The Eloquence of Blood

by Judith Rock

  “The thought has its points,” Charles said dryly. “But it would still be a bit rushed to send the boys from Poland and China home and back again by January second.”

  “Yes, all right. But as things are now, there’s hardly even time for Père Jouvancy to take a group of them down to the school’s country house at Gentilly.” Père Joseph Jouvancy, the renowned senior rhetoric professor, oversaw Charles’s work in the college, both his teaching and his ballet production.

  Charles shuddered. “He told me they’ll walk to Gentilly after Mass tomorrow. As cold as it is! A great Christmas treat, he called it. He can’t wait. Unbelievable.”

  “Gentilly is a bare few miles away, but even that little promenade will be rushed, because they’ll walk back again on Holy Innocents.” The Feast of the Holy Innocents on December twenty-eighth commemorated King Herod’s massacre of boy babies when he tried to find and kill the newborn Jesus.

  “But, mon père, we tell them that keeping them on college property protects them from worldly temptations. Are you denying that argument?” Charles’s eyes were wide and blue with feigned dismay.

  “Logic.” Damiot snorted in disgust. “That’s the other worst thing about you rhetoricians. Besides that, nothing could protect some of our—oof!” He ducked as the wind blew a clot of snow off a gargoyle leering down at them from the church of Saint-Séverin. “I’ll tell you one thing, sending them home would save the school money. Judging from the belt tightening we’ve been doing lately, surely that would be welcome.”

  Charles grunted agreement. “I’ve heard we have a bequest coming, though.”

  “So I’ve heard, too. If it’s true, it’s not before time—I never want to see another bowl of bean pottage! On the other hand,” Damiot added ruefully, “Saint Ignatius did say we should live like the poor.”

  “Saint Ignatius was a saint, after all . . .”

  They melted into the gloom of the Petit Châtelet, the fortress entrance of the bridge called the Petit Pont, at the end of the rue St. Jacques. When they emerged onto the bridge, its tall stone houses somewhat sheltered them from the wind. But the bridge road was all too short. On the Right Bank, the wind seemed to blow even colder than on the Left, and they grabbed their wide-brimmed, flat-crowned black hats and gave up talking in favor of simply getting where they were going.

  The church of St. Louis, just beyond St. Catherine’s well on the rue St. Antoine, was an Italian oratorio of a building in pale stone. As they started up the church steps, the setting sun burned a rent in the clouds and stained the columned front with red. The door beneath the pediment’s big gold and blue clock burst open and Père Jean Pinette, rector of the Jesuit Professed House beside the church, came out onto the porch. Impatience was visible in every line of him. Charles bit his lip to keep his countenance, thinking that Pinette’s pale bony face and red-rimmed eyes made him look like an evil-tempered rabbit. His nose even twitched as it started to drip in the cold air.

  “Get inside, you’re late.” Pinette swiped at his nose and stared in the direction Charles and Damiot had come from. “At last, thank the Blessed Virgin!” The sound of running feet behind them made Charles and Damiot turn to see a long-legged novice flying toward the steps, red cheeked from the cold.

  “They are coming, Père Pinette!”

  “Walk decently! Go and get the torches. I don’t know how you’ll keep them alight in this wind, but see that you do!”

  Pinette chivied Charles and Damiot into the church, where three hundred other shivering Jesuits stood facing the door. They represented the three Paris houses of the Society of Jesus: the Professed House here beside St. Louis, the college of Louis le Grand, and the Paris Novice House. Charles and Damiot, last to arrive from Louis le Grand, started meekly toward the back row, but Pinette hissed, “No time!” and pushed them into the row just inside the doors. As they fumbled under their cloaks for their three-pronged ceremonial hats called bonnets, Pinette’s voice boomed through the nave.

  “Nearly here, be ready!”

  The gathered Jesuits stopped hugging themselves for warmth, straightened their bonnets, and stood as though carved from black stone. Like soldiers, Charles thought, ducking aside to put his outdoor hat and Damiot’s out of the way behind a statue of St. Ignatius. Ignatius, ex-soldier and courtier, founder of the Society of Jesus, had thought of his Jesuits as stalwart and obedient soldiers. That was part of what had attracted Charles, an ex-soldier himself, to the Society. After seven years, though, the soldier image was no longer one of the things he cherished about being a Jesuit. And obedience was his greatest stumbling block.

