by Judith Rock
“On Monday. I hope Père Jouvancy will completely recover now.”
“I think he will. I have ordered him to rest until then. Very well. Montmorency’s tutor can watch him from supper through the rest of the evening.” Le Picart’s nostrils flared. “And I will set one of the proctors to watch the tutor. A cubiculaire can take the morning watch.”
Charles took his leave, gave Jouvancy’s saddlebag to a lay brother to deliver, and went upstairs to prepare for supper. When he reached the third floor and opened the door to his bedchamber and tiny study, a burst of gratitude sang through him. After the opulence of Versailles, the plain plastered walls and beamed ceiling, the sun pouring through the west window onto the dusty board floor, the narrow, gray-blanketed bed and scanty furniture, all seemed like a modest heaven. Heaven not least because he could close the door and have the two small chambers to himself.
Charles dropped his saddlebag on the floor, hung his cloak over the old-fashioned rail attached to the wall and his outdoor hat on the hook beside it, and pulled off his riding boots and put them in the wall cupboard. Then he shoved his feet into his square-toed, high-tongued black shoes and went to the small table to clean his hands and face. A folded piece of paper with his name scrawled on it lay beside the water pitcher. He opened it and saw that it was a note from Père Thomas Damiot, his best friend in the college, who lived across the passage. Damiot was also the priest in charge of the bourgeois men’s confraternity, a religious and social group called the Congregation of the Holy Virgin, which met at Louis le Grand. Charles was his assistant. The note told Charles that an elderly member of the Congregation had died, and that Damiot wanted Charles to help him at the Monday morning funeral Mass at Holy Innocents cemetery across the river. Charles was pleased, because he rarely got to serve at a Mass. Finding his water pitcher empty and dry after nearly a week unused, he instead scrubbed the road dust from his face and hands with a linen towel. He combed his hair and, having a little while till the supper bell, opened his window and looked out.
The din of the rue St. Jacques, the Latin Quarter’s main street, rose to meet him. Warm in the late-afternoon sun, the square-cobbled street was full of people walking, riders on horseback and muleback, street vendors trying to sell the last of their wares, slow loaded carts, and carriages with red-and-gold wheels, whose cursing drivers tried to find a way through it all. Across St. Jacques, the dome of the Sorbonne church shone in the sun, and Charles crossed himself as a chanting procession of clerics and laypeople passed beneath his window, carrying a statue of St. Antoine, whose feast it was. Day students just released from Louis le Grand, Montaigu, St. Barbe, and the quartier’s other colleges raced down the hill toward the river, shouting and shoving and taunting each other for sheer exuberance at being done with classrooms for the day. Older students in the short black gowns of the University of Paris, along with still older and more dignified students of law, theology, and medicine, thronged bookshop displays on tables set up in the street, indifferent to the traffic. Clerics of all kinds came and went in longer gowns of black, brown, gray, and white. Pairs of nuns and other women walked together, and coiffed maidservants looking for late-day bargains crowded around the illegal makeshift market stalls blocking traffic where side streets joined St. Jacques. A juggler on stilts had stopped at the corner of the little rue des Poirées just across the street and was surrounded by an applauding crowd. As a cart driver came level with him, the juggler tossed one of his six spinning balls wild, and the driver caught it and threw it back with a friendly insult.
At the river end of the street, the spire of St. Severin’s church reached from its ancient gray stone and swallows soared and dove around it. The trees showing above courtyard walls along the street seemed to have twice as many leaves as they’d had on Monday, when Charles and Jouvancy rode out of the city. Summer had really come. With a sigh of contentment, Charles leaned on the windowsill, soaking up the light and warmth. During the winter, the golden afternoon light-on the rare occasions when the sun had shone-had seemed like a cruel trick, promising warmth and giving none. Just thinking about the snow-swept, frigid winter, which had lingered far into April, still made him shiver. He sent up a prayer to St. Medard and whatever other saints saw to weather that the summer would be long, and hot enough to drive even the memory of snow from his Mediterranean bones. When the supper bell rang, he left his window open and went to the refectory, happier than he remembered being in a long time.
