by Judith Rock
From the chandelier hanging over the middle of the stage and the iron holders fixed to the side flats, candles cast a welcome yellow glow. But the gray light from the long room’s windows was as somber as Lent itself. Charles reminded himself that nevertheless, the snow was gone, melted in the chill, dripping rain that had come with February. And that Lent brought spring as well as salt fish.
He feasted his color-starved eyes for a moment on the deep blue satin of the Duc du Maine’s suit and his sister’s rose brocade, bright among the more sober colors of their attendants. As he looked, though, he wondered whether the young woman, whose voice was more carrying than Bertamelli’s, was going to chatter to her brother throughout the show. The overture was nearing its end. Charles’s gaze swept one last time over the audience, and he smiled in surprise as he saw Lieutenant-Général La Reynie standing at the back of the salle des actes, next to Père Damiot. Wondering if they’d found something to talk about before the music began, and hoping that they had, he went back through the wing to the stage door and pulled it all the way open.
Celse’s overture was ending. Michele Bertamelli was waiting in the doorway in his spring-green coat and breeches, the wreath of flowers and birds—symbols of youth—nested in his dark curling hair, a branch of yellow silk flowers in his hand. Charles put a hand on his shoulder and guided him farther into the wing, ready for his entrance. In the pause between the overture and the first notes of Celse’s first act, Bertamelli lifted his radiant face to Charles and gave him a smile that made Charles’s breath catch in his throat, a smile so joyous and young that winter and sorrow might never have existed. Then the music began again, and the little Italian filled his lungs and burst onto the stage like spring itself.
Author’s Note
The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone . . . gone as utterly as we ourselves shall be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.
—G. M. Trevelyan, Autobiography of a Historian
T he Eloquence of Blood is fiction, but the story happens in real places and some of its characters are real seventeenth-century people. Charles du Luc is fictional, but his college of Louis le Grand still stands on the rue St. Jacques, in Paris’s Left Bank University quarter. Its rhetoric teachers really did produce ballets, drama, and even opera, as part of teaching eloquence of body and voice. In 1687, the Latin tragedy Celsus and Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s opera Celse (called a tragédie en musique) served as the annual pre-Lenten performance, celebrating the end of Carnival and ushering in the season of Lent, which began two days later, on Ash Wednesday.
As I was writing the book, people often asked me if a single woman could have adopted a child, as Anne Mynette does in the story. They could and did, even though in formal law, adoption had become illegal. But customary law—doing things as they’d always been done—was still strong in France. Anyone who wanted to adopt went to a notary and had papers drawn up detailing what they would do for the child. If they wanted money or property to go to the child after their own death, they drew up a donation entre vifs. Nothing could be willed to a child who was adopted or illegitimate. Also, people of the time made a harsh distinction between an orphan of married parents and a nameless foundling, and it is this distinction that worries Charles in relation to Martine. The concern for maintaining bloodlines—through children of one’s own blood or children whose parentage, and therefore blood, was known—was growing in France and would eventually eliminate adoption altogether.
Nicolas de La Reynie, first head of the Paris police, is real, and so are Père Jacques Le Picart, Père Joseph Jouvancy, dancing master Pierre Beauchamps (a passionate collector of paintings), and composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. The seventeen-year-old Duc du Maine, seen briefly at the February performance, was a legitimized son of Louis XIV. His sister is fictional, and I’ve given her the fictional title of Mademoiselle de Ronen. Père Claude François Menestrier, who appears at the end of the story, was a renowned creator of elaborate spectacles for European courts and public occasions. He wrote several books on dance and is regarded as the first European dance historian. He and Jouvancy planned the sumptuous decor for the April 26, 1687, interment of the Great Condé’s heart in the altar wall of the Jesuit church of St. Louis. There is a drawing of the decorated church in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris, showing sweeping blue drapery and a myriad of skulls—whether real or of papier-mâché, it is hard to tell. The Great Condé was a Bourbon, a royal Prince of the Blood, and it had long been customary for royalty to leave their hearts, and sometimes their entrails, to religious institutions for separate burial. To receive a “relic” of this kind was considered a great honor for a religious house.
