Plague of Lies cdl-3

by Judith Rock

  Jouvancy stood in the doorway, blinking in the firelight and yawning. “Bonsoir, mon père, maître,” he said indistinctly, turning politely aside to cover another wide yawn. “I see I have slept into the evening. I thank you for letting me rest so long. I am a new man.” He sniffed the air. “Supper?” he said hopefully.

  “Le bouillon, mon père.” La Chaise got up and set his wineglass on the table. “And to start, let me pour wine for you.”

  The firelight made a twisting red rope of the wine as he added what was left in the small pot of wine to the silver pitcher. He filled a glass for Jouvancy, who took it with a satisfied sigh and sank into the chair Charles offered him.

  “You feel better, then?” Charles said, watching Jouvancy narrowly.

  “Much better, I was only tired.” Jouvancy settled stiffly on the seat’s thin cushion and smiled up at Charles. “Don’t fuss over me-go and help our host.”

  La Chaise straightened from stirring the pot. “No need, we have a few minutes yet to wait. What you can do, though, is show me the gift we’re giving to Madame de Maintenon tomorrow. I would like to see it.”

  “With pleasure, mon père.”

  Charles brought the well-wrapped reliquary from the connecting chamber and held it out to Jouvancy.

  “No, please-you unwrap it, maître.”

  When the heavy canvas and the soft silk wrappings beneath were peeled away, the cross stood glowing among the supper preparations, the bread and the wine, so that for a moment, Charles saw the table as an altar.

  “Very beautiful,” La Chaise said, coming closer to examine the shining gold and the deep blue inlay of the stone called lapis lazuli.

  “Show him the relic,” Jouvancy said.

  Charles picked up the cross, turned it facedown across his hand, and pressed a tiny flange in its back. The cross’s back opened like a door to reveal a little compartment an inch wide and three inches long that held a thin bundle of tightly wrapped and yellowing old silk.

  “Saint Ursula’s finger bone,” Charles said.

  “Her little finger,” Jouvancy added. “The silk has always seemed too fragile to unwrap.”

  “Very nice. A well-thought gift, indeed. And perfect for Saint Cyr, as Saint Ursula is also a patron of students.” La Chaise nodded at Charles to reclose the reliquary and went to peer again into the soup pot. He laughed softly. “We must hope, though, that Madame de Maintenon does not know how uncertain Saint Ursula’s legend is.”

  Jouvancy bridled, frowning. “What do you mean, ‘uncertain’?”

  An unholy glee showed briefly in La Chaise’s dark eyes. “As uncertain, you might say, as Madame de Maintenon’s ‘legend’ is in our own time-her ‘uncertain’ marriage to the king, I mean.”

  “Oh, dear Blessed Virgin!” Dismay furrowed Jouvancy’s pale face. “The lady won’t think-she can’t think-but that isn’t at all what we mean by it. I’ve never believed that Saint Ursula’s story was other than truth!”

  Charles bit his tongue for courtesy’s sake and hoped that Madame de Maintenon was as credulous as Jouvancy. He supposed that St. Ursula and her martyrdom might be real enough. But many people-including him-found her eleven thousand martyred virgin companions a bit much to swallow.

  “Of course,” La Chaise said soothingly. “I’m sure nothing of the kind will occur to her. And even if it did, she wouldn’t think of any connection to her marriage. Her mind doesn’t work like that, especially about holy things.” With a disconcerting glance at Charles, he added, “But you must admit, it’s amusing, if your mind does work like that.”

  Charles’s mind definitely worked like that. Trying and failing to keep the laughter out of his voice, he said, “There’s something else we didn’t think of. Or I didn’t, anyway. When Ursula was martyred by the Huns, eleven thousand other virgins were martyred with her. So it’s said, at least. That’s a lot of virgin bones.”

  “This isn’t just one of those other virgins, it’s Ursula herself-her own finger!” Jouvancy was sitting militantly upright now. “My grandfather brought it back from Cologne when he visited the Basilica of Saint Ursula. It cost him a fabulous sum.”

  “Yes, mon père, I’m sure it must have,” Charles murmured, not daring to look at La Chaise.

  “Beyond price, surely,” the king’s confessor said gravely. “And you can be sure that Madame de Maintenon will value the gift accordingly.”