But when he was back in his room, replete with mutton stew and the greetings of students and fellow Jesuits after his few days away, his eyes kept straying to the still unpacked saddlebag on the floor. The ballet livret inside was nagging at him about its unfinished scenes. First, though, he turned his back on the saddlebag and went to his prie-dieu. He’d prayed little so far that day, and it was nearly time for Compline. Scholastics weren’t obliged to pray the canonical hours, but they were required to spend an hour a day in prayer, starting with the Hours of Our Lady and going on to other prayers. They were also required to make two examinations of conscience each day, and Charles would have to tell his confessor that he had not come anywhere near that at Versailles. As he collected himself to begin the Hours of Our Lady, Compline bells began ringing from churches and monasteries across the city. Their urgent, discordant clanging suddenly made Charles think that prayers must sound like that to God: urgent, clashing, drowning each other out, some sweet, some harsh as crow calls, all wanting notice.
He finished his own pleas and opened his eyes in time to see a level ray of evening sun strike the little painting of Mary and the Holy Child on the wall in front of the prie-dieu. Mother and baby glowed in its light, and their smiles seemed to welcome him home. One of those sudden updrafts of the spirit took him beyond pleading or wanting or worrying, and he laughed aloud. He was home indeed, and here was his family.
Mocking himself a little for his overflowing feeling, he got to his feet, picked up the saddlebag from the floor, and tossed it onto his bed. He untied the flap, reached in, and pulled out the livret. And stared in bewilderment at what he held, because it wasn’t the livret. It was a book of sorts, roughly stitched like the livret, but he’d never seen it before. Fending off the panicked thought that he’d left the livret at Versailles, he upended the saddlebag. And went weak with relief when he pulled the livret from the tangle of his dirty shirt and drawers.
Puzzled, he picked up the other book again, carried it to the window, and opened it. On its first page, in elaborate script, was written: “Armand Francois de la Motte, Comte de Fleury.”
Chapter 15
FRIDAY NIGHT INTO THE FEAST OF ST. ELISÉE,
SATURDAY, JUNE 14, 1687
THE FEAST OF ST. VITUS, SUNDAY, JUNE 15, 1687
Dumbfounded, Charles turned the roughly stitched pages. Except for the flourished name, the script was cramped and hard to decipher. Charles stood at the window trying to read it until the light failed. He lit his candle and kept on reading until the wick was consumed and the flame guttered out. Then he lay awake, wondering who had put the mémoire in his bag. His first guess was the Duc du Maine. Maine had taken Lulu’s silver tobacco box from Fleury’s room and could easily have taken the journal. The journal might even have been the true object of Maine’s search on Lulu’s behalf, the night Charles had talked to him in the gallery corridor. But the boy seemed to Charles like someone who would mostly shut his eyes to trouble. So if Maine had not gone to La Chaise’s rooms while the Jesuits were out and put Fleury’s book in the saddlebag, who had?
The first part of the mémoire was a conventional, self-aggrandizing account of the Comte’s public and military life, and the name-dropping included only other men, most far better known than Fleury. But the second part was another matter. It began innocuously enough, with comments on court happenings. But it soon degenerated into Fleury’s highly colored and self-congratulatory record of lecherous escapades with maidservants. There was also an account of his violent pursuit of a female courtier whom he call
ed simply Venus, including a tale of buying a magical powder guaranteed to make Venus throw herself into his arms. Then came page after malicious page recounting his fellow courtiers’ alleged peccadillos, none of which the said courtiers would want known-or even suggested.
Lulu and her misdeeds figured largely in it. Fleury wrote salaciously of catching her wading bare-legged, skirts to her knees, in the Latona fountain, of seeing her in the arms of the Prince of Conti in a gallery arcade, of watching her climb onto the roof of the palace and sit singing at the top of her voice, until the king sent two of his gentlemen out onto the roof to bring her in. He wrote indignantly that she’d cursed and thrown her silver tobacco box at him when he scolded her for smoking her little clay pipe. He gloated over keeping the box. To punish her, he said, but from a few entries about expenses and furious envy of a rich nephew, Charles suspected that Fleury had meant to sell the little box.