The sad story of Claire Clemence, wife of the Great Condé, is true, though her devoted servant Marin is imagined. Claire Clemence died in 1694, after many years of virtual imprisonment at the remote Condé castle of Chateauroux, in the province of Berry.
As for what else is real in the story, Louis XIV really did fear and dislike Paris, because of his experiences there as a child in the 1640s revolt against the monarchy. The war minister Louvois, who ranked above La Reynie, loathed any kind of disorder—especially in Paris and especially on the rare occasions when the king visited, as he did on January thirtieth 1687 for the dinner the city fathers gave him at the Hôtel de Ville. And the Capuchin friars really were the firefighters of Paris.
As for Henri Brion’s smuggling scheme, it, too, happened—though the instance I know about happened in the eighteenth century, and that time, it was Jesuits who hid silver under the chocolate . . .
READERS GUIDE
The Eloquence of Blood
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. How does Charles struggle with his role as a man of the cloth versus that of being a man of worldly desires? How did he come into this position and how does his vocation both cause him to struggle (to give in to temptation) and provide him with direction?
2. Were you initially suspicious of the church in having a hand in the deaths of both Martine and the notary? Why? Who else had sufficient motivation to kill, especially as the patrimoine was surrounded by confusion?
3. Discuss the class structure (and the boundaries) of seventeenth-century Parisian society. How does social standing and parentage affect one’s destiny? What might the future hold for an orphan, or young woman without a solid financial future?
4. Do you think the Jesuits did the right thing as tension against them began to mount—even as their silence began to put the students in jeopardy? How do you think they could have diffused the climate of violence?
5. What motivates Charles’s commitment to the investigations? Why does he insist on clearing Gilles of the crime, even though it would not lift the veil of suspicion off the Jesuits?
6. Why does Gilles refuse to reveal the name of his companion? What might be the repercussions? What would be the sacrifices? Why do you think Charles agrees to keep his investigation as discreet as possible?
7. How does the song allow the townspeople of Paris to deal with their outrage over the deaths of Martine and Brion? Is this a form of free speech or would you consider it intimidation or harassment? Do you think those who distributed the lyrics should have been punished?
8. Why did the beggars come to Charles’s rescue against the attacking street mob, risking their safety to save him? How does Charles repay this kindness—and how is his behavior toward the poor different from the prevailing attitudes of the time?
9. Who is Reine and what was her life like before begging? What is her role in the streets—to both the Jesuits and the police? How does she work with all sides to create dialogue, to help keep a semblance of peace?
10. Were you shocked to learn the killer’s true identity and motivations?
11. Where you surprised to learn who stole Anne and Martine’s donation paper?
Who was he ultimately trying to protect?
12. What is “the Sacred Heart” and how does it play a role in the novel? From Martine’s necklace, the Prince of Condé’s heart, and the symbol in Charles’s dream—how are all these ideas united?
Would you like to have Judith Skype into your book club? Visit her website at www.judithrock.com for more information!
Turn the page for a sneak peek into Charles’s next adventure . . .
A Plague of Lies
Coming soon from Berkley!
FEAST OF ST. CLOTHILDE, TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1687
The storm-riding demons of the air were gathered over Paris, hurling thunder and lightning at the city’s cowering mortals. Every bell ringer in the city was hauling on his ropes, turning the church bells—baptized like good Christians for just this purpose—into widemouthed roaring angels fighting off the storm with their own deafening noise. The terrifying spring thunderstorm had begun north of the river, but now it raged directly over the rue St. Jacques, sending thunder echoing off walls and stabbing roofs and cobbles with spears of rain. In the Jesuit college of Louis le Grand, teachers and students were praying to aid the clanging bells. But the prayers of the senior rhetoric class dissolved into gasps and cries when lightning struck nearly into the main courtyard.
