The Eloquence of Blood

by Judith Rock

  He started toward the window to open the wooden shutters, then wondered if leaving them closed might keep his rooms warmer. Telling himself that was exactly as likely as the miracle of loaves and fishes happening in the refectory and replacing the omnipresent bean pottage, he opened them in case the sun shone, put on the skullcap he’d gotten permission to wear for warmth, and went to Mass.

  Unlike Benedictines, members of the Society of Jesus were not cloistered and did not pray the canonical hours together. Besides each day’s solitary hour of meditation, they gathered for Mass before scattering to the day’s duties, and twice during the day took time for an examen, the examination of conscience.

  After five months in the college, Charles no longer got lost on his way to the chapel, or tripped over the way’s odd steps and sudden turnings, even in the early-morning dark. The original college buildings had been part of a private hôtel, or townhouse. But in the century and a quarter since the Society of Jesus acquired the property, the old buildings had been reconfigured again and again to accommodate the growing number of students and teachers, and these upper floors were haphazard mazes of small chambers, studies, an occasional cramped salon, dead-end passages, and low doorways. He hurried through narrow passageways, around corners, up and down inconsequential steps waiting like traps, and finally down a last steep flight of stairs to a small door set into a corner.

  The door opened into Louis le Grand’s main chapel, long and high ceilinged. Charles stopped for a moment, as he always did, under the small false dome where the aisles crossed, and looked up at the well-fed angels in their blue sky, reaching down to struggling mortals. He could barely see them as yet in the dim light, but knowing they were there was enough. The side altars, too, were swathed in shadow, and the gallery and its colored glass windows were black. He went to his usual place on one of the backless wooden benches, knelt on the stone floor, and bowed his head onto his clasped hands. All around him, heels tapped over stone, and cassocks, cloaks, and coats rustled as Jesuits, students, and a scattering of people from the neighborhood, especially men who belonged to the college confraternities, arrived and settled. Then the Mass began and Charles gave himself up to the mystery of God.

  After a breakfast of bread, a little cheese, and leftover soup, eaten standing in the fathers’ refectory and as near the fireplace as possible, Charles walked back through the archway between the fathers’ courtyard and the students’ court, thinking about the day before him. His first task was calling on Monsieur Edmé Callot, an elderly member of Louis le Grand’s bourgeois Congregation of the Ste. Vierge. These Congregations of the Holy Virgin, based in Jesuit houses and colleges all over Europe, were social groups promoting spiritual formation and charity among men and boys. Besides Louis le Grand’s four student Congregations, two for pensionnaires, boarders, and two for externes, nonboarders, there were also two Congregations for men, one for bourgeois and another for artisans. Charles was in charge of almsgiving in the older pensionnaires’ Congregation, and he also helped with the bourgeois group, which his friend Père Thomas Damiot served as priest. This morning’s call was a courtesy offering of Christmas greetings, accompanied by a plea to M. Callot for a contribution to the bourgeois Congregation’s alms budget.

  Charles’s spirits rose as he emerged from the students’ court into the Cour d’honneur and crunched across its gravel to the street passage. The air was sharp in the nose, but through the bare branches of trees scattered along the court’s edges, the sky showed a thin blue in the growing light. The surprising promise of sunshine made the short walk to the Place Maubert a pleasant assignment. Scholastics were not supposed to leave the college alone without special permission, and his companion this morning was Maître Louis Richaud, whom he knew slightly and who was visiting a member of the artisans’ Congregation.

  Richaud was waiting in the passage. A scholastic like Charles, he was lean and quick moving, with perpetually watchful black eyes. Unlike Charles, he was not a teacher, but a cubiculaire, who helped provision the private student chambers and the small dormitories for the less well-born and wealthy boys, and also supervised students. Students in Jesuit colleges were rarely left alone, especially boarding students, most of whom were the scions of rich and influential families.

  Charles and Richaud greeted each other, and the porter let them out into the shadowed street.