  Jouvancy sat back in relief. La Chaise gave a final stir to the bouillon, pronounced it ready, and armed himself with a ladle.

  “Bowls and spoons are in the cupboard,” he said to Charles, who got three brown pottery bowls from a shelf and set the small table with the spoons. The king’s confessor placed the fragrantly steaming bowls beside the spoons and brought a knife for the bread and cheese, and the three of them stood with folded hands and bowed heads while he said the grace. Then, tired and momentarily at peace in the darkling room, they sat and ate hungrily, comforting their bodies with bread, wine, cheese, and La Chaise’s hot soup, and comforting their minds with good talk. Charles watched the candlelight gleam on St. Ursula’s reliquary and thought that perhaps their souls were comforted, too, by her presence. For the good of what they had to do here, he hoped she was present, because whatever the reliquary’s gold and lapis had cost Père Jouvancy’s pious grandfather, the little cross seemed smaller and more insignificant by the moment here in the grandeur of Versailles.

  Chapter 4

  THE FEAST OF ST. LANDRY, TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 1687

  Before half after nine the next morning, after a late and hasty breakfast of bread and the rest of the bouillon, Charles followed Père La Chaise and Père Jouvancy along the gallery corridor toward the central, royal part of the palace. Their heels echoed sharply on marble and parquet as they passed through a seemingly endless chain of sumptuous chambers opening one into the other. In spite of his determination not to admire the king’s ill-gotten grandeur, Charles caught his breath in wonder when they reached the Galerie des Glaces. Not long completed, the Hall of Mirrors was already one of the wonders of Europe. It was more than two hundred feet long, and the inner side of it was lined with “windows” whose panes were mirrors, reflecting back the sunlight from the outer windowed wall and the colors and jewels of the people moving between. Staring and blinking in the unaccustomed light, Charles realized that the benches and tables, and the enormous pots of orange trees in every window embrasure, were made of what looked like silver. He edged toward the nearest pot to see if it really was silver and walked into Jouvancy, who had stopped and was gazing upward.

  “Thank the bon Dieu for so much beauty,” the rhetoric master whispered, and Charles looked up, too.

  He had to admit that the ceiling was beautiful. Until he looked closely and saw that it was war spread over his head in sky blue and blood red and every other color in the artist’s palette. Louis XIV, in a billowing wig and a Roman soldier’s scanty armor, ramped over the battlefields of Europe, leading charges and trampling enemies against a background of smoke from burning cities, while a sky full of cheering angels watched and bosomy classical goddesses waited to bestow laurel crowns. Charles turned his attention to trying to catch sight of Père Le Picart and Père Montville among the throng of courtiers waiting for the war god’s appearance. La Chaise had set Bouchel to watch for the other two Jesuits outside and bring them to the gallery the moment they arrived.

  The king’s day, La Chaise had explained, rarely varied from its set schedule of private events and royal appearances, and there was little chance that this morning’s appearance would be late. From being waked at half after seven and the succeeding ritual of the royal dressing, to the reverse ritual of undressing and retiring to bed at half after eleven at night, Louis was the center around whom everyone else’s day revolved.

  The palace clocks began to chime the quarter before ten. Beside Charles, La Chaise sighed with relief at the sight of a pair of three-cornered formal Jesuit hats called bonnets coming toward them, bobbing beh
ind the footman Bouchel, who was cleaving the gathered courtiers like Moses in the Red Sea. As the footman delivered Le Picart and Montville, a hush fell and every head turned toward the door opening into the middle of the Galerie des Glaces. La Chaise drew his delegation a little forward to stand at the front of the crowd. In spite of himself, Charles felt his heart begin to speed. After all, he was about to see the king of France. He’d never seen a king, and quite apart from any personal feelings, the anointed king was the body of France itself.

