The Astronomer

by Lawrence Goldstone

  “Certainly true,” Amaury said. “I heard that one of the cardinals recently hosted a dinner of sixty-five courses, at the end of which a naked boy of thirteen leapt out of a cake.”

  Broussard emitted a snort. “Im no student of Scripture, but I’II wager naked boys and cakes are not to be found in any biblical text, or perhaps I’ve been reading the wrong translation.”

  “You are with the Reformers then?”

  “One does not have to be with the Reformers to believe in reform.” “Indeed,” Amaury said.

  “Have you gone with the Reformers? After nine years in the theology faculty?”

  Amaury laughed. “Nine years. Yes. Sufficient to either guarantee one’s allegiance or his antipathy.”

  “And in your case it was the latter?”

  “I am finished with the Church,” Amaury answered, “if that’s what you are asking. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m ready to throw my lot in with a group that may be no better.”

  Broussard mused for a moment, his large brow furrowed. It looked like hedgerows. “Oh, but they are,” he said finally. “A good deal better.” Broussard placed his hand on Amaury’s shoulder. “Reform is a revelation, my friend. I would never have believed I could be so fervent about anything. Except money, of course.”

  “Are you certain you are not simply rejecting your own past? Choosing a path only because it runs counter to what you were taught?”

  “Quite certain. Reform is new. It’s young. It has swept away the stultification and corruption of centuries. We are the true religion, Amaury. The religion that Christ died for.”

  “Perhaps,” Amaury allowed grudgingly. “But I have read some of the ‘new religion’ . . . was beaten for it . . . but I am, I confess, still dubious that the Lutherans have any more to say than the pope.”

  “Anyone has more to say than the pope. Why don’t you come with me to listen? There is a meeting tomorrow. One of the new leaders of the movement will be speaking. Quite clever. Like you. You’ll find him stimulating if nothing else.”

  “Perhaps. Just who is this exciting new leader?”

  “His name is Jean Chauvin. He was forced to flee after running afoul of the Inquisition but has sneaked back into Paris just to address our group.”

  “All right, Geoffrey. I’ll allow you to corrupt me. Where is this meeting of yours to take place?”

  “The location is secret. Even I won’t know until tomorrow. Meet me here one hour after sundown, and I’ll take you. You’ll need me to vouch for you in any case. Come to the back door.”

  “Conspiracy and Scripture. What better way to spend an evening?”

  “Broussard will be your entrée into the Lutheran conspiracy, ” Ory had said. “It seems that not only were you purchasing heretical literature, but you were doing so from a heretic. Now you know why you are so perfectfor this assignment. Besides,” Ory had added, “we are almost certain Fabrizy came to the attention of the Lutherans through Broussard himself Fabrizy visited the shop regularly. As did you. ”

  Amaury made to stand, but then stopped. “Oh, yes. I had almost forgotten. A mutual acquaintance of ours was killed. Stabbed. In a foolish street robbery, of all things.”

  “Mon Dieu. One cannot take three steps in Paris these days without risking death. Who was it?”

  “Giles Fabrizy. Another student. Young, but a wonderful scholar.”

  Broussard pursed his lips, then placed an index finger on the point of his chin. “Fabrizy, you say?” He thought for a moment more, then shrugged and shook his head. “No. I don’t think I know him.”

  VIII

  AMAURY HAD LEARNED by necessity how to travel at night unobserved. Many a journey to either gaze at the heavens or read about them had been spent with senses honed to detect if he was being followed.

  And he was being followed now.

  He had left Madame La Framboise’s after dinner and walked along rue de la Cerise toward the Seine. When he turned right at the wall that abutted the river, someone had materialized behind him.

  Amaury continued west toward pont Notre Dame, walking casually. He must lose the pursuer, but without the man being aware it had been done intentionally. Announcing that he was on guard against surveillance would mark him as much as if he allowed himself to be followed to his destination.

