The Whispering of Bones
Page 31
“Do you ever miss the old darkness?” Charles said, partly to ease the other man’s awkwardness. “With these lanterns, I don’t notice the stars as much as before I came to Paris. I don’t somehow look so far up.”
La Reynie snorted dismissively. “I can live with a few less stars if that’s the price of being able to walk the streets without being robbed or killed.” He turned to get into his carriage.
“Wait, I’ve been meaning to tell you something. The last time I talked with Père Dainville, he told me a little about how Paris used to be. He said that you deserve an assured place in heaven for what you’ve done to make it safer.”
La Reynie made a soft surprised sound and looked at Charles over his shoulder. “Did he?”
Charles nodded.
A slow smile spread over the lieutenant-général’s tired face. “Thank you.” He climbed into the carriage, the waiting lackey closed the door and sprang up behind, and the carriage started down the hill.
Charles went to the door of the LeClercs’ bakery. Marie-Ange answered his knock and pulled him inside. “Maître, come in—oh! What happened to your poor face?”
“Someone hit me. But I’m all right, everything’s well.”
“That’s good!” She was wriggling with excitement. “We have something to show you. Papa, bring him!”
Roger LeClerc came into his shop, walking like a man escorting the king and carrying what looked like a small bundle of laundry. Solemnly, he came to Charles and peeled back the corner of the bundle’s blanket. A tiny, red-faced baby stared up at Charles. Its wide, dark eyes were fringed with eyelashes as long as a doe’s. Charles’s heart melted and he put out a tentative finger.
“My son,” LeClerc said tremulously, and the baby grasped Charles’s finger.
Charles grinned at the baker. “Well done, monsieur! He has a good grip on him! Have you named him?”
“He is Brice Roger Auguste LeClerc.” The father’s attempt at formality dissolved and he grinned back.
“‘Brice’ is after my grandfather. The ‘Auguste’ part is after Père Dainville,” Marie-Ange said. “Papa, let me!” She held up her arms and Charles gently withdrew his finger from the fierce little grip. Roger LeClerc carefully gave her the baby.
She stroked her brother’s cheek. “Maman says he looks just like I did, maître.”
“I can see that he has your eyelashes. How is madame your mother?”
“Maman is sleeping, she’s very tired. But she’s well.”
Charles glanced at the baker for confirmation.
“Yes, very well indeed,” he said. “My Beatrice did bravely.”
“Thank the Virgin and Saint Anne,” Charles said from his heart. He watched Marie-Ange kissing her brother on his minute nose and turned to LeClerc. “I will go now, monsieur. I don’t want to wake madame. I’ll tell Père Le Picart and Père Brunet that all’s well. And that your son carries Père Dainville’s name.” He shook LeClerc by the hand. Then he enveloped Brice Roger Auguste and Marie-Ange in a careful hug and took his leave.
Outside, he walked slowly down the St. Jacques hill toward the river. It was nearly full dark now. The widely spaced lanterns were lit and the street’s daytime noise had hushed. He walked slowly, thinking of all that had happened and all he’d learned. When he reached the river, he turned to the left, past the Petit Pont’s fortress gate, and took a short narrow lane down to the river’s edge. The Seine flowed fast and black, but even in the dark it was busy with boats and men and starred with lanterns. A late barge had just tied up a little way downriver, and men with lanterns and ropes were making it fast for the night. The clock on the other side of the Île chimed the hour, and bells from church towers joined it.
As Charles gazed at the water, the knotted mass of thought and feelings left from all that had happened seemed to float away with the river. For a while he stood blessedly not thinking or feeling at all. Then he found himself wondering idly where the Seine began, and thinking that someday he’d like to go to wherever it ended in the sea. And maybe farther than that . . .
When the November wind grew too cold, he turned back toward Louis le Grand. But he took a last look at the Seine running west under the swinging lanterns on the boats and the stars, and as he looked, he remembered what the goatwoman had said to him: that endings and beginnings can’t be untangled. That they flow into human hands and out again, like air, like water. He stretched his big hands in front of him, as though he were offering something. All he had to do, then, was keep his hands open. And his heart. Because no matter what flowed into them and out again, nothing was wasted.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In each of the Charles du Luc books, I’ve taken readers to different parts of seventeenth-century Paris. Much of The Whispering of Bones takes place west and south of the old city walls. The church of Notre Dame des Champs, where Charles and Père Dainville find Paul Lunel’s body, is no longer there, but its crypt still exists beneath a Paris parking lot. In the spring of 2012, I tried to visit it, but was unable to get access. There’s a photograph of the crypt in Paris in the Time of Ignatius of Loyola, by Philippe Lécrivain, S.J.
