A Plague of Lies (2 page)

“
Messieurs
, I beg you, calm yourselves,” he shouted, over the noise, to his students huddled together on the classroom benches. “All storms pass. The bells are winning, as they always
do, because we baptize them to make them stronger than the demons of the air. Listen! The demons are fleeing toward the south now.” By force of will and voice, he called the boys back to their unfinished praying.

When he looked up after the “amen,” one of the students, Armand Beauclaire, was frowning thoughtfully at the oak-beamed ceiling. Beauclaire, a round-faced sixteen-year-old with a thick straight thatch of brown hair, put up a hand and shifted his gaze to the teacher’s dais at the front of the room.

“Yes, Monsieur Beauclaire?” Charles called, over the storm’s receding noise, girding his mental loins. Beauclaire’s questions were always interesting and never easy to answer.

“Is it really demons,
maître
? If the demons of the air cause thunderstorms, why do the storms always end? Why don’t the demons win sometimes?”

“Win? You
want
that demons win?” The outraged speaker was the elder of a pair of brothers from Poland.

“No, Monsieur Sapieha, he doesn’t want them to win.” Charles hoped he was responding to what Sapieha had actually said. It was often hard to tell, Latin being the language of the college, but the Sapieha brothers’ Latin was heavily accented and mixed with Polish. “Monsieur Beauclaire only wants to know why they
don’t
win, which is a very different question and an excellent one.” But it was not a question Charles was going to discuss there and then. When not dodging lightning, he personally doubted the demon theory, though many people—including most of his fellow teachers at Louis le Grand—did not. And he had to get the class through a lot more pages of Greek before the afternoon ended.

Charles was in the scholastic phase of his long Jesuit formation, with ordination and final vows still some years away. Teaching
was part of Jesuit training, and Charles was a teacher of rhetoric, the art of communication in both Latin and Greek.

He raised his eyebrows at Beauclaire. “Perhaps the demons always lose because good is stronger than evil,” he said. And hoped that his belief in the second half of his sentence was enough to justify his evasion. “But now, back to our book!”

As the storm receded outside and he tried to find his place in the book open on the oak lectern in front of him, Charles wondered if he looked as unconfident as he felt. The senior rhetoric master, Père Joseph Jouvancy, was in the infirmary recovering from sickness. And the second senior master, Père Martin Pallu, had just fallen ill with the same unpleasant malady. Which left Charles in sole charge of the thirty senior rhetoric students. But, no help for it, there were still two hours of class before the afternoon ended. He smoothed the book’s pages open, pushed his black skullcap down on his curling, straw-blond hair, and twitched at his cassock sleeves. The long linen shirt under the cassock showed correctly as narrow bands of white at wrists and high-collared neck, and the cassock hung sleekly on his six feet and more of wide-shouldered height. With a deep breath and a prayer to St. John Chrysostom, the only Greek saint he could think of at the moment, Charles tackled the Greek rules of rhetoric, sometimes reading from the book, sometimes explaining what he read.

But under the reading and explaining, he felt more than a little overwhelmed by his responsibilities. Behind the teacher’s dais where he stood was a tapestry showing the unfortunate philosopher Socrates drinking his fatal cup of hemlock. Its graphic rendering of an unpopular academic’s fate made for an uncomfortable teaching backdrop, he’d always thought.

He paused, giving the class time to write down what he’d
said, and let his eyes wander over the benches. The boys were bent over small boards braced on their laps, their feathered quills scratching across their paper, and all he could see of them were the tops of their heads above their black scholar’s gowns. Louis le Grand’s students ranged in age from about ten to eighteen. The youngest in this class was thirteen, a little Milanese named Michele Bertamelli, whose mass of curls was as black as his hat. Most of the bent heads were French and every shade of brown, apparently God’s favorite color for hair. But there were also boys from England, Ireland, Poland, and the Netherlands—one with hair flaming like copper, some as blond as Charles himself was, thanks to his Norman mother’s Viking forbears. Today, though, there were fewer boys than there should have been, because three of them were in the student infirmary with the same contagion Jouvancy and Pallu had.

Charles glanced out at the courtyard and saw that the rain had nearly stopped. The storm was south of the city now, and the bell ringers of Paris were letting their ropes go slack. Relieved at no longer having to shout over the noise, he went back to feeding his fledgling scholars Aristotle’s rules for rhetoric. But even as he tried to make his dry morsels of knowledge tempting, his thoughts kept circling around all that he should have finished and hadn’t.

His biggest worry was the summer ballet and tragedy performance, only two months from now, on August sixth. In Jesuit schools, both voice and body were trained for eloquence, and part of his job was directing the ballet that went with the school’s grand tragedy performance every summer. This year, under Jouvancy’s watchful eye, Charles was working on the ballet’s
livret
—the plan of its four Parts—and would be directing the ballet itself. Happily, this year’s ballet was an updated version
of the 1680 college ballet, so he was only rewriting instead of coming up with something new from scratch. Full rehearsals were about to start, but because of Jouvancy’s illness and this extra teaching, Charles was seriously behind. And what if Jouvancy’s illness returned and worsened, as illness so often did? If that happened, Charles knew that he might end up directing the tragedy
and
the ballet.

