The Rhetoric of Death

by Judith Rock

  In his rooms, he shed his cassock without bothering to light the candle. He went to the window, opened the casement, and leaned out, remembering his first Paris night. There were fewer candles now in the windows up and down the street. Schools were closing for vacation, as Louis le Grand shortly would. He lifted his face to the damp air and clouded sky and wondered if there would be rain before morning. Think of rain, weather, the tragedy, the ballet, he told himself. Even of the real tragedy, whose final act had played out tonight on the stage. Think of anything but Pernelle.

  He felt his way to the prie-dieu, groping like a blind man, but not because of the dark. He sank to his knees and prayed for the Doutés, living and dead, for Lisette’s dead child, for her maid Agnes waiting for her trial in the Châtelet, and the porter and the tutor. He even brought himself to pray for Guise and Moulin, because guilty and innocent alike had been brought to ruin by greed and hatred and the love of power. He turned then to giving thanks for the preservation of his own life and for La Reynie’s unexpected humanity. Finally, he prayed for Pernelle’s safe journey and that she would find her daughter and sister-in-law waiting for her. But those last prayers cost him dearly and his heart overflowed with the pain of her going. These last few days, even with their danger, exhaustion, and worry, had been so full of the happiness he’d always felt in her presence. Just knowing she was there, at Mme LeClerc’s, even when he hadn’t seen her, had lit a small, bright fire in his heart. What will I do now, he asked the Silence. Finish the school term, make my yearly Jesuit retreat, and during it make my decision about the Society? He dropped his head onto his arms. “Tell me,” he begged aloud. “I love her. What do you want of me?” The Silence held its peace. Some quality in the air, or maybe it was only his misery, made Charles feel that It was holding Its breath.

  “Charles?” The door closed softly and Pernelle’s feet moved lightly across the ancient floorboards.

  Charles raised his head. “What’s wrong? How did you get here?”

  “Shhh.” Her fingers were warm on his lips. “Nothing’s wrong. Mme LeClerc found her stairway key; it was in a flour barrel.” She withdrew her hand and he waited, like a man in a trance. “She said spending my last night down there was a terrible waste. She said it wasn’t fair. To either of us.”

  “And what do you say?” he said in a choked whisper. “What’s fair to you?”

  “I am here,” she said simply. “David is gone, I am not breaking any vow.”

  “But I would be.”

  “Not a final vow.”

  “That’s hair splitting.”

  “Well, that thing Jesuits do—casuistry, isn’t it called? Don’t you teach that the end justifies the means?”

  “It’s much more complicated than that.” Suddenly he was laughing. And thinking that any man who thought body and mind had no commerce had never loved a brilliant woman. “Is it the custom among Huguenots to discuss theology when considering—um—?”

  “Considering bedding together? It has been known,” she said gravely, but he could hear her smile even though he couldn’t see it. “But it is not required.”

  “What is the end the means might justify, Pernelle?”

  “Whole-heartedness.”

  “Whose?”

  “Ours. But especially yours.”

  “Expound, my learned maîtresse,” he said laughing softly.

  “We loved each other, Charles. We meant to marry. When they pulled us apart, I thought I would die. But I learned to love David and he loved me. My heart grew into one whole piece again. But I think yours has not been able to. You need a whole heart to give to God.” She put her hand on his cheek and a small yearning sound escaped her. “Make love with me, Charles. For both our sakes. If we go through this last door together, then perhaps we can go on apart.”

  Her fingers fumbling at his neck to untie his shirt stirred him into fire. He rose to his feet, untied the cloak she wore, and pushed her shirt—his shirt—off her shoulders. He held her against his naked chest, his face buried in her hair, and felt like every lost creature who has ever found its home again. The Silence, or the air around him, or maybe just he himself, released a long-held breath.

  Hours later, when he woke, it was deep night and rain was blowing against the window. For a moment, he thought he was a boy at home again and his brother was taking up most of the bed. Then his heart nearly burst with thankfulness as he realized that the knees in his back and the arm across his waist were Pernelle’s. He wriggled closer to her, and she stirred and kissed his spine.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Not morning yet, but very, very good!”

