d not been to Paris in some time. The change would do him good, he reasoned. True, the trip was long. But Paris held the promise of old friends and new acquaintances, distractions; indeed, he’d heard tell of a woman there, a former circus dancer living near the Pont Neuf, who could, with her tongue, tie…

  So, Louis, having foolishly stated his intentions to too many people, left for Paris.

  The curé’s departure for Paris was just what the Prosecutor and his cabal of coconspirators had hoped for. Their initial attacks against the priest were nothing compared to the counterattack they now launched. And so, as the priest left for Paris, the Prosecutor undertook the much shorter trip to P——to see the bishop.

  The documentation had been prepared weeks prior. Now, with the priest beginning his own legal proceedings in Paris, the Prosecutor could make his case, or rather the village’s case, against the curé. In defense. It was a brilliant plan, and the cabal was proud. Papers were presented to the Promoter of the Officiality, the bishop’s legal representative. Father Louis, pleading his case before the Parliament of Paris, would return to Q——to find himself accused of “having debauched innumerable married women, having ruined five young women of Q——, of being profane and impious, of never reading his breviary, and of fornicating within the precincts of the church.” A lesser priest of St. Pierre was prepared to swear to the truth of the last charge, for he’d seen his superior sporting with a woman on the stony floor of the sacristy, not fifteen paces from the blessed sacrament.

  Father Louis, in resorting to justice, ensured that it would not be served.

  Though his hours in the pulpit had honed his speech, rendered him eloquent, Father Louis failed to make his case before the Parliament of Paris. His charms were nothing against the law, and the assembly was unmoved by his tale of calumnies and conspiracy.

  The Prosecutor fared far better. From his friend the bishop he won the following sentence: the curé was condemned to fast on bread and water every Friday for three months and was forbidden to exercise the sacerdotal functions for five years.

  Louis returned from Paris to learn of the sentence. Nonsense! An outrage! Condemned? In his absence? He would appeal.

  But he soon discovered that he could not appeal, for the Prosecutor had already appealed the sentence: as the bishop and his ecclesiastical judges could only mete out spiritual punishment for such crimes, the Prosecutor had also petitioned the Parliament of Paris, asking the civil magistrates to consider corporal punishment. The appeal—presented at Parliament two days after Father Louis’s failed plea—bore the weighty signature of the Bishop of P——; it asked Parliament to consider “hanging, maiming, branding, or condemnation to the gallows.” (The bishop had been swayed toward severity by the Prosecutor, to whom he owed a favor or two relating to certain indiscretions within his See.)

  The bishop’s sentence stood while the matter went before the Parliament of Paris.

  Louis canceled all confessions and took to his rooms. His thoughts were not of Madeleine but of his friend René Sophier, the Curé of T——, who, just six years prior, had been burned alive, guilty of “spiritual incests and sacrilegious impudicities.” To him, René had been a trusted friend; and indeed, the older man had taught Louis a thing or two. Could it be that the same fate lay in store for him? Impossible! Weren’t the men considering his case—men of the Church and courts—righteous and smart, principled and learned? And hadn’t countless clerics committed acts far worse than his? For what had he done but love as every man should?

  Ten days passed with no word from the Parliament. The good men and women of Q——went unconfessed. It was rumored that the omnipotent Richelieu had taken an interest in the case. Louis thought about leaving Q——. Several of his friends and lovers advised, even begged him to do so, offering to slip him unseen into the Italian hillside, or place him among the peaceable Swiss…. No. He would stay. He would fight.

  Finally, word arrived from Paris: the Parliament wanted proof of the priest’s infidelities.

  The Prosecutor, despite the cabal’s efforts to dissuade him, continued to deny the presence in his home of the pregnant Madeleine. The coming bastard would not be proof. And so, lest the door to his good home be opened, and infamy let in, the Prosecutor dropped his case and the inquiry was ended.

  Without proof, the appeal and all outstanding charges against Father Louis were dismissed and the bishop’s sentence was rescinded. The curé was restored to his office and full duties.

  Ever more impudent, Father Louis returned to the sins of the willing women and men of Q——.

  As for the Prosecutor and the cabal, they would watch, and wait.

  12

  Creatura Ignis: The Cabal

  IT WAS one month later that the Prosecutor duly served notice to the bishop that the case against the curé was to be reopened. A petition bearing the signatures of the fine men and women of Q——(many of whom were dead) was sent to P——. This was not evidentiary; but it was effective. The bishop was bound to respond to the town’s plea in some way. He could not ignore their request, which was for permission to receive the sacrament “from hands other than those, so notoriously impure, of our parish priest.”

  The bishop, deeming his debts to the Prosecutor paid, followed Parliament’s lead: he would do nothing without proof of some sort. And in private correspondence, the bishop stated plainly that “the bastard spawn of a cleric” would not suffice. The bishop would have true proof of the priest’s perfidy—of sacrilege, of devilry, of bewitching, of possession—and he’d have it soon, for he’d not suffer much longer “the distractions of Q——.”

  The cabal accepted the bishop’s challenge, and acted quickly.

  Off the main square of Q——, over the glass-paned door of a large shop, there hung a sign. Into the wood, cut to resemble a pestle, were carved the words M. Adam, Apothecary. Sagging shelves, heavy with jars, lined the walls. Jars full of dark, viscid…things. Fetal sha
pes peered out from within the jars, pale, pickled, seemingly suspended between life and death. Other jars held powders and berries and extracts, all labeled in Latin. Hundreds of herbs, some dried and others fresh. Three flying fish had been pinned to a thin sheet of cork; afternoon sunlight shone on the webs of their outstretched wings, dry and thin as parchment. An alligator, tall as a man, hung upright on a wall. Tortoise shells of sundry size were displayed like armor. There were dried vipers, horses’ hooves, and human bones, either whole or powdered. A sign announced that powdered sapphire and pearl were available, payment due in advance if you please.

  Behind a half-wall at the back of the shop could often be found four men at a round table.

  Present would be the old pharmacist, Monsieur Adam; his nephew, the Public Prosecutor (and Madeleine’s father), tall and bald and stoop-shouldered, with a horrible hook of a nose; dressed in full robes despite the heat would be Canon Mignon, oldest of the men, dry as dust, with tiny ice-blue eyes; and the quietest of the men, Mannoury, the surgeon, would be known by the rings he sported on the small finger of each hand—bands of white gold, inlaid with gems.

  “Mademoiselle Dampierres was in not one week ago,” said Monsieur Adam, the shopkeeper. “She came, as always, in the company of her nurse, and she complained, as always, of the female problem, for which I sold her mugwort.”

  “What is your point, Uncle?”

  “Just this,” came the reply. “The nurse tells me the new confessor takes to the back parlor of Madame de Brou’s, with the lady herself, each Tuesday in the afternoon, and for no less than one hour.”

  “Can the good lady have so much to confess? What crimes could the magistrate’s widow be committing that she needs—?”