  With a rueful quirk of his wide mobile mouth, Charles resumed his place in this soldierly gathering of men to honor France’s greatest general, the Prince of Condé, who had died on December eleventh. The Great Condé, as he was called, Louis II of Bourbon, was a soul newly reclaimed for Holy Church after a lifetime of freethinking apostasy. Because Jesuits had helped return him to the fold, he had left them the great gift they were assembled to receive. This was only the ceremonial reception of the gift, though. Its interment in the wall behind the high altar would be in April, to give time for the writing of new music for the funeral Mass and the creation of elaborate church decor for the occasion.

  The Professed House rector raked a last sharp look over his troops and barked, “Doors!”

  Novices hauled the church’s great doors open wide, and Pinette went out to stand at the edge of the porch. The first row of Jesuits filed out past him and stood one on the end of each step. Charles was on the bottom step in the wind’s path, holding his bonnet on with one hand. Damiot was just above him. From the alley at the side of the church, four novices came with flaring, spitting torches. Two stopped at street level and two climbed to stand wide apart just below Pinette.

  The sound of slowly rolling carriage wheels, the rattle of harness, and the slow beat of scores of hooves drew all eyes to the west. Along the street, people hurrying to get out of the early-evening cold stopped and crossed themselves, and the men took off their hats. Black and slow under the last slash of crimson in the clouds of Christmas Eve’s sunset, the Great Condé’s procession came. The first riders passed St. Catherine’s well, a score of black-caparisoned horses carrying noblemen so blackly clad they were only white faces in the dusk. Behind them rolled two black-plumed carriages, the first with the heraldic arms of the Bishop of Autun, the second with those of the Prince of Condé. Behind the carriages rode yet more men-at-arms. The first carriage drew up at the church steps and a lackey sprang down to lower the carriage step and open the door. Two clerics emerged and together helped a slow-moving mass of sable and silver to descend. The Bishop of Autun stood stiffly upright and straightened his mitre as one of his attendants pulled the episcopal crozier from the carriage. The second carriage disgorged three more clerics, one of them bearing a small box of pale gold. They paced gravely to their bishop, and the box bearer set his burden on the bishop’s upturned, black-gloved palms.

  The bishop mounted the stairs, one cleric going before him with his crozier, the other four coming behind. Jewels on the gleaming box flashed red, blue, and green in the torchlight. Père Pinette bowed deeply to the bishop and kissed his ring. In clouds of silver frost, the bishop spoke and Pinette replied. Then Pinette received the box, which held the Great Condé’s mummified heart, and the bishop gave his blessing. From their places on the steps and inside the church, the Jesuits began a sonorous Te Deum. The bishop descended majestically down the church steps, back to his carriage.

  “Allez, allez, mon cher évêque,” Charles thought toward the bishop behind his singing. “Achieve your carriage and get us out of this wind, or you’ll send us all to join the Condé before our time!”

  But the bishop, warm in his sable, knew good liturgical theatre when he met it, and he paced solemnly on. When the episcopal posterior finally disappeared and the carriage door was shut, Pinette turned with equal majesty and bore the box into St. Louis, toward the gate
d altar where it would stay until its April interment behind the high altar. Still singing, the Jesuits who had stood on the steps followed him in double file, trying not to shove each other to get out of the wind. Those in the nave parted neatly before Pinette and his burden, allowed those who had been outside to pass, then closed behind them in procession toward the gated side altar bright with wax candles and covered with cloth of gold.

  The twinkling box had almost reached its temporary resting place among the side altar’s blazing candles when a man reared, bellowing, out of the shadows. He launched himself at Pinette, the singing shattered into chaos, and the box went bouncing end over end into the darkness, clanging on the stone floor like an out-of-tune bell.