The near miss made assistant rhetoric master Maître Charles du Luc’s skin tingle. And startled him into wondering if the demons of the air, in whom he mostly didn’t believe when the sun was shining, were bent on making this day his last on earth.
“Messieurs, I beg you, calm yourselves,” he shouted over the noise to his students huddled together on the classroom benches. “All storms pass. The bells are winning, as they always do, because we baptize them to make them stronger than the demons of the air. Listen! The demons are fleeing toward the south now.” By force of will and voice, he called the boys back to their unfinished praying.
When he looked up after the “amen,” one of the students, Armand Beauclaire, was frowning thoughtfully at the oak-beamed ceiling. Beauclaire, a round-faced sixteen, with a thick straight thatch of brown hair, put up a hand and shifted his gaze to the teachers’ dais at the front of the room.
“Yes, Monsieur Beauclaire?” Charles called over the storm’s receding noise, girding his mental loins. Beauclaire’s questions were always interesting and never easy to answer.
“Is it really demons, maître? If the demons of the air cause thunderstorms, why do the storms always end? Why don’t the demons win sometimes?”
“An excellent question, monsieur.” But not one Charles was going to discuss there and then. Though he mostly doubted the demon theory, many people—including many of the Jesuits at Louis le Grand—didn’t. And he had to get the class through many more pages of Greek before the afternoon ended. He smiled at Beauclaire. “Perhaps the demons always lose because good is stronger than evil,” he said. And hoped that his belief in the second half of his sentence was enough to justify his evasion. “But now, back to rhetoric!”
Though nearly eight years a member of the Society of Jesus, Charles was still in the “scholastic” phase of his long Jesuit training, with final vows and ordination as a priest still to come. His work assignment was as a teacher of rhetoric, the art of communication in both Latin and Greek, Greek being by far the most difficult. Now, as the storm receded outside, and he tried to find his place in the book open on the oak lectern in front of him, he wondered if he looked as unconfident as he felt. Behind the professor’s dais where he stood was a tapestry showing the unfortunate philosopher Socrates drinking his fatal cup of hemlock. Its graphic showing of an unpopular academic’s fate made an uncomfortable teaching backdrop, he’d always thought. But, no help for it, there were still two hours of class before the afternoon ended. He smoothed the book’s pages open, pushed his black skullcap down on his curling, straw-blond hair, and twitched at his cassock sleeves. The long linen shirt under the black woolen cassock showed correctly as narrow bands of white at wrists and high-collared neck, and the cassock hung sleekly on his six feet and more of wide-shouldered height. With a deep breath and a prayer to St. Chrysostom, the only Greek saint he could think of at the moment, Charles tackled the Greek rules of rhetoric, sometimes reading from the book, sometimes explaining what he read.
But under all that, he was feeling overwhelmed by his responsibilities. He was assistant to Père Joseph Jouvancy, senior rhetoric master and famous for his teaching and writing, but Jouvancy was in the infirmary recovering from sickness, and the second senior master, Père Martin Pallu, had just fallen ill with the same unpleasant malady. Which left Charles in sole charge of the thirty senior rhetoric students.
He paused, giving the class time to write down what he’d said, and let his eyes wander over the benches. The boys bent over small boards braced on their laps, feathered quills scratching across their paper, and all he could see of them were the tops of their flat-crowned hats above their black scholar’s gowns. Louis le Grand’s students ranged in age from about ten to twenty. The youngest in this class was thirteen, a little Milanese named Michele Bertamelli, with a mass of curls as black as his hat. Most of the bent heads were French and every shade of brown, apparently God’s favorite color for hair. But there were also boys from England, Ireland, and Poland—one with hair flaming like copper, others as blond as Charles himself was, thanks to his Norman mother’s Viking forbears.
