The Rhetoric of Death

by Judith Rock

  “No, mon père.”

  “Our Père La Chaise, the king’s confessor, often uses it. Because he guides the king’s conscience, he has to know what is afoot in the world and what the powerful are saying about it. To that end, he frequently hosts gatherings of influential men. He is holding one of his soirées tomorrow evening, and I want you to go. Père Guise has been invited, and someone from the Condé house here in town usually attends as well. Fall into conversation with the Condé’s representative; see if you can find out the gossip in his household. And see who Père Guise talks to. I know that the thought of spying on a brother Jesuit is distasteful. But if he is—involved—I want to know it first.”

  “How am I to spy in a salon?” Charles said in dismay. “And on a man who knows me!”

  “It will be a large gathering, you will be just one more Jesuit there. I will tell Père Guise that you are doing an errand for me and paying your respects to Père La Chaise.” Le Picart smiled. “Your official errand will be to take him the plan I have made for our reception of the Siamese. I am gambling on your acting being as good as your dancing, Maître du Luc. Oh, yes, I heard all about your classroom gigue. I wish I had seen it myself.” He stood up and Charles rose with him. “I will give you a letter of introduction to Père La Chaise. He knows what has been happening here. And now, bed.”

  “How do I get to this soirée, mon père? Shall I take a horse from our stables?”

  The rector frowned, thinking. “They may be spoken for. I will tell you tomorrow and give you directions.” He looked up, suddenly just a tired, worried, aging priest. “May the Holy Virgin protect you, Maître du Luc. If what you are doing for me becomes known, you will look to someone like Nemesis. Do not forget that for a single moment.”

  Chapter 20

  Charles stood beside the well in the stable courtyard, waiting for his hired horse and looking anxiously at the sky. If the flying clouds erased tonight’s moon, he would have to find his way back in the pitch dark. Hoof beats clopped along the lane behind the college. He opened the gate and Frère Fabre reined in a big black horse and slid to the ground. The horse rolled an uncertain eye at Charles.

  “He seems all right,” Fabre said dubiously, handing over the reins. “But watch out for cats. One ran in front of him just now and he shied like he had a poker up his ass.”

  Charles eyed the horse. “Oh, good. And stray cats are so rare in Paris. But thanks for the warning. What’s his name?”

  The brother shrugged. “You need to be introduced?”

  “I’ve ridden horses that thought so.” Charles gave the horse’s nose a scratch and swung himself up.

  “When you get back tonight, maître, put him in the stable here. I’ll return him tomorrow.” Fabre raised an admonitory finger. “Now remember. Cross the river on the Pont de la Tournelle, not the Petit Pont—”

  “Père Le Picart made me memorize the directions. St. Anthony must have told him how lost I got coming home the other day. My thanks for fetching the horse, mon frère, and a peaceful night to you.”

  “And to you. If you stay away from cats.”

  Charles clucked to the nameless horse and rode away down the lane, thinking that cats were going to be the least of his worries. But the sky seemed to be clearing again, that was something. And when the lane met the rue St. Jacques and he turned toward the river, he saw that the wind had dropped enough to let the long shop signs hang quiet on their poles. The Latin Quarter’s shops and the ramshackle vendors’ booths scattered along side streets were closing. Belated shoppers darted like rabbits, seeking things forgotten earlier, their demands for cheap end-of-the-day prices—and complaints when their demands were refused—shrill above the rumble of carriage wheels. Charles’s eye was caught by a sign painter on a ladder, finishing a silver spoon on a scarlet ground.

  “Pewterer or roast shop, mon ami?” he called out.

  “Best roast shop in Paris! We open tomorrow, come and try the garlic mutton!”

  Charles’s horse shied in protest as an onslaught of released day students pelted down the hill from Louis le Grand, Plessis, Cambray, and Gervais. Their game of stealing each other’s hats grew into armed conflict as one group of scholars fired a volley of gutter refuse at its rivals. Charles ducked and reined his horse aside to avoid a flying bunch of rotting carrots, and the horse’s hooves just missed a stack of small gleaming boxes outside a joiner’s shop. The joiner’s shock-haired apprentice ran out, yelling abuse, and belatedly gathered up his master’s wares.