  “My man lives just off the Place Maubert,” Charles said, as they started down the hill. “In the rue Perdue, I’m told, at the Sign of Three Ducks. And yours?”

  “He’s a tallow chandler, well off for his kind, I think. His shop is on the west side of the Place. Where the gallows used to stand, he says.”

  Richaud sounded almost regretful that the gibbet was gone, but Charles shuddered. He’d seen too many corpses in the army, including too many poor souls left hanging for the birds.

  Though the Christmas festival lasted until the Feast of the Epiphany on January sixth, working people couldn’t afford to stop work for so many holidays in a row, and the street was fairly busy. A carter bawled encouragement to his horse pulling a load of cured skins up the hill for the bookbinders along the rue St. Jacques. Cheaply cured skins, Charles thought, as the smell from the cart hit his nose. Farther along, at the corner of the Benedictine Hôtel de Cluny’s property, a clutch of tonsured, black-robed monks argued with three fishwives who had blocked most of the small side street with a temporary stall. The oldest woman was giving as good as she got, and swinging a large fish by its tail in wider and wider arcs. Charles grinned at Richaud.

  “Looks to me like she’s warming up her arm to use that fish on someone,” he said, surprising Richaud into what Charles sensed was rare laughter. On impulse, Charles said, “Are you coming to our Christmas farce tonight?”

  Richaud’s mouth tightened angrily and he walked a little faster.

  Charles eyed him. “A Farce of Monks, I mean. By Père Damiot. It’s good, very funny, you’ll like it.”

  “I doubt it. But I have to go.”

  “Have to? What do you mean? Every group of Jesuits puts on an in-house farce of some kind at Christmas! Surely you go every year?”

  “No.” The negative fell like a stone at Charles’s feet. “But this year my confessor, Père Dainville, has ordered me to go. He thinks I dwell too much on sin.” Richaud sniffed disdainfully, making his disagreement clear.

  How like Père Dainville, Charles thought, smiling to himself. The old man was his confessor, too. Though he seemed frail, he was as implacable as a wall in demanding truth from his penitents. But once he had it, he was compassion itself in setting penances. He was also inventive at finding ways to puncture the self-absorption that guilt so easily bred. During these last months, Charles had had the hard but comforting experience of just how inventive Dainville could be.

  The next turning to the right, and the second to the left, brought them out in the long, Y-shaped Place Maubert. Its stone houses were well kept: some set back behind tall, solid wooden gates, others with doors opening onto the street. Some had been rebuilt in a more modern style, with brick and stone, but one still showed timbering, and another was old enough to have a corner finished with a small, round tower capped with blue slate. Most of the houses had ground-floor shops with garish signs. There was an enormous red-brown boot, a loaf of golden bread the size of a carriage wheel, and a towering candle with an orange flame as long as Charles’s arm. The painted tumble of chops and trotters and tongues on the butcher’s sign was so realistic, it made his stomach growl.

  “I’ll be over there,” Richaud said, pointing to the candle.

  “Can you wait there for me, if my business takes longer than yours?”

  “Of course. The chandler loves to talk. Bon chance with your Monsieur Callot.”

  “Good luck to you, too, with your chandler.”

  Circling around servants and housewives gossiping and filling pots and jugs at the fountain in the middle of the cobbled Place, Charles angled south, looking for the r
ue Perdue. It turned out to be hardly wider than a footpath, and he wondered as he started along it if it was called Lost Street because of its size. Its houses, whose doors opened directly onto the street, were also smaller and looked less prosperous than those on the Place. He found three ducks carved in stone over a door just beyond the lane’s sharp turn. The door was opened by a gangling serving man tugging at the sleeves of his tight gray jacket, as if that would make them long enough.

  “Bonjour,” Charles said, “I am Maître du Luc. I would like to see Monsieur Callot, if I may.”

  Still pulling at his sleeves, the servant nodded and stood back from the door. Charles walked into a small antechamber with a worn but handsomely patterned black-and-red stone floor. An oak staircase rose on the right, against dingy plastered walls. The manservant disappeared through a doorway opposite the street door, leaving Charles at the foot of the stairs, listening to violin music, thumps, and loud laughter from the floor above.