As for new historical characters in this book, Charles’s cousin—Charles-Francois de Vintimille du Luc—is real. His relationship to my Charles du Luc, of course, is fiction. But his background is fact. He was the older brother of the Bishop of Marseilles (who appears offstage in The Rhetoric of Death). He lost an arm at the Battle of Cassel in 1677, then became a naval officer, and in the early eighteenth century, was Louis XIV’s ambassador to Switzerland and Austria. Likwise, Molière’s famous play, Tartuffe, takes aim at religious hypocrisy—and while his relatives in this book, the Poquelin father and son, are fictional, a man named Poquelin was a member of the lay Congregation of the Holy Virgin at the Professed House in the 1680s.
The Gallicans and their desire to keep the pope’s political influence out of France were also real, and were an oddly assorted lot. Many were lawyers and judges, some were anti-Jesuit, and some Jesuits—like the king’s confessor, Père La Chaise—were Gallican. Past reality is never any simpler than present reality!
If you want to know more about the Paris Jesuit Novice House, read Patricia Ranum’s fascinating recent book, Beginning to Be a Jesuit: Instructions for the Paris Novitiate circa 1685 (Institute of Jesuit Sources, St. Louis, 2011). Patricia is an endlessly learned historian of seventeenth-century French culture, and has patiently answered my questions as I’ve created the Charles books. She found the handwritten original of instructions for the Paris novitiate in the Mazarine Library in Paris, where they’d been unnoticed for a very long time. She translated and annotated them, and included wonderful period drawings of the Novice House.
The other book that figures largely in The Whispering of Bones is the Monita Secreta—or Le Cabinet jesuitique, as the 1678 version I’ve used in the novel is called. I’ve wondered why so much dark mythology surrounds the Society of Jesus. All human institutions are certainly flawed and the Society is no exception. But the still widespread beliefs that the Society of Jesus was—and is—secretly scheming to run the world, or that the Society serves as “the pope’s shock troops,” as someone once said to me, are simply peculiar. The Monita Secreta, which means Private Instructions, was first printed in Cracow, Poland, in 1614, and pretends to be the secret instructions for a select inner circle of Jesuits about gaining inordinate power in the world. It was actually written by Jerome Zahorowski, a Polish Jesuit angry over being dismissed from the Society, and despite being immediately recognized as a forgery by non-Jesuit as well as Jesuit scholars, it unhappily proves that people in every age love a conspiracy theory. Contemporary scholars see parallels between the Monita Secreta and the notorious anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which fueled the tragic anti-Semitism before World War II. Hitler, who hated Jesuits nearly as much as he hated Jews, had the Monita Secreta in his library. The
Monita Secreta has gone through at least 148 printed editions, in many countries and languages, under many different titles; there was even an edition published as recently as 1996, in Moscow. These days you can also find several fringe websites warning against the so-called Jesuit conspiracy to run the world. Because Charles loves truth and hates lies as much as I do, the book became part of this novel.
Besides reading Le Cabinet jesuitique in the Mazarine Library in the spring of 2012, I also read the October 1687 Mercure Galant, the closest thing Charles’s Paris had to a newspaper. The Mercure was published monthly as a small book, rather than as the kind of newspaper we know, and circulated all over France. When I asked for the Mercure at the Mazarine, a man in a blue smock climbed a long ladder to get the book from a very high shelf. The librarian brought it to me, along with a weighted silk cord for holding the fragile pages down without damaging them while I read. As I opened the Mercure, I was moved almost to tears. I was holding a tiny piece of 1687 Paris in my hands. I could imagine Charles, or any of the other characters, reading it, passing it around, talking about its news, singing its songs. In The Whispering of Bones, I made use of details that were all new and interesting in October 1687, such as white skirts with orange stripes like Mlle de Subligny’s, the riddle Père Martin the doorkeeper solves, and the love song Charles hears as he stands at his window. For me, part of the joy of writing historical novels lies in inviting readers to touch the past. Another writer has said, “There are no dead . . .” When something allows the past and the people who lived there to flash into vivid and tangible life, I understand the way in which those words are true.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why do you think it took Amaury de Corbet so long to become a Jesuit novice? How is discerning our own vocations affected by our emotional lives?
2. Charles and his cousin the naval commander have different understandings of courage. Are they both right? How do you understand courage?
3. What drives the Jesuit scholastic Louis Richaud to do what he does? What effect do you think his family life might have had on him?
4. Did anything you learned about the Jesuit Novice House and life as a novice surprise you?
5. Why do you think books like Le Cabinet jesuitique (the Monita Secreta) are always so popular, even when what they say has been proven false?
6. At the end of the book, how did you feel about the Lunel brothers, Alexandre and Paul?
7. What do you think will be different for Charles, now that he’s no longer haunted by the terrible secret from his time as a soldier?
8. Is the goatwoman a witch or just a shrewd old woman?