  Amaury made his way slowly along the wall, clicking the wood heels of his shoes against the pavement stones, occasionally humming loudly. As the towers of Notre Dame came into view, Amaury increased his pace. He ceased to hum. By the time he reached the bridge to Cité, Amaury was walking briskly, but taking his steps smoothly to disguise their speed. He made no sound. He could not yet hear anyone behind him, although he was certain that his pursuer was now hurrying to keep up.

  Amaury turned sharply to the left on pont Notre Dame, keeping close to the buildings on the eastern side. As he passed into the broad plaza, the facade of the magnificent cathedral came into view. After three centuries, the Gothic beauty of Notre Dame never failed to inspire awe. With all its treasures, Paris would cease to be Paris without this greatest of monuments to God and Church. How starkly different was Cité than when he visited the Conciergerie. Candles burned in both towers in sufficient numbers to cast a glow on Sainte-Chapelle and create a false daylight below.

  He turned in to the plaza and hurried to a spot in the shadows. There he waited, just another Parisian taking the air on a late winter night. A steady stream of pedestrians entered the plaza: a young man with a scraggly beard in a red jerkin, an ancien in a green cloak, two heavyset women laughing at some unheard joke. Then Hoess.

  The wine merchant, affability vanished, hurried across, light on his feet for a man of his girth. His head swiveled to and fro as he searched the plaza for his lost quarry, jowls flapping like folds of cloth. For a moment, Amaury was tempted to stroll out and greet him, just to see Hoess attempt to stammer an explanation for being there.

  The Swabian stopped, hands going to his hips. When he concluded Amaury could not have made it all the way across into Quartier Latin, he turned and walked quickly toward Notre Dame. Amaury, he reasoned, must have entered the cathedral. The interior was so vast, and the stream of worshippers, even at this hour, so steady that Hoess would need some moments to check the nave and side aisles.

  Amaury waited a moment or two after the wine merchant entered the great doors to be certain the Swabian would not change his mind and pop out again. Then he emerged from the shadows and proceeded quickly across the bridge.

  At the far side, he entered grand rue Saint-Jacques. Montaigu was a mere ten-minute walk south from here. His appointment, however, took him east, to a basement on a small residential street, rue Alexandre Langlois, the third building in from grand rue Saint-Victor. After looking up and down the street one last time, he descended the small staircase and rapped softly on the door.

  There was no response. Had he mistaken the date or the time? After a few more moments, Amaury turned to remount the steps. Just then, he heard the click of a lock being turned. Soon afterward, the door swung open.

  He started inside but he could not see where to walk. The interior was completely dark. What scant illumination from the street penetrated the blackness seemed arrested at the threshold. Amaury leaned forward, trying to make out something or someone, perhaps just an object of reference, but could not.

  “Come in,” said a voice, soft but somehow strained. “Your eyes will become accustomed.”

  Amaury moved forward in tiny steps, his right arm extended to warn him of any obstacles. Why was there no light? Was his go-between with Ory blind? Amaury moved completely into the gloom before he noticed the softest glow coming from a room ahead and to the left. As the voice promised, his eyes were becoming accustomed to the surroundings, and he was able to make his way down the hall until the turn without stumbling. Ahead of him was a room with a table and chairs. A tiny candle sat in a cylindrical holder with high sides, shielding the flame so that only the most feeble gleam e
scaped. He made for the table and sat in the nearest of the chairs. There was a soft crunching behind him. A figure passed. All Amaury could see was the back of a cloak, its hood pulled up. The figure inside seemed to waddle more than walk, its feet not leaving the floor sufficiently to avoid scraping. The figure paused at the other side of the table before turning to sit in the opposite chair.

  When he did so, Amaury could not stifle a gasp. Opposite him sat the most astonishingly ugly man he had ever seen. Not even a man, really; more like a flayed animal. The creature had leathery skin, alternately dark and pasty white, which seemed to be flaking off like the bark of a plane tree. Two elliptical holes were set in the center of the shriveled face in place of a nose. Below the oblongs were dry, pale lips.