  He rolled onto his back, hardly feeling his wound, and pulled her on top of him. “My joy, my heart, my love.” He was nearly singing. “Thank you. For your wisdom, for your great gift. I kneel at your feet, I—”

  Laughing, she covered his mouth with hers and then pulled away. “That’s all very pretty, but get to business, sir.”

  So he did.

  When he woke again she was sleeping soundly. Her head was on his chest and he breathed in the sweet scent of her hair. He hoped he hadn’t been repulsive, still wearing his day’s sweat. But she hadn’t seemed repulsed. His smile was broad enough to light the dark. But dawn was coming. His arm tightened around her. Before dawn, she would go. He tensed against grief’s assault, but it didn’t come. But I love her with all my heart, he said to the Silence, appalled at his lack of feeling.

  Yes, Something said very distinctly in the dark. Charles froze, feeling like Adam discovered with Eve after they’d shared the apple, and everything else. Pernelle sighed in her sleep and put a warm hand over his heart. Light too bright to look at seemed to come from nowhere and flood everything, every smallest piece of him. And he finally understood, though he also didn’t understand at all. She would go and he would love her. And he would love many other things, though not any other woman. Yes, the Silence said.

  Darkness still held Paris in its arms when Charles and Pernelle went hand in hand to the street passage. The college was sleeping and the porter hadn’t yet come to his post. Pernelle was in her boy’s clothes, wearing her cloak and with the last of the rector’s pouch of coins in her pocket. Before they reached the postern, the bell rang beside it. They stopped and turned to each other. Charles put down his lantern.

  “Go with God, beloved heart,” he whispered, and kissed her. “Always.”

  Her dark eyes were silvery with tears. “Always.”

  Charles unbarred the postern door and Lieutenant-Général La Reynie, booted and cloaked, stepped out of the darkness.

  “Quickly,” he whispered.

  Pernelle’s hand rested briefly against Charles’s heart. Then she turned to La Reynie and Charles closed and rebarred the door. He listened to the two pairs of feet walk toward the river and when he could no longer hear them, he went to the chapel. He meant to go to the Virgin’s altar, but he found himself instead standing in front of the statue of Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orleans. He knelt where he and Pernelle had knelt just a few days before, and waited for the blow of her leaving to hit him. Instead, an emptiness grew inside him. Not a grieving emptiness. A waiting emptiness, he thought, gazing uneasily up at the Maid. She stared over his head, as though she were waiting, too, waiting for the English army and knowing, against all the odds, that she would prevail.

  “But they killed you,” Charles said out loud. The statue calmly studied the horizon. “They burned you,” he said. But only after she had saved France. His breath began to come short. “I have no power,” he protested, “no power at all!” But neither had she, only belief in her truth. They could take her mortal life—and they had—but God had held her soul’s life. So she had clung to nothing but God; her enemies had had nothing she wanted. She’d had no price. That was her power. Charles stood up. Or something pulled him upright.

  Chapter 38

  The servant who opened the Hôtel de Louvois’s gate was as brusque as the war minister
himself. He waved Charles across the cobbles to the house door and disappeared into one of the ground-floor outbuildings. Charles picked up the iron fist that served as a knocker and let it fall.

  “I am Maître Charles Matthieu Beuvron du Luc,” he said to the surly footman who answered, putting several generations of Provençal noblemen into his voice. “Please tell M. Louvois that I must speak with him. About last night’s events at the college of Louis le Grand.”

  “Wait here.”

  He waited in an antechamber done in rich red, listening to the early-morning stirrings of the household. The footman returned as quickly as Charles thought he would and led him upstairs to a large room whose glowing parquet was an expanse of eight-pointed golden stars. Across the room, in front of long windows, Louvois sat writing behind a massive black desk. Ebony, Charles thought. The room was so padded and plump with luxury that Louvois’s plum brocade house robe and turbanlike head wrapping made him seem like just one more piece of costly decor.