  Suddenly, the darkness stirred beyond the open door. France’s fourteenth Louis let the doorway frame him for the length of a breath, stepped into the light arcing between the windows and the mirrors, and paced along the center of the Galerie. As Louis went, he raised his white-trimmed hat with its fashionably rolled brim to every lady. The mass of courtiers jammed between the royal pathway and the walls dipped like wheat in a wind, making their deepest bows and curtsies as he passed. Men-and a few women-darted forward and spoke quickly to him or placed small folded notes in his hand. Charles stared at the royal face as Louis drew nearer. Its expression of Olympian courtesy never varied. The man was more than merely regal, Charles thought, in unwilling admiration, he was regality’s ideal, its pattern. Light flamed from his diamond shoe buckles and made his brown velvet coat shine like the pelt of a sleek beast. And then the king’s dark blue-gray eyes were looking back at him. La Chaise nudged Charles, who removed his bonnet and deeply inclined his head, the protocol for clerics before their king, showing that they honored and served him, but bent the knee only to God.

  Still looking down, Charles watched the shapely black-stockinged legs and red-heeled shoes pass along the glowing Savonnerie carpet. Then La Chaise shoved at Charles again, and he lifted his head and followed his companions into the royal train behind the king’s almoner. The procession, lengthened every moment by courtiers falling in behind, made its way back through the long chain of rooms to the chapel, where most of the courtiers went down into the sumptuously gilded nave, but the king and his immediate train, including the Jesuits, took their places in the balcony. Louis knelt on his thickly cushioned prie-dieu, set in front of a cushioned armchair, and his attendants stood in a semicircle behind him. Most had kneeling cushions set ready for them on the floor, and out of the corner of his eye, Charles saw that even these were pawns in the game of grandeur. He watched as one shining square-toed shoe inched its owner’s cushion forward, closer to the king, and then a different shoe inched another cushion beyond it. Someone else cleared his throat, and both cushions were inched back to where they started.

  The Mass began, celebrated by a Franciscan priest. The heart-lifting musical setting was gloriously sung by a choir of men and boys accompanied by violins and oboes, but instead of losing himself in the liturgy as he usually did, Charles could not stop drinking in the colors, the music, the rich fabric, and the jewels of the crowd. Not to mention how the sunlight played over all of it, since the chapel’s windows, fittingly for a king who likened himself to the sun, were mostly clear glass, in the new fashion. And there in the midst of it, the Sun King-the man who rode his charger over the dead and dying on the ceiling of the Galerie des Glaces-was praying.

  Which was more than Charles managed to do, and by the time the Mass was ended, he was in a thoroughly bad humor with himself. Feeling as though he’d been caught in a trap of richness, he kept his eyes rigidly on his low-heeled, square-toed black shoes as Louis left the chapel, and kept them there as he waited with his fellow Jesuits for the royal attendants to sweep through the door after the king. Oh, for God’s sake-and I do mean that literally-can’t you just enjoy the beauty? the acid part of Charles’s mind said. I am enjoying it, Charles said even more acidly back, that’s the trouble. Oh, yes? the inner voice said. What a very un-Jesuit position to take. A very Jansenist position, in fact, the voice taunted, Jansenist Catholics being so austere that they rejected beauty entirely, insisting that it distracted the soul from God. The voice went on needling him. Jansenists say they love only what is ugly. Are you going to join them, then? Of course not, Charles returned indignantly.

  “And shut up!” He realized he’d said it out loud only when Jouvancy turned an outraged face on him.

  Fortunately, La Chaise called their attention. “Come, we will get the reliquary, and then go to Madame de Maintenon’s antechamber.”

  The five men hurried to La Chaise’s chamber, where Charles fetched the reliquary while Le Picart and Montville washed the road’s gritty dust from their faces and Jouvancy gave the reliquary’s satin-smooth, carved box a last polishing. He started to hand it back to Charles to carry, stopped, told him to pull his white shirt cuffs another fraction of an inch below his cassock sleeves, barked at him to straighten his bonnet, put the box tenderly down on La Chaise’s bed, hurried to the bowl of water still standing on a table, washed his spotless hands again, dried them, picked up the box, and finally handed it to Charles. With an amused glance at one another over Jouvancy’s head, La Chaise and Le Picart and Montville got him out the door, followed by Charles with the box.

  Madame de Maintenon lived on the south side of what had been Louis XIII’s little royal hunting lodge. The placement of her rooms, nearer than anyone else’s to the king’s, made Charles wonder why there was any gossiping question at all about her status. When the Jesuits reached the guardroom that was the only access to her reception chamber, a large, impassive soldier barred their way. Charles found the Swiss Guard’s ceremonial indoor uniform, in the fashion of his grandfather’s time, slightly comical. Patterned in red, black, and white, it sported a starched white ruff, a padded doublet, and loose breeches gathered and fringed at the knee. But there was nothing comical about the pike in the soldier’s white-gloved fist. It was a menacing weapon, taller than a tall man, with a steel ax head and a long, glittering spear point.