  The man smiled ever so slightly, the skin around his mouth bunching grotesquely like a child’s horror mask. “You can understand why I am averse to an excess of light,” he said in the same strained manner, as if speech itself was an unnatural act. He removed his arms from his cloak to slide the candle to the side. The hands were gnarled and misshapen. Claws. He was forced to place one on either side of the candleholder to slide it even a short distance. Finally, Amaury understood that he was in the presence of a man who had been horribly burned.

  “That is less offensive, is it not?” the man asked, laboriously replacing his arms in his sleeves. In fact, the small distance the candle had moved had not changed the vision at all.

  Amaury was too stunned to respond. He simply continued to stare across the table. As he became inured to the man’s deformity, revulsion began to turn to wonder. Only then did he notice the man’s eyes. They were pale green; intelligent and intense. They dominated the face, as if all the ugliness was artificial, camouflage for an indomitable and forbidding spirit underneath. Once Amaury gazed into them, he could not look away.

  “Would you care for some wine? I have found that it aids those who must remain in my presence.” The voice did not waver, had no inflection. With the unvaried cadence, Amaury could not be certain if the remark was jest or fact.

  “No, thank you,” he replied. “I do not find being in your presence taxing.”

  The crinkle of skin over the man’s eyes rose. Where his eyebrows had once been. “Do you not? I thank you for saying so, even if it is untrue.”

  “It is true,” Amaury insisted, and realized, to his surprise, that it was.

  “Tu egisti bene in mea sententia,” the man said in Latin. “You have done well, I believe.”

  “Have I?”

  “Yes,” the man replied. “You have advanced your friendship with Broussard. Have you learned anything?”

  “Only to confirm what I had already been told. Geoffrey claimed not to know Giles Fabrizy, but I could tell he was lying.”

  “Indeed?” the man replied. “Do you think Broussard had a hand in Fabrizys death?”

  “There is some distance between denying knowing someone and being complicit in his death.”

  “You like Broussard?”

  “Of course.”

  “He is a friend?”

  “Of a sort.”

  “But you would betray him to . . . us?”

  “If he is responsible for Fabrizy’s death . . . yes, I would.”

  “You cared for Fabrizy then?”

  Amaury remained silent.

  The man nodded. “Yes. Perhaps, then, you would tell us,” he allowed. “Perhaps not.” The man paused, looking down at the top of the table. “Perhaps you have grown to like Broussard too much. He is, after all, a bright and charming young man. Perhaps you will grow to find his heresies appealing as well. All that nonsense about bringing Man closer to God. Allow me, then, to enlighten you, to tell you a story about your Lutheran friends.”

  Amaury began to protest, but the man raised one of those shriveled claws to stop him. “You do not need to protest your innocence. I, as you, thought them simply men of good will misguided by a desire to initiate reforms to a Church that, as we all can see, is greatly in need of them. I, as you, met some quite amiable people among the Lutherans. But unlike you, my young friend, I have experienced Lutherans not merely as agents of change, but as rulers.” He reached once again to grasp the candle, this time to move it closer so that his hideous skin was fully illuminated. “The thing you see before you is the result.”

  The man replaced the candle with a dry chuckle. “I no longer fear fire,” he said. “I have so little skin left to burn.” He raised his eyes to Amaury and began his tale. “My name is Johann Liebfreund. I came to Paris from Basel three years ago. My emigration from Switzerland was not by choice.

  “I am—was—a tutor by trade. I spent my days trying to stuff the classics down the gullets of spoiled offspring of the merchant class who as pired to be taken for something better. I was what has been termed a ‘humanist.’ I had scant interest in theology, although, of course, I attended church and participated in the sacraments. As I am sure you know, Basel was perhaps the most cultured city in Europe . . . including this one. Scholars from across the continent came to study at the university and participate in the interchange of ideas. It was the most tolerant city as well, orthodox and reformers living side by side, worshipping freely. Erasmus himself chose Basel after he left Paris. When he arrived, he was assigned an assistant, a minor clergyman named Hausschein. Hausschein was a sour, foul-tempered man of mediocre ability, and Erasmus often teased him unmercifully.