  “Monsieur.” Charles nodded to him slightly.

  Louvois glanced up. “What do you want? It is barely day.”

  “You will have heard, I think, in spite of the hour, of last night’s deaths at the college.”

  “Of course,” Louvois said, still writing. “It is all over Paris. Père Guise was my confessor,” he added accusingly, as though Charles were disturbing his mourning.

  “Before Père Guise and Frère Moulin died, they talked.”

  Louvois’s hands stilled. “I did not know this Moulin.”

  “On the contrary, Monsieur Louvois. Last night Frère Moulin talked much about his usefulness to you. As your errand boy for the dragonnades you and Père Guise have run these last years. I know the king knows about them. I know he wants them to go on. I also know that if they are forced publicly on his notice, you will be the scapegoat. He will accuse you of usurping his authority and you will likely die a very public traitor’s death to save his face.”

  “The man who forces such knowledge on Louis will also die,” Louvois said, purple with fury. “He will see to that, make no mistake.”

  “Nevertheless, I am here to give you notice, monsieur, that if the dragonnades continue, I will force all that on the king. The next dragonnade is planned for Metz, I understand.”

  Louvois’s eyes bulged. “You are insane. You are a rogue Jesuit. Do you expect me to believe that Jesuit policy toward heretics has changed?”

  “I expect you to believe that I will do what I have said.”

  Louvois surged to his feet and bellowed for his servants. Charles ran. Halfway down the stairs, he straight-armed a man over the banister and into the path of more men coming behind him. Charles gained the front door, covered the courtyard in a few long strides, and was through the gate, just opened for a carriage coming in. He took a twisting path away from the rue de Richelieu and when he passed the open door of a tiny church, he ducked inside.

  Hidden in a corner’s shadows, he gasped for breath, sweating with fear and holding on to the wall because his legs threatened to collapse under him. What in God’s name had he just done? Had he truly gone insane? A priest came out of the sacristy and started toward him, and Charles went back outside, wary and watchful, but no one paid him any attention. He walked toward the river, gulping rain-washed air, still asking himself what he’d done. As he crossed the Petit Pont, the utterly simple answer came: He had done what he could.

  He had also guaranteed that he would be looking over his shoulder for as long as he lived. As long as Louvois lived, anyway. Rogue Jesuit, Louvois had called Charles. In a way, he supposed he was. Yesterday he had helped Louis le Grand to a public triumph. But this morning he had kissed his lover good-bye. Just now, he had struck a blow against what many Jesuits applauded. And before any of that, he’d already had penance coming. For the lies that had bought him time to solve the murders, for acting as La Reynie’s spy, for breaking his vow of chastity. But not for loving. Never for loving. If that made him a rogue, then rogue he was.

  Dodging the rivulets of mud sliding down the rue St. Jacques, he climbed toward the college. When he reached it, he stopped in the street and looked up at the words carved over the double doors. Collegium Magni Ludo. The College of Louis the Great, the king’s college. But not only the king’s. It was also Le Picart’s, Jouvancy’s, Dainville’s, Fabre’s, God’s . . .

  “God’s thorn bonnet, mon père!” A cart driver pulled his horse nearly onto its haunches to keep from hitting Charles. “Are you going in or out? Make up your mind!”

  “In,” Charles said. “I’m going in.”

  Epilogue

  The last dragonnade in France took place in August 1686 in Metz.

  In 1688, when the Catholic King James II fled England, rumors that French dragoons were poised to invade and dragonnade the Anglicans helped to bring about his fall. The English throne went to his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange.

  Marie, Duchesse of Guise, died without heirs in 1688. In 1700, the Hôtel de Guise passed to the Prince of Soubise, in token of Louis XIV’s gratitude for the illicit favors of the Prince’s wife.