  Charles lunged for the attacker, saw that Damiot and others were already grabbing him, and instead changed course to go after the box. He prayed that it hadn’t broken open. Or, if it had, that he wouldn’t step on its contents. His first prayer went unanswered. A faint whiff of death overlaid with spices led him toward the side wall. A fast-thinking novice brought a torch, whose light showed them the box lying open on its side. A little way beyond the gleam of its sapphires and rubies lay a misshapen thing the size of a large apple, tightly wrapped in dull gold silk. As Charles bent to pick it up, the attacker broke partly free of his captors and limped a few steps toward the box. He was old, wild haired, and dirty, and his seamed face was twisted with hatred.

  “Your box is full of nothing!” he screamed, pointing a shaking finger at the lump in Charles’s hand. “That’s no human heart! That’s a cold clod of filth; the thrice-damned Prince of Condé had no heart!”

  In the stunned silence that closed around the words, a dark, slender young man—almost a boy still—threw himself to his knees in front of the Professed House rector. His brown breeches and coat were worn, and his hands were blue with cold as he clutched at Pinette’s cassock.

  “Mon père, I beg you, forgive him, let him go! He is old and his brains are weak, he does not know what he does!”

  “He does violence and blasphemy!” Pinette jerked his cassock skirt out of the youth’s fingers. His hard stare shifted from the young man to the old one. “Who is he? What are the two of you doing here?”

  “He is no one, I swear it!”The boy was shaking with fear. “We only—we only came inside because we were cold, mon père.”

  The stone walls caught and magnified the frightened whisper. “Cold, cold, cold . . .” Pinette seemed to be choking on what he wanted to say. A muscle jumped in his jaw and his lips were a thin bloodless line. Charles hoped he would remember that Jesus’ mother had also been poor and sought refuge from the cold one Christmas Eve . . .

  “Get out,” Pinette said through his teeth. “Stay out. If I find either of you here again, I will turn you over to the commissaire . Go!”

  The youth scrambled to his feet, and Damiot and another Jesuit escorted him and the muttering old man to the nearest door. The old man twisted in their hands and looked back, his eyes glittering with rage.

  “Hypocrite!” He spat at Pinette, barely missing Damiot. “You’re like him, priest, coldhearted as the devils in hell! You’ll be dead and rot like him, too!”

  Pinette turned a deaf ear, drew himself up, and faced his men. “Arrange yourselves!”

  The lines re-formed. Charles put the swaddled heart back into its lead-lined nest, closed the lid on it, and bore it as decorously as he could to Pinette. Pinette took it, they bowed to each other, and someone started the Te Deum again. Exchanging silent, sidelong looks, the singing Jesuits paced the rest of the short distance. Reverently, Pinette carried the silver gilt box through the open gate of the candlelit side altar and placed it on the glowing cloth of gold. After prayers of thanksgiving and a dismissal blessing, the Jesuits bowed and went silently out of the church to the duties and joys of Christmas. But when they reached the walkway to the Professed House and the steps of St. Louis, the air grew sibilant with outraged whispers about the disrupted ceremony. Inside the church, the sacristan locked the altar gate, pocketed the key, and hurried to contribute his own morsel to the indignant talk, leaving the heart of the Great Condé, Prince of the Blood, to await the spring and its final resting place.

  Chapter 2

  ST. STEPHEN’S DAY, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26

  The Feast of Christmas passed in Masses, a modest but welcome feast, and equally welcome rest. When the five o’clock rising bell clanged through the winter darkness the next morning, it pulled Charles from dreams of home and warmth. He forced himself out of bed, shivering in his long white linen shirt and the black knee-length underpants and stockings he’d taken to wearing night and day in the cold. He felt his way into his shoes, easy to do in the dark since they had no right and left, and twitched his woolen cassock down from its old-fashioned hanging rail. Thrusting his arms into its narrow sleeves, he pulled it on over his underclothes and tied the black cloth belt around his waist in the regulation knot. By feel, he pulled a narrow edge of shirt cuff and neckband to show white at neck and sleeve against the cassock’s black, retrieved his cloak from its night duty as an extra blanket, and draped it around his shoulders. Then he knelt at his prie-dieu for the required hour of meditation.