  Glad to escape the fray, Charles turned into little rue Galande, past the ancient church of St. Julien the Poor. A clutch of the modern poor darted from the shelter of its doors, proffering bloody bandages, sores, and a sleeping swaddled infant. Charles suspected that the bandages and sores were works of art, not nature, but the thin, vacant-eyed woman holding the baby wrung his heart. Praying that Pernelle and Lucie were not in want, he gave her a handful of copper gros from the purse Le Picart had given him to use if he needed. For expenses, Charles supposed. Or bribes. Le Picart hadn’t said.

  He was nearly at the Pont de la Tournelle when he rode into a tiny square and found himself in one of those spaces of quiet all cities hold. The cacophony of Paris faded and a cascade of song poured from an open window, somehow deepening the hush. “Thick forest,” the singer lamented, “you cannot conceal my unhappy love . . .” Doves cooed from a walled garden and Charles breathed in the scent of flowers. It came to him that all this—the city, being on his own with money to spend, no vow of obedience, nothing to curb his choices—could be his ordinary life if he left the Society.

  Not money to spend, he corrected himself. Since their father’s death, his older brother, René, had run the family land, selling the olives, wine, and figs, collecting his seigneurial dues, even overseeing his small seigneurial court in person, which was somewhat unusual these days. But prices had fallen and the land barely kept René’s family and Charles’s mother in modest comfort. If Charles left the Society, he would be on his own. He supposed he could support himself teaching. Though Paris schools expected their teachers to be, if not clerics, at least single. And he might not stay in Paris. Or stay single . . . Turning away from where that thought tried to take him, he told himself he could earn a living as a dancing master. If he could find students who liked the wailing of amorous cats, which was what his violin playing sounded like. Or a theatre company might take him on. He’d proved that he could still dance, and his heart leapt at the thought of performing. He was old, though, to turn professional; and his shoulder was permanently stiff, outright painful if he overused it. But he also acted well enough, and acting would be easier on his shoulder . . .

  His imaginings carried him across the Pont de la Tournelle to the Ile St. Louis—the Ile Notre Dame, as some still called it—where wooden cranes and piles of stone and lumber testified to the ongoing lure of this island, created for the rich. As he reached the Right Bank, the slowly fading light recalled him to his evening’s business. He would have to get himself presented to whoever was representing the Prince of Condé. But he was increasingly sure that the key to the murders was in Paris, not away in Chantilly. His main goal tonight was learning as much as possible about Guise’s life outside the college. Though how to do that with Guise’s gimlet stare following his every move, he didn’t know. His spirits sank abruptly as he turned along the wide rue St. Antoine. What skills did he really have for this? His mother had often said that he could talk the horns off a brass goat when he wanted to. And he could act. Fighting, dancing, and directing had taught him to read bodies and their intentions—a useful skill when facing angry men, but he was going to an urbane soirée in a Jesuit house, not a street fight. So acting and talking the horns off a brass goat would be tonight’s weapons of choice.

  A tall fountain in the middle of the street made him shove his worries aside and look eagerly for the Society’s new church of St. Louis. Just by St. Catherine’s fountain, Le Picart had said, and there it was. C
harles slowed his horse to a walk, drinking in the pale honey stone facade, craning his neck to follow the graceful curves soaring into the evening sky like a Mass’s Gloria. Patterned after the Jesuits’ great Gesù in Rome, St. Louis was exuberantly carved, painted, niched, and scrolled. Even the enormous clock over the church porch was gorgeous, its face surrounded by a golden sunburst. Charles was suddenly as glad to be brother to those who made such extravagant beauty for God, as glad to be making his own small contribution to such beauty in the ballets, as he’d been just moments ago to imagine himself uncassocked and his own man in the way of ordinary men.

  Mentally throwing up his hands at his own inconstancy, Charles nudged the horse to a trot and left the church behind. What do You want, he demanded silently of God. I feel more like a shuttlecock every day. Is that what I am? A toy for You and the devil to knock back and forth between you? And which side is Yours? Is it better to walk away from the Society and its sins of power? Or to stay and try for some power myself and hope to lessen the sins? Or is it better to leave the sins to You and get on with the good the Society does? I cannot just tell myself piously that all things work together for good and leave off thinking! He waited, but this time his sparring didn’t deepen into prayer.

