by Rock, Judith
In desperation, he leaned his elbows on the rail and his forehead on his clasped hands and prayed for light. For the light of healing on the souls who’d come through these last weeks with him. For the light of mercy on those who’d died. Then his silent praying fell away and he seemed to see a great throng of men and women making their way through shifting light and shadow, as though they walked in a forest whose branches moved in the wind. The dappled light was always changing. The men and women sometimes saw clearly and sometimes groped in near darkness. They helped one another up and stumbled over the fallen. And all the time a deep sighing went with them, whether the sound of the trees in the wind or the sighing of the wanderers, he couldn’t tell…
“Maître?” A hand tapped his shoulder.
Charles came back from wherever he’d been and opened his eyes.
The baker’s daughter, Marie-Ange, made a révérence to the Madonna. “We saw you go by the bakery, maître. The college bell was ringing for your supper and I didn’t want you to miss it. Maman says you’re too thin.”
Charles was on his feet now, blinking in the candlelight, which seemed now almost too bright to look at. “Thank you, ma petite. That was kind.” He hesitated as she knelt in his place. “Are you staying?”
“To pray for maman.” She looked up at him and her brown eyes were full of fear. “That she’ll have a safe delivery when her time comes. So many mothers and babies die.” She turned back to Notre Dame.
Charles looked down at the little girl’s brown curls and frayed red ribbons, remembering a time when his own mother had nearly lost her life in childbirth. “I’m praying for her, too, Marie-Ange. And I’ll tell you a secret. So is the rector.”
Marie-Ange looked over her shoulder, her face suddenly bright with hope. “He is? Oh, Notre Dame will surely listen to him!”
Treasuring that up to tell Père Le Picart, Charles left her in Notre Dame’s care and went back to the college. When he reached the refectory, he halted on the threshold in surprise. Tables had been moved out of the vast room’s center and crowded close together around the walls. The workmen were gone, but they had begun building scaffolding in the middle of the room. Remembering his lateness, he hurried onto the dais and stood behind his chair at the far end of the long table. Le Picart said the grace and everyone sat. Charles ate with real appetite for the first time since coming back to Louis le Grand, but as he made short work of the stewed beef and mushrooms, and the lettuce salad, he kept wondering about the scaffolding.
When Père Damiot, sitting beside him, paused in talking to the man on his other side, Charles called his attention.
“Why the scaffolding, mon père? Is the ceiling falling down?” The old ceiling painted with gold stars was Charles’s favorite thing in the college.
“No, not at all! They’re going to repaint our stars.”
“Using what for money?”
“Old Père Dainville’s niece has given the money. You know Père Dainville’s sight is weakening. Well, it seems he told her how much he loves the stars, and she wants him to see them clearly while he still can.”
Hardly daring to believe his ears, Charles looked up at the faded little stars. Some had already disappeared, leaving only the faintest of gold smudges.
“That’s wonderful news!” he said to Damiot, but Damiot had turned back to arguing points of grammar with the other Jesuit.
Starlight, Charles thought, savoring the word as he looked at the ceiling. He laughed for sheer, sudden happiness. Even a man benighted in a forest could glimpse the stars. Even painted starlight was sometimes enough to steer by.
Author’s Note
As I said in the beginning note, this book’s Lulu is a fictional member of Louis XIV’s family, the Bourbons. I needed a “might have been” place to put her birth, and found it in the only gap in the birth order of the first five children born to Louis and Mme de Montespan. No actual child was born in 1671, so that became the year of Lulu’s birth. And because she exists only for the space of this story, loose fictional ends are not left dangling in real history.
Researching Louis XIV’s palaces of Versailles and Marly, which were within a few miles of each other southeast of Paris, was a fascinating part of writing A Plague of Lies. Versailles was constantly changing, so even if we’ve seen it as it is now, we haven’t seen it as it was then. Tony Spawforth’s recent book Versailles: A Biography of a Palace was immensely helpful, and is a great read for anyone who wants to know more.