  Minutes went by. In a pause in the music, Charles heard the manservant arguing heatedly with someone. The voices seemed to come from beyond the door the servant had gone through, and wondering how long he was going to be left waiting, Charles opened the door cautiously and looked in. The bed with faded green curtains, the ragged cushioned chair, and cooking utensils scattered around the cold hearth told him this was a lodger’s chamber—not surprising, since Parisians of all ranks rented out any extra foot of space, especially on ground floors or in attics. The voices came from beyond a door straight across the room.

  “Oh, blessed saints,” a woman said impatiently, “he doesn’t care, so why should we?”

  Quick light steps approached and Charles withdrew his head just in time. An exasperated maidservant walked through the lodger’s chamber, tucking stray black curls under her white coif. Her gray woolen skirt and bodice were old, but better fitting than the young footman’s jacket. Ignoring Charles, she hurried up the stairs and into the room the music was coming from. And almost immediately backed out of it, as a man burst onto the landing.

  “Maître du Luc!” M. Edmé Callot, bent and brittle and in his seventies, leaned precariously over the wooden stair railing, his long, high dressed chestnut wig threatening to slip off his bald head and land at Charles’s feet. “Welcome, maître! Come up, come up and be at home!”

  The maid hovering behind Callot threw up her hands and bustled back down the stairs, this time rolling her eyes at Charles as she passed him.

  Charles gave her a rueful smile and started up to the landing. “Bonjour, Monsieur Callot,” he said as he climbed. “I have come to wish you a blessed Christmas season. And to have perhaps some talk about the Congregation of the Sainte Vierge.”

  “Good, excellent!”

  Callot wove his way back toward the music. Charles sighed and followed. But he was hardly through the door of the small salon when a young woman leaped at him. Her full red lips were smiling and her lemon-colored skirt was bouncing on the small hoops supporting its inverted cone shape. He jumped backward. She pirouetted without missing a beat and struck out toward the salon windows in a series of simple but prettily done chassées. A young dancing master bowing a little pocket violin beside the fireplace nodded at her enthusiastically and redoubled his efforts.

  “Ha! She almost had you, maître!” M. Callot was convulsed with mirth. In a parody of the girl’s chassées, he sidled to Charles and smote him on the shoulder. “Christmas, maître, make the most of it!”

  From the fumes accompanying Callot’s words, and the glass and bottle on a table near the fire, Charles gathered that the old man had already been making the most of it, with the help of the distilled spirits called eau de vie. This was definitely a new view of the quiet, pious elder whom Charles had glimpsed at gatherings of the bourgeois Congregation.

  “May we talk somewhere a little quieter, monsieur?” Charles said, raising his voice to be heard over the music. “About the Congregation.”

  “No, no, stay and dance! I know you can dance, I saw your Louis le Grand show in August! That Labors of Hercules was a good ballet, though why you bother with those godforsaken Latin tragedies, the sweet Virgin only knows. Ah, me, I would dearly like to dance Hercules . . .” He posed unsteadily in fourth position, his right arm straight out as though he held a sword. As the girl danced past him, her feet flickering in swift pas de bourrées, he lunged, swiping the imaginary sword left and right, overbalanced, and fell into her arms. Laughing, she stopped and pushed him back onto his feet. The dancing master stopped playing and glowered.

  “Oh, no you don’t, uncle,” the girl admonished, one capable-looking hand spread on Callot’s chest to hold him at arm’s length. “No more Christmas kisses.” She glanced at Charles, shrugged a wry shoulder, and dipped the best curtsy she could in the circumstances. She was perhaps nineteen or twenty, Charles thought, robust and auburn haired, a little too broad-faced for conventional beauty, but her tip-tilted nose and slightly down-slanting brown eyes were appealing. Her mouth, which Charles saw now was naturally red, looked as though it nearly always smiled. And her body—Charles lowered his eyes and firmly refused to consider her body.