But the worst was that one day late in April, so Fleury claimed, he’d been walking in the gardens, near the Grotto of Persephone, an imitation classical temple with an underground chamber pretending to be the door to the spring goddess’s underworld. He’d stopped to talk to a gardener trimming a yew hedge. They’d both seen the handsome young footman Bouchel come out of the little temple, but Bouchel hadn’t seen them. Then Fleury and the gardener were “rewarded,” as Fleury put it, by “the sight of lovely Persephone herself, Mademoiselle de Rouen, coming languidly from the temple, rosy and smiling.”
When Charles finally shut the book and went to bed, he lay sleepless, going over and over what he’d read. The night was warm, and he threw back his blanket and pushed up the sleeves of his long linen shirt. Considering the source of the story, it might not even be true. But if it were true, and if the unnamed gardener had been Bertin Laville, it could explain the gardener’s death and the money his wife had found in the house after he died. If the gardener had seen Bouchel and Lulu come out of the grotto, he might have tried to blackmail the footman. Charles found it hard to think of Bouchel as a killer, but he could imagine him killing to protect Lulu.
Charles turned over and punched his pillow into a better shape. But if Bertin Laville saw Bouchel and Lulu come out of the grotto in April, why wait till June to blackmail Bouchel?
The college clock chimed midnight. Charles went over what the little Condé girl had told him about the argument overheard between Bouchel and Lulu. Anne-Marie had said that Lulu told the footman that he had to help her. And that Bouchel had pleaded-near tears, the child had said-that he’d already done what he could and that he had no money. And that Lulu had run weeping into the corridor, threatening to kill herself. With a sinking heart, Charles stared up into the darkness, seeing Lulu’s pale face and darkly shadowed eyes, and thinking about her frenetic and changeable moods. He sat up in bed. Women shout more at men when they’re expecting babies, Marie-Ange had confided just hours ago, when she told him her mother was pregnant. And Anne-Marie had told him not to make Lulu run, because Lulu had been feeling ill. Charles got out of bed and went to the open window.
Two and half months since Lulu and Bouchel were seen leaving the grotto. And Bertin Laville would know the signs of pregnancy, Charles realized suddenly. The stable boy at Versailles had said that Laville’s wife had just had a child. A gardener might easily see a girl hiding in the garden to be sick without witnesses. Seeing unmistakable signs of a princess’s secret pregnancy was a blackmailer’s dream. And if Lulu were pregnant, she had every reason to feel desperate over going to Poland. She could not possibly attribute a baby to a ten-year-old husband.
Charles’s mind stopped short and backed up. If this was all true, then what about Fleury’s death? Bouchel had been there when the old man fell downstairs. Had Bouchel pushed him, then, in the hope of being rid of the other witness at the grotto? Bouchel had said that Fleury slipped in water, and Charles had seen the wet patch on the floor when he went up to find Fleury’s room. And Lulu hadn’t had Fleury’s journal till later that night. So when the Comte fell, Bouchel might not even have known that he and Lulu had been seen leaving the grotto back in April.
Marching feet echoed along the rue St. Jacques and Charles saw that the night watch was returning from the river, a formidable phalanx of striding men, their swinging lantern striking flares of silver and gold from the stars and fleur de lys on the shoulder straps that held their swords. They passed by and went on up the hill, leaving the city drowned again in quiet and nearly invisible in the dark. In summer, the street lanterns stayed unlit, but even if they’d been lit, their candles would be nearly burned out by now. A breeze came up from the Seine and cooled Charles’s face. He looked up at the sky and its thickly burning stars. Was Lulu really desperate enough to kill herself? The thought made Charles half sick. If he did nothing with what he suspected, and if she committed suicide, part of the guilt would be his. For her death and the child’s. If there was a child.