  When the guard was satisfied that the Jesuits had reason to be there, he allowed them into Mme de Maintenon’s antechamber. Bright with sun from its big south-facing window, the room was full of men and women, talking and shifting from one little group to another. Charles was startled to hear the word poison slipping in and out of their talk like a sibilant snake. He saw that Le Picart heard it, too, and watched him whisper a question to La Chaise.

  Not everyone was gossiping, though. A few courtiers watched the door to the inner chamber like dogs watching a man with a leg of lamb, and more than a few looked merely bored, fanning themselves, fingering their jewelry, examining their lace or fingernails. Tapestries and gilt-framed religious paintings hung on the walls, and Charles could see himself in the shine of the parquet. It was as slick as a mirror, too, and when Charles sidestepped to avoid a glowering man striding out of the audience chamber, he skated into Jouvancy and nearly dropped the reliquary. Jouvancy yelped and grabbed it from him, holding the box to his chest as though it were a lady’s frightened lapdog. Montville patted Jouvancy’s arm, and Le Picart looked sternly at Charles.

  “A man who dances as well as you do cannot keep his balance on two feet?”

  “Not here, it seems, mon père,” Charles murmured.

  La Chaise drew them all to the side of the room, out of the path between the antechamber doors, and gave them a brief education in court ceremony.

  “To my surprise, the king expressed a desire to be here,” he began. “But early this morning he told me that he cannot leave his council meeting after all, since he returned from inspecting the fortifications at Luxembourg only on Saturday and there is much business to be done.” La Chaise gave them a moment to murmur their disappointment and then took them through the steps of the ceremony, finishing with, “You, Père Jouvancy, will be flanked by Père Le Picart and Père Montville. I will stand to one side, and Maître du Luc will stand behind you with the box. When you finish your presentation speech, he will hand it to you. You will open its lid and hold it toward Madame de Maintenon, so that she can see the reliquary. When she has admired it and thanked you, someone, probably the Duc d
u Maine, will step forward and take the box from you. Then all of us will step back, make our reverence to her, turn, and leave the chamber. Not backward, remember, for the same reason that we do not remove our bonnets to her: she is not royalty.”

  The audience chamber’s door opened and the crowd turned as one. A liveried footman nodded at Père La Chaise. Charles took the reliquary box from Jouvancy, who, with Le Picart and Montville, crossed the antechamber close behind La Chaise. Suddenly dry-mouthed and feeling his heart thud like any provincial’s, Charles brought up the rear. With a mental shrug, he silenced the acid-tongued part of himself before it could comment and gave himself up to the experience. The footman spoke their names as they entered a large chamber that Charles registered only as a brief blur of color before La Chaise stopped halfway down the room and led them in their révérence to the woman who waited for them in a chair upholstered in yellow brocade. She wore a ribbon-edged, rose-embroidered black satin gown that covered her shoulders, with a filmy black scarf partly covering her abundant dark hair. Behind her, a dozen young courtiers and two brown-robed Franciscans stood in a rough semicircle, their eyes flicking from her to the Jesuits. Among them, Charles recognized the three young people he’d seen playing ball last evening in the courtyard: the king’s eldest legitimized son, the Duc du Maine, his sister, Mademoiselle de Rouen, and the Condé child. Mademoiselle de Rouen’s eyes swept dismissively over the Jesuits until they reached Charles. Then they widened, and she smiled and whispered something in the Duc du Maine’s ear. Maine shook his head and hushed her, but she shrugged a round white shoulder at him and kept watching Charles.

  Madame de Maintenon nodded to La Chaise, who stepped to the side, and Jouvancy led the other three in their approach to her. Clutching the box and walking carefully on the polished floor, Charles tried not to stare. He hadn’t expected the king’s secret wife to seem so youthful. She was more than fifty, but her round cheeks had natural-seeming color and her eyes were as large and dark as an Italian madonna’s. They were also full of a cool, assessing intelligence as she watched the Jesuits.