  “She calls me uncle to make me feel younger, but in fact she is my all-too-lovely great-niece,” Callot was saying. He waved his hand airily between the girl and Charles. “Maître du Luc, Mademoiselle Isabel Brion.”Then he stepped back from her and grinned at the scowling dancing master. “And that is her very devoted maître de danse, Monsieur Germain Morel.”

  Monsieur, Charles noted, which meant that the dancing master was just beginning in his profession and had not been at it long enough to be called by the more honorable title of maître, given not only to Jesuit scholastics but to many positions in French society. With a visible effort, Morel composed his face and managed a civil bow to Charles.

  “Come now, mon cher Monsieur Morel,” Callot laughed, “it’s Christmas, we must make the most of it!”

  “Hush, uncle, I fear you have already made the most of it,” Mlle Brion chided. “I think today you put eau de vie even in your morning chocolate!” She turned to the red-faced dancing master. “Do forgive us, monsieur,” she said sweetly. “Shall I try it once more?”

  “Of course! By all means!” The young man’s face cleared and he set his violin on a chest against the tapestry-covered wall. “But first, mademoiselle, allow me to correct your pas de bourrée.”

  With a dazzling smile, Isabel Brion presented herself in front of him. Morel began to demonstrate, dancing in a circle around her so that she could see the step from every angle. Charles, only half listening to Callot rambling on about Hercules, watched with pleasure. The young teacher might be a beginner, but he was good, very good. Slender and supple, of middle height, wearing his own chestnut hair cut several inches above his shoulders, he had grace and speed, and his technique was perfect. Morel stopped beside Mlle Brion and resumed the pose from which the step began. She studied his well-muscled, stockinged legs, his tautly poised torso, his graceful arms, as though they were Holy Writ, and copied his stance almost exactly. But somehow, her right arm, in its ruffled sleeve that showed her round, firm forearm was just enough wrong that he had to stretch his own arm around her to make the correction. Color flooded their faces and they gazed earnestly at each other. Somehow, Morel forgot to withdraw his arm from around her shoulders.

  Charles turned to Callot to hide his smile, wondering what the girl’s father would do if he walked into the salon and hoping he wouldn’t. Callot was still practicing unsteady sword thrusts and mumbling a running commentary on his own performance.

  Charles watched him for a moment and said, “I think, monsieur , that I should return another day. I wish you—”

  He broke off as the front door opened and shut and voices rose. Callot turned anxiously toward the landing, and the dancing master and Mlle Brion moved apart.

  “Mademoiselle,” a deep voice rumbled, “I beg you, calm yourself. It will all come right, I assure you. And now—”
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  “But if we cannot find it?” It was a girl’s voice, shaking with emotion. “I will have nothing, Monsieur Brion, what will happen to me? No one will want me without money!”

  “Ma chère, you forget your faithful Gilles. My son may seem shy in his suit, but I assure you, his heart is yours. But now that you are coming to live in my house, you will have more time to learn that he loves you.”

  “No, Monsieur Brion,” the girl said with sudden spirit. “You are very good, but I have told you that I want to stay in my mother’s house. I want to be where she was.”

  “Now, ma petite, do not start on that again. You are a minor and must do as I, your guardian, tell you. You will enjoy living with my Isabel, will you not? And as I say, you will come to know Gilles better.”

  With an anxious look at Morel, Isabel Brion ran out onto the landing. “Papa,” she called down, “didn’t you find it?”

  “We will, ma chère Isabel,” her father called back. “We will! This is only a little setback. I have brought Martine to you to amuse. I am going again to the Châtelet to search. Some disgracefully careless clerk has brought us to this pass, but we will find what we need, never fear, no reason in the world to fear. I don’t know what the Châtelet has come to, it is disgraceful . . .” The front door opened and shut again, cutting off the stream of words, and feet ran lightly up the stairs.

  Frankly curious, Charles moved so that he could see the landing. A weeping girl pushed back her wide black hood and threw herself into Isabel Brion’s open arms. She was so small she hardly reached the other girl’s chin.