He could tell the rector what he’d read and Le Picart could send word to La Chaise. Or he could tell La Reynie. But would they agree with his deductions? If they did, how long would it take them to move from talking to acting? It took only a moment to die. Charles suddenly wanted to ride to Versailles and take Lulu somewhere safe, out of the king’s reach. Someplace where she would have a chance to simply live. He lost himself in a moment’s fantasy of taking her to Languedoc, to his mother, where she could be just a girl and wade in the Gard River as she’d waded in the palace fountain, and harvest olives. A girl with a new name. And perhaps a baby. But free…
A pretty fable, the coldly logical part of him said. It rivals the fables of Monsieur de La Fontaine. Lulu harvesting olives? She would cling to her royal living like a leech. Shrugging off the probable truth of that, Charles said back, I’m afraid for her life. And you’re heartless; shut up. The voice didn’t. Besides, it said, who is free?
Charles leaned on the windowsill. “What am I to do?” he whispered.
The stars shifted a little, the breeze from the Seine died, and the darkness wrapped itself around him like black velvet. The air itself seemed to tense and quiver. He waited, every sense quivering. Slowly, breath by breath, the quiet deepened into the Silence that sometimes visited him. He didn’t dare to name it. But it spoke to him from the deepest place in his love of God. Charles, it said, and it was the first time it had called him by name. Who are you? And that was all.
Charles finally slept, but when he woke, the Silence’s question still echoed in him like soft thunder. After the early morning Mass, he went looking for Père Le Picart, only to learn that the rector had gone to the Jesuit house at Gentilly, along with the rectors of the Novice House and the Professed House, to meet with the Paris Provincial, the Society’s chief official in the Île de France, and would not return until Monday morning. Père Montville, the college’s second in command, had gone with him, leaving only Père Donat, the third-ranking administrator. Donat disliked and distrusted Charles and was unlikely to listen to anything he had to say, let alone act on it. He would probably order him to do nothing, which would make whatever Charles ended up doing worse disobedience than it was already likely to be.
All Saturday morning as he assisted in his assigned grammar class and then helped oversee dinner in the senior student refectory, he tried to make up his mind. He was hoping to ask advice from his friend Père Damiot, but Damiot wasn’t at dinner. The meal ended, Charles made sure that Henri de Montmorency’s tutor took his charge back to their chamber, and then he went to Damiot’s room, across the passage from his own. But Damiot wasn’t there, either. Charles went down to the postern to ask the porter if Damiot had gone out. Frère Martin, an elderly lay brother settled comfortably on a stool beside the door, nodded portentously.
“He did, maître. His father’s ill again and Madame Damiot sent for him early this morning. To the Pont Notre Dame, that’s where they live. No knowing when he’ll be back.”
“Is it this sickness everyone’s been having?”
“No, and be
tter if it were, poor man. Pains in the heart, Père Damiot said.” Martin clapped a meaty hand over his own chest and held up his rosary. “So I’m saying my beads and calling on the Sacred Heart for him.”
Charles sighed. “I will pray for Monsieur Damiot, too.”
The sense of urgency snapping at his heels drove him to the alcove in the grand salon, where paper, ink, and quills were kept. No scholastic was authorized to send notes on his own, but Charles wrote to La Chaise at the Professed House and went in search of a lay brother to carry what he’d written. If trouble came of it, he would make sure it fell only on himself. He gave the note to a brother who was too new to question him and saw him off, praying that La Chaise was in fact back at the Professed House. He wouldn’t be, if the king was still ill, but sending a lay brother all the way to Versailles was out of the question.
Feeling that he’d at least done something, Charles went back to his rooms to finish the ballet livret, writing with half his mind and one ear cocked toward the door. When the knock came, the brother who’d taken the message told him that La Chaise was still at Versailles. But the Professed House rector, Père Pinette, had agreed to send the note on the next time he sent something to Versailles. Charles thanked the brother, shut the door, and felt his sense of urgency becoming panic. It took so little time to let the life out of a body. He’d been a soldier, a scout, a spy in enemy camps, he knew exactly how little. One moment a man was breathing. The next moment he was not.
He went to his desk and wrote a note to Lieutenant-Général La Reynie at the Châtelet. He still needed to make his report to La Reynie about the little he’d learned of the Prince of Conti, though that did not make sending the note any more permissible. He gave it to the brother who’d taken the other note, then doggedly returned to work on the livret. This time, when the knock came on his door, the brother told him that La Reynie, too, was in Versailles. No one knew when he would be back. They’d kept the note, though, to give him as soon as he returned.