  According to St. Simone, orders for the Minister of War François Michel Le Tellier de Louvois’s arrest and permanent imprisonment in the Bastille were issued on July 16, 1691. On that day, before he could be arrested, Louvois died suddenly at court, of apoplexy.

  Author’s Note

  The past is a patchwork of what we know, what we may guess, and what we can never know. As others have said, the writer of historical fiction often works where the known joins the unknown, and I worked in that way in this story when I imagined a reason for the end of the dragonnades in France. I also used what we do know: deliberately created rumors of English dragonnades did help to topple King James from the throne, but I have imagined how they were created. The sixteenth-century Wars of Religion and the bitter fruit they bore in the seventeenth century were also real.

  The college of Louis le Grand was much as I have presented it. Now a state lycée, it still stands on the Left Bank’s rue St. Jacques. Until the early 1770s, when the Society of Jesus was suppressed by the pope, the Jesuits produced drama, ballets, and even opera in their schools as part of teaching rhetoric, and many ballet programs survive. The August 1686 performance, with the Siamese ambassadors in the audience, is historical.

  Many of the story’s characters are real people. Lieutenant-Général La Reynie is sometimes called the first modern police official. Michel Louvois, Louis XIV’s feared minister of war, directed the dragoons and much else in France. The great Pierre Beauchamps was the Louis le Grand ballet master and Père Joseph Jouvancy was a renowned rhetoric master at the college at the time of the story. The House of Guise and its Catholic League played pivotal roles in the Wars of Religion, and in Charles’s time, Marie of Guise had her “court” in the Hôtel de Guise in the rue Paradis. Père Sebastian Guise, her nephew, is imaginary.

  Charles and Pernelle are also imagined, but the du Luc family was real. Charles Gaspard du Luc was bishop of Marseilles and later archbishop of Paris—though his actions in this story are invented. Two boys named Antoine and Philippe Douté are listed as student performers in a Louis le Grand ballet program, though their names are all I know about them. A Père Le Picart was the college rector in 1686, but beyond his name, he, too, is my creation.

  Why do these seventeenth-century people, real and imagined, fascinate me? One reason is that they live with one foot in the fading medieval world and the other foot in the emerging modern world. Paris was still in many ways a medieval city, though its walls were going down, “modern” buildings were rising, and what we would call urban renewal was taking place. It was possible to believe whole-heartedly in demons and alchemy, while keeping abreast of the latest developments in telescopes, microscopes, and anatomy, and speculating about extraterrestrial worlds.

  I have tried to make the story’s people true to their own century, and not just us in costumes. My hope is tha
t their humanity reaches out and touches the reader, so that the reader can touch the past.

  READERS GUIDE

  The Rhetoric of Death

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Discuss the significance of the arts, especially dance and the art of communication, as a vital part of education during this period in France’s history. Though Charles came from a family of minor nobility and his education prepared him to take an important place in the secular world, why do you think he ended up where he did, first as a soldier and then training to be a priest?

  2. Being new to Louis le Grand, and with a checkered past he’d rather keep hidden, Charles had much to lose by investigating Philippe’s death. What do you think his reasons were for involving himself in the investigation?

  3. Discuss the devious characters in the novel. How do some use their duplicitous nature for good, and others for evil?

  4. When Charles finds the hidden staircase above the bakery he thinks, “The stairs changed everything” (page 173). What do you think he means by this? Do you think Philippe’s murder could have been avoided had the staircase not existed?

  5. This time period (the late 1600s) in France straddled the beginning of modernity and the end of medieval times. How do you think this time of great transition affected the characters and their actions throughout the novel? What seemed especially different to you from what might happen now in similar circumstances?

  6. Religious persecution and power are main themes throughout the course of the novel. Discuss why religion, government, and education were so tied together.

  7. After ordering Charles to leave the murder investigation to others, Père Le Picart summons Charles to his chamber and orders him to find Philippe’s killer. Why do you think Le Picart changes his mind? When Le Picart asks, “What human action, after all, is completely free of sin?” (page 215), what do you think he means?