  He said the Hours of Our Lady, added prayers for particular people, and finished, as always, with fervent prayers for the safety and well-being of his Huguenot cousin Pernelle and her little girl Lucie, living now in Geneva. Some of his brother Jesuits might have censored his prayers for Protestants—called Huguenots in France—unless he was praying for their conversion. But St. Ignatius had founded the Society of Jesus “to help souls,” and Charles sheltered his prayers under that wide rubric. When he reached his “amen,” he rose resolutely from the prie-dieu, refusing to stay there with the images of Pernelle that rose in his mind. It being still too dark to see the little painting of the Virgin and Child on the wall in front of him, he took his candle into the passageway. Listening to the faint morning sounds from other chambers, he lit the candle from the night lantern on the stair landing and hurried back to his own door, shielding the spark of warmth with his hand.

  His chamber and tiny adjoining study were on the third floor of Louis le Grand’s main building, whose tall double doors were the college’s public entrance. The ground floor, which also housed the most important administrative offices, offered a few traces of elegance with its carpets and paintings, but Charles’s rooms were anything but stylish. The white walls were roughly plastered and the low ceiling was crossed with massive beams. Besides the prie-dieu and his little painting of the Virgin and Child, Charles’s sleeping chamber held a narrow uncurtained bed with a painted crucifix at its foot, a single chair without a cushion, and an old-fashioned, age-blackened wooden chest. Everything in the chest, except for his two extra shirts, was black: an extra pair of underpants, two extra pairs of stockings, a skullcap, and a pair of breeches for wearing under his cassock when activities like riding or directing ballet rehearsals threatened modesty.

  The work of scholastics differed, and Charles spent more time as assistant rhetoric teacher than he did studying. Rhetoric was the art of communication, and because Jesuits believed that the body should be as eloquent in the service of God and virtue as the voice, rhetoric teachers produced plays and ballets in which their students acted and danced.

  The only other things in Charles’s sleeping chamber were two hooks beside the hanging rail, and two niches in the thick plaster walls. The hooks held his two black hats. The flat-crowned, wide-brimmed one was his outdoor hat, and the brimless bonnet with its three corners, or points, was usually worn only indoors, on ceremonial occasions like the one for the Condé on Christmas Eve. The niche over the clothing chest held several books, and the one at the foot of his bed held his mother’s New Year’s gift, a small Pietà—the Virgin cradling her dead Son—carved in black stone. Eventually, it would be put where others could see it, but for now, he was allowed to keep it in his chamber.

  In the study, another painted cruc
ifix hung over a large scarred table that served as Charles’s desk. The chair had a hard red seat cushion, and a small frayed piece of brown rug kept his feet off the cold wood floor. Like most rooms in the college, chamber and study were unheated. The rector and a few others sometimes had a brazier in chamber or office, but only the kitchens, the infirmary, the fathers’ small refectory, and the common warming room—the calefactory—had fireplaces. There were also fireplaces in a few large chambers in the student court, but those were strictly reserved for noble or very wealthy boys. Otherwise, the assumption was that a cold and solitary body made for warm devotions, and that in large gathering places, so many bodies crowded together made heat enough.

  Shivering in spite of his cloak, Charles broke the skim of ice on the water that had stood overnight in a tall copper jug. One of his eccentricities was that he liked to be clean. To most people, “clean” meant wearing a clean white linen shirt or chemise. But to Charles, it meant using water—even soap. Though he had to admit that he was washing less in this winter weather. Last summer, when he’d first come here, lay brothers had brought water to his chambers most mornings, sometimes even warm water, but this autumn, the rector had stopped that small luxury. Money was unexpectedly short, and the lay brothers—who cleaned, cooked, marketed, ran the infirmary, and also took care of many of the college’s mundane interactions with the outside world—were spread thinner because no new brothers could be accepted until college finances improved.

  Charles wiped his teeth with a linen rag dipped in the little pot of tooth cleaner he kept. He didn’t shave, because his confessor had taken his shaving mirror and ordered him to go to the college barber like everyone else. Charles missed the mirror. Not from vanity—he didn’t mind going stubble-jawed half the time, nor did he want to look at himself. But the little mirror’s greenish glass had made everything look mysteriously under water, and he’d found that being reminded of mystery, even in the mundane act of shaving, had been a good part of the day’s beginning.