  “Although Catholics still dominated the upper classes, Lutherans had begun to make inroads so that, five years ago, after Erasmus was long gone, power teetered between the two. To maintain its reputation for tolerance, the city council passed an edict guaranteeing freedom of worship, the first of its kind in Christendom. That was too much for the Lutherans. They had effected their gains by stoking the resentment of the lower classes to what they howled were excesses by the Church, including the hoarding of riches. The uneducated are particularly susceptible to demagoguery.

  “In response to the new law, a Lutheran minister organized a mob. He had Latinized his name to Oecolampadius. In German, of course, it would have been Hausschein, ‘house light,’ but Oecolampadius sounded a good deal more impressive to Erasmus’s old assistant. In any event, Oecolampadius organized a mob. Eight hundred met at dawn in the town square. After stoking their rage with a speech in which he assured them that the Catholics would steal their money and their souls, he demanded an end to Mass and the expulsion of Catholics from the government. When they had reached the appropriate level of fury, he turned his rabble loose on the city. By evening they had taken over the center of town, and by the next day their ranks had grown to thousands. The mob ran through the streets, ransacking churches, smashing idols and artifacts, murdering priests, and burning down whatever buildings they decided were harboring Catholics. In some sections of gentle, tolerant Basel, the streets literally ran red with blood.

  “Finally, they arrived at the home of my employer, a silk merchant from Italy named Frondizi. A quite decent man, said to be Catholic, even an agent of the pope. His two sons were quick and eager, and I had come to be treated as a member of the family. A rumor had gotten started that Signor Frondizi kept large sums of gold and silver in the house, a rumor that was unfortunately incorrect. When he refused to produce that which was not there, the leader of these God-fearing apostles of reform and true religion ordered the mob to fire the house. I was on my way down from my room in the atelier when the torches struck.

  “There had been little rain for weeks. The wood and paper in the house, including a magnificent library, caught fire almost instantly. The house became an inferno so quickly that by the time I had reached the second floor, the staircase was impassable. I turned back to try to find a window to leap from, but the first two rooms I entered were too filled with smoke and flame to get through. By the time I reached the third room, I realized that I must make my way across to the window or die. I began to rush through, but was immediately enveloped in flames. The pain was so great that at fi
rst I was conscious of nothing—I heard horrible screams and only afterward realized that they were mine. I began to sink to my knees when, incredibly, there was a hand on my shoulder, pulling me out. I was told later that a handful of broiled skin came off in that hand. Signor Frondizi had come up a back stairway. He dragged me back down the same way and pitched me into the street. I immediately fainted. I found out later that, in the attempt, Frondizi himself had been horribly burned and died two days afterward.

  “In the entire household, only a maid and a charwoman escaped unscathed. Of the family, all but Signora Frondizi perished, and she had been blinded and crippled. I was taken to a local physician, where I lay for six months, oils applied to my burns. Mercifully, I remember almost nothing of my convalescence. I was told later that for the first weeks, I shrieked in agony almost constantly. For the remainder, every time I slept, the fire came back to me. I avoid sleep whenever possible to this day, lest I wake screaming, the pain of the burns as fresh as—” Liebfreund paused and made to smile. “But enough of my misfortune. Suffice to say that only after two years was I well enough to get about on my own . . . if you can call this getting about.” Liebfreund paused. “A terrible story, is it not?”

  There was little Amaury could do but nod in agreement.

  “Actually, that was not the terrible part. The terrible part came later. Only after the incident did the mob learn that Signor Frondizi was not an agent of the pope after all. He was not even anymore a Catholic. Although he did not make a spectacle of it, he had become a convert to the teachings of Luther. He had even sheltered other Lutherans fleeing persecution from his native country. Do you know what Oecolampadius said when he found out about this ghastly mistake, these murders that he had incited? He said, ‘To die in such a fashion proves that Frondizi was, in truth, an agent of the pope after all.’”

  Amaury merely sat by the flicker of the small candle, staring across at a man who, in effect, had been burned at the stake and lived.