Charles glanced out at the courtyard and saw that the rain had nearly stopped. The storm was south of the city now, and the bell ringers of Paris were letting their ropes go slack. Relieved at no longer having to shout over the noise, he went back to feeding his fledgling scholars Aristotle’s rules for rhetoric. But even as he tried to make his dry morsels of knowledge tempting, his thoughts kept circling around all that he should have finished and hadn’t. His biggest worry was the summer ballet and tragedy performance on August sixth. In Jesuit schools, both voice and body were trained for eloquence, which meant that part of Charles’s job was directing the ballets that went with the school’s grand tragedy performance every summer. This year, under Jouvancy’s watchful eye, Charles was responsible for writing the ballet’s livret, as well as directing the ballet itself. But because of Jouvancy’s illness, the livret wasn’t finished, and rehearsals were late starting. And what if Jouvancy’s illness returned and worsened, as illness so often did? If that happened, Charles knew that he might end up directing the tragedy as well as the ballet, and the threat of having to direct both was almost enough to make him volunteer for the New World missions. But only almost.
He finished his lecture and told the class’s three decurions—class leaders named for Roman army officers commanding ten men each—to collect the afternoon’s written work and bring it to the dais. Then he set them to hear each of their “men” recite the assigned memory passage. Today it was from St. Basil’s writings. Greek recitation was never popular. When the decurions delivered the bad news of recitation, thirteen-year-old Bertamelli sprang from his seat and flung his arms wide.
“But, maître,” he wailed, “I cannot speak Greek, it hurts my tongue!”
Snorts of laughter erupted along the benches, Charles bit his lip to keep from laughing himself. Henri de Montmorency, the dull-witted scion of a noble house, turned on his bench and gaped at Bertamelli.
“You’re mad. Words can’t hurt anything!”
Charles called the class back to order, fixed Bertamelli with his eye, and schooled his face to stern disapproval. The boy’s scholar’s gown had slipped off one shoulder to reveal his crumpled and grayed linen shirt, and his huge black eyes were tragic with pleading. He was one of the most gifted dancers Charles had ever seen. He was also proving nearly impossible to contain within Louis le Grand’s rules—and probably its walls, though Charles preferred not to think about that. He suspected that the little Italian would not be with them long, though who would crack first, Bertamelli or the Jesuits, he wouldn’t have cared to predict.
“To put Monsieur de
Montmorency’s puzzlement more politely,” Charles said, with a sideways frown at Montmorency, “how does Greek hurt your tongue, Monsieur Bertamelli?”
“It has hard edges, sharp edges, cruel edges, it bites me! My tongue is a tender Italian tongue!” To be sure Charles understood, he stuck the sensitive member in question out as far as it would go.
“No need for scientific demonstration, Monsieur Bertamelli, and please pull your gown closed over your shirt. And if at all possible, compose yourself.”
Bertamelli yanked his gown onto his shoulder, pulled it straight, and clasped his thin brown hands together under his chin. His eyes grew even larger. “My tongue—”
“Let your tongue rest, monsieur, and make your ears work. Hear three things that I am going to tell you.” Charles held up his thumb. “Number one: Learning Greek will strengthen the sinews of your tender Italian tongue.” His first finger joined his thumb. “Two: Every educated man must learn Greek. While Latin is our international language of scholarship, what the Romans wrote in Latin is rooted in what the Greeks wrote first.” Charles’s second finger uncurled and his eyes swept the classroom and came to rest on Montmorency. “Three—and this is for each of you: You will observe the rules of classroom behavior. If you want to speak, put up your hand. As you very well know. Now, Monsieur Bertamelli, sit down and prepare yourself for your Greek recitation.”
Bertamelli sat. Two tears spilled from his wounded black eyes. He wiped them with the edge of his gown, gazing at Charles like a martyr forgiving his tormentors. The room filled slowly with a quiet, dogged murmuring that Aristotle surely would not have recognized as Greek.