  The sunset reddened behind him and the ancient bulk of the Bastille loomed ahead. No longer in the mood for sight-seeing, he passed it unheeding. He rode through the medallion-encrusted Arc de triomphe that had replaced the St. Antoine gate, across the stinking sewage ditch running along the line of the old wall, and took out his feelings in riding harder than he needed to through the gathering dusk. When he turned east and left the ditch behind, he pulled the horse to a trot. He was in real countryside now, passing canvas-sailed windmills, a tiny village, fields ripening toward haying, patches of woods. The road rose gently and he rode into the spacious courtyard of a stone house whose windows shone yellow against a sheltering hill.

  A chorus of loud voices and laughter from the stable suggested a lively game of dice among grooms and escorts passing the time until they were needed again, and beside the stable door, two men nearly as tall as Charles, with pistols at their belts, stood talking. The unfamiliar cadence of their words thudded against Charles’s ears as he dismounted. English, he thought in surprise, and handed his reins to the stable boy who came to meet him.

  Charles dug his formal three-pronged Jesuit hat from the saddlebag, stowed his outdoor hat, and crossed the forecourt under the assessing stare of the Jesuit waiting at the top of a flight of handsome stone steps, beside the house door. The doorkeeper asked his name and led him into a long salon glowing with candlelight, whose wide casements stood open to the evening, letting moths blunder in to singe themselves in the candle flames. The salon’s plain white plaster walls and bare wood floor contrasted sharply with the men who filled it. The curls of their full-bottomed wigs clustered on their blue, green, gold, and tawny shoulders. Snowy lace and lawn rippled down the fronts of their full-skirted coats and foamed from their foot-wide cuffs. Rings twinkled and ribbons fluttered on high-heeled shoes as they gestured and bowed to one another, and their busy eyes missed nothing.

  Charles followed his guide through the crowd, past the richly dressed men and the Jesuits quietly offering them wine in plain, cone-shaped glasses like those that graced the college tables. The plangent sound of recorder and lute wove through the buzzing talk, and Charles finally found the musicians reflected in a gilt-framed mirror. It was the room’s only decoration besides a half-life-size and brightly painted crucifix on the wall toward which his guide was leading him. As they passed the mirror, it also showed Charles three Capuchin monks, their signature pointed brown hoods hanging down their backs. A Capuchin had been Cardinal Richelieu’s spymaster in the previous reign and Charles wondered if the order offered similar services to Père La Chaise, the king’s confessor. To his discomfort, he realized that he was only half joking. His guide stopped in front of a sixtyish, fleshy-faced Jesuit standing before the crucifix.

  “Père La Chaise,” the doorkeeper said, bowing, “may I present Maître Charles du Luc, from the College of Louis le Grand?” He gestured Charles forward and retreated.

  “Bon soir, mon père,” Charles murmured, bowing low.

  La Chaise inclined his head and turned to the tall, fair-haired man in a russet coat and breeches who stood beside him. “If you would excuse us for a moment, mon ami? College business. Often banal, I fear, but it must be done.”

  A shadow of annoyance passed over the fair-haired man’s big-boned face, but he nodded politely. Surprised at not being introduced, Charles watched him withdraw toward the windows.

  “Mon père,” he said, remembering his manners and taking the rector’s two letters from his inside pocket, “I bring you these from Père Le Picart.”

  La Chaise looked briefly at the letter about the Siamese, pocketed it, and unfolded the second. As he read, Charles studied him. The king’s confessor had fine dark hair that curled a little around his skullcap, a high forehead, a long straight nose, and a doubling chin. The lines around his mouth were good humored and the look in his eyes was at once wise, weary, and tolerant. Charles supposed that after eleven years confessing King Louis XIV, a man would have to either look like that or be a crabbed, bitter cynic. La Chaise refolded the letter introducing Charles and looked up, smiling.