I was so astonished by the Marly Machine that I had to use it. Built on the Seine near the palace of Marly, the Machine had fourteen huge water wheels, each twelve meters in diameter and operated by pistons. It pumped water up a long steep hill to a holding pond and aqueduct, and then to the gardens of Marly and Versailles. It extended far out into the river, like a rectangular peninsula, and was enclosed in a vast wooden casing with many levels and walkways. The Machine operated mostly unchanged until 1817, and then in various updated configurations until 1968.
The seventeenth century was a better time for watering your garden than for getting sick. In 1687, French doctors had been arguing about the medicinal use of antimony for a hundred years. Originally called stibium, antimony was a metallic substance that could be used in the making of medicinal cups. These cups were then filled with white wine, which broke down and absorbed some of the metal. When the wine was drunk, it irritated the digestive system and caused vomiting, which was thought to rid the body of illness. The medical faculty at the University of Paris supported its use, but other doctors (notably Guy Patin, who died in 1672) were violently opposed to it, insisting that it killed more patients than it helped.
As for other parts of this book that are real, the flogging the king gave Bouchel’s fictional grandmother is real—a woman whose son was killed during Versailles’ construction was flogged for confronting and loudly blaming the king on one of his inspection tours. The belief that “demons of the air” caused thunderstorms and were fought off by ringing baptized church bells is also true. In a letter about the baptism of a Paris bell, the king’s sister-in-law Liselotte remarked that the bell, garlanded with flowers, looked exactly like a hefty court lady of her acquaintance wearing a new and overdecorated gown. And “the most Christian king” Louis XIV really did covertly support the Moslem Turks in their attack on eastern Europe, because they were keeping his European enemies occupied and out of his hair—or wig, since he was probably bald by that time.
As I wrote this book, I grew very fond of Anne-Marie, daughter of the Prince of Condé and granddaughter of Claire Clemence, the princess of Condé, whose story is partly told in the second Charles book, The Eloquence of Blood. Anne-Marie and her three sisters were Bourbons and Princesses of the Blood, but because they were so small—like Claire Clemence—the court called them Dolls of the Blood. Anne-Marie, who never married, died of lung disease at twenty-five. The Duc de Saint-Simon wrote that she had “great wit, kindness, and piety, which sustained her in her very sad life.”
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. When the book opens, Charles is dismayed at the thought of being sent to Versailles. Why does Charles dislike King Louis XIV and the Sun King’s court so much? Do his attitude and thinking change over the course of the book?
2. What do you think of the way Père La Chaise handles his responsibility as the king’s confessor? How does he balance his role’s limits with the opportunity to influence the king? Do you think his motivations are ultimately good, self-serving, or both?
3. In what way does the character of the Comte de Fleury, whom we never meet alive, manipulate the novel’s development? How do you think things might have ended up differently if he hadn’t died?
4. Discuss the different positions of women at court. Is Mme de Maintenon better or worse off, being married to the king but not recognized as queen? How is the Grand Duchess of Tuscany’s role different from those of the young girls, Lulu and Anne-Marie? How are the two girls’ positions different from each oth
er?
5. Why do you think Lulu was so desperate not to go to Poland? Why does she do what she does at the end? Can you see how she could have made different choices?
6. Do you think the Prince of Conti is indifferent to Lulu’s plight? Why or why not?
7. How do the character and personality of Henri de Montmorency shape the events of the book? Do you think he has grown or changed by the end?
8. It is often noted that the entire court is obsessed with the idea of poison. Why do you think poison was such a frequently used—or frequently suspected—murder weapon during that era?
9. What struggles does Charles have with Jesuit obedience in this book? How is his attitude toward obedience different from your own? Do you think Charles will decide to continue as a Jesuit, or will he ultimately find the life too constricting?
10. Seventeenth-century Paris was a fascinating period, full of drama and intrigue. Would you have liked to live in Charles’s era? Why or why not?
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