  “You are most welcome, Maître du Luc. To Louis le Grand and to this house.” He lowered his voice and spoke just on the edge of hearing. “If I can help you, you have only to ask. We must make sure that these sad events at the college damage us as little as may be.”

  “And we must make sure that the guilty are found, mon père.”

  “That goes without saying. What do you need here this evening?”

  “I was told to meet whoever is representing the Prince of Condé’s household, mon père.”

  “Ah. Unfortunately, I have been told that the Hôtel de Condé’s chaplain, who usually comes, has sent his regrets. I trust you will still be able to make good use of your presence, maître.”

  “I trust so, mon père,” Charles said, thinking that now he was free to concentrate on Guise.

  La Chaise reached under his cassock, drew something out, and peered at it. He opened his hand and showed Charles a tiny clock in the shape of a skull. “My timekeeper. Spiritually as well as temporally useful, as you see. I must seek someone else now, if you will excuse me. Come to me for whatever you need.”

  Charles bowed his thanks and waited courteously for La Chaise to walk away first. Then he went to find the circulating drinks. Sipping the disappointing but thoroughly Jesuit vintage, he scanned the room for Guise and listened to the conversation around him. A few feet away, a bantam-sized young man in lushly purple velvet was holding forth on the philosopher Spinoza.

  “—and I assure you, gentlemen,” he was saying, “I have the very best authority for my opinion: my illustrious confessor, the devout and learned Père Guise.”

  Charles moved closer, gratified to see that the name made some of the listeners look as though they’d swallowed vinegar. This looked like his cue to start talking the horns off a brass goat. He surveyed his goat a moment longer, assumed an expression of polite interest, and joined the little circle.

  “I say it again, this Jew’s god has no divine plan,” the goat pronounced, as the circle made room for Charles. “The god of Spinoza feels nothing, judges nothing, he is as cold and useless to the soul as a triangle.” The young man looked around the circle, preening himself.

  “Earnestly argued, monsieur,” Charles said, with a smile and a bow. “But—cold as a triangle? I find your argument flawed.”

  “Indeed, mon père?” The goat blinked. “I am surprised to hear a Jesuit say so.”

  “Please, I am a mere maître, monsieur. Not père, not yet. Maître Charles du Luc, newly at Louis le Grand. As for your surprise, this Spinoza sometimes echoes Jesuit teaching.”

  An older man eyed Charles with respect and nodded, but the re
st looked puzzled.

  “Allow me to quote from our gentle Jew’s Ethics.” Charles assumed ballet’s fourth position, the rhetorician’s stance. “ ‘ There cannot be too much merriment.’ And ‘Nothing save gloomy superstition prohibits laughter.’ And again, ‘To make use of things, and take delight in them . . . is the part of a wise man.’ The Society of Jesus teaches that we must make learning pleasurable. And that whatever is good and innocent of itself is worthy of Christian attention and delight and can be used to the glory of God.”

  The young man swelled with offense. Teetering on his very high heels, he tried to make himself seem taller as he faced Charles. “How can you possibly compare infidel maunderings with pious Catholic teaching?”

  “Oh, dear. Do you mean that we are to reject all Jewish writing?” Charles frowned and looked around the circle as though for help. “But, monsieur, the Jews gave us the Old Testament, which speaks of a Savior.” He threw out his hands in supplication. “And, think, I beg you—if we got rid of the Old Testament, Holy Scripture would lose fully three-quarters of its volume. Would that be wise? If Holy Writ weighed so little, ordinary people might want to carry it around. Even read it and interpret it for themselves! Like the Huguenots,” Charles said in a shocked whisper. “And then where would good Catholics be?” Besides better educated and less credulous, he added silently, as several of his listeners snorted with laughter.

  “I am not speaking of Holy Scripture,” the young man said stiffly. “Spinoza was a Christ killer trying to lead good Christians astray. I trust you do not allow his work at Louis le Grand.”

  “Oh no,” Charles said in a horrified tone. “Père Guise would never stand for that.”

  “Certainly not! A more ardent and orthodox Christian does not exist.”

  Charles looked vaguely around. “Where is Père Guise? I have not yet seen him.”