He finished his lecture and told the class’s three
decurions
—class leaders named for Roman army officers commanding ten men each—to collect the afternoon’s written work and bring it to the dais. Then he set them to hear each of their “men” recite the assigned memory passage. Today it was from St. Basil’s writings. Greek recitation was never popular, and when the
decurions
delivered the bad news, thirteen-year-old Bertamelli sprang from his seat and flung his arms wide.

“But,
maître
,” the Italian boy wailed, “I cannot speak Greek, it hurts my tongue!”

Snorts of laughter erupted along the benches, and Charles bit his lip to keep from laughing himself. Henri de Montmorency, the eighteen-year-old dull-witted scion of a noble house, turned on his bench and gaped at Bertamelli.

“You’re mad. Words can’t hurt anything!”

Charles called the class back to order, fixed Bertamelli with his eye, and schooled his face to stern disapproval. The boy’s scholar’s gown had slipped off one shoulder to reveal his crumpled and grayed linen shirt, and his huge black eyes were tragic with pleading. He was one of the most gifted and passionate dancers Charles had ever seen, but he was also proving nearly impossible to contain within Louis le Grand’s rules—and probably its walls, though Charles preferred not to think about that. He suspected that the little Italian would not be with them
long, though who would crack first, Bertamelli or the Jesuits, he wouldn’t have cared to predict.

“To put Monsieur Montmorency’s puzzlement more politely,” Charles said, with a sideways frown at Montmorency, “how does Greek hurt your tongue, Monsieur Bertamelli?”

“That language has hard edges, sharp edges,
cruel
edges. It bites me! My tongue is a tender Italian tongue!” To be sure Charles understood, he stuck the sensitive member in question out as far as it would go.

“No need for scientific demonstration, Monsieur Bertamelli, and please pull your gown closed over your shirt. And if at all possible, compose yourself.”

Bertamelli yanked his gown onto his shoulder, pulled it straight, and clasped his thin brown hands together under his chin. His eyes grew even larger. “My tongue—”

“Let your tongue rest,
monsieur
, and make your ears work. Hear three things that I am going to tell you.” Charles held up his thumb. “Number one: Learning Greek will strengthen the sinews of your tender Italian tongue.” His first finger joined his thumb. “Two: Every educated man must learn Greek. We speak Latin here in the college because Latin is the international language of scholarship, but what the Romans wrote in Latin is rooted in what the Greeks wrote.” Charles’s third digit uncurled and his eyes swept the classroom and came to rest on Montmorency. “Three: And this is for each of you. You will observe the rules of classroom behavior. If you want to speak, put up your hand—as you all know very well. Now, Monsieur Bertamelli, sit down and prepare yourself for your Greek recitation.”

Bertamelli sat. Two tears spilled from his wounded black eyes and he wiped them with the edge of his gown, gazing at Charles like a martyr forgiving his tormentors. The room filled
slowly with a quiet, dogged murmuring that Aristotle surely would not have recognized as his native language.

Charles left the lectern and opened one of the long windows, letting in a rush of the unseasonably cool air the storm had brought. The rain had stopped, leaving behind the music of water dripping from the blue slate roofs and splashing onto the courtyard gravel. Charles had come to the school from the south of France less than a year ago, but he’d quickly learned to love Louis le Grand’s sprawl of ill-matched buildings grouped around graveled courtyards. Some buildings were five stories of weather-blackened stone, the oldest were two stories and half-timbered, and a few were bright new brick with corners and windows trimmed in stone. All the roofs bristled with chimneys and towers. Some of the courtyards had shade trees and benches, two had gardens, one had an old well, and one boasted an ancient grapevine on a sunny wall. Rounded stone arches led to passages between the courts and from the enormous main courtyard, called the Cour d’honneur, out to the rue St. Jacques.

It was in the Cour d’honneur, outside the rhetoric classroom windows, that the outdoor stage for the summer ballet and tragedy was built each year. As Charles stood at the window, he began imagining scenery to go with the final section of his ballet
livret
. This year’s ballet was called
La France Victorieuse sous Louis le Grand
. The title, like the school’s name, was in honor of King Louis XIV. Charles knew that one reason for the trouble he was having with the
livret
was his dislike of Louis XIV’s passion for glory, which the ballet would so grandly praise. Charles especially deplored the king’s indifference to his people’s suffering under the draconian taxes that paid for the glory-bringing wars. And he particularly loathed the Most Christian King of France, as Louis styled himself, for outlawing and hunting France’s Protestants—called
Huguenots—in God’s name. Part of his own family was Protestant, and he knew their suffering all too well.

But Holy Mother Church—the Catholic Church—had nurtured Charles all his life, and he loved her. He was certain that God was Love. Demanding, relentless, even terrifying Love, but Love nonetheless. Which meant that cruelty in God’s name was blasphemy. Which amounted to calling the king a blasphemer. Which was treason, pure and simple.

Even as Charles grappled with that thought, King Louis XIV himself stared blindly at him from the top of the Cour d’honneur’s north wall. The recently installed bust was a copy of one shattered by a storm-felled tree the year before, and Charles had developed a teeth-gritting dislike of those sightless eyes overseeing his daily comings and goings. He turned away from Louis and watched the dripping water dig a small pool in the gravel under the window. The tiny but deepening pool comforted him a little. Small persistent forces often won in the end. He had the sudden thought that maybe he could slip something into the ballet
livret
that didn’t praise Louis, some small piece of a different truth to raise disquiet in those with ears to hear… But even as he thought it, he knew it was impossible. Père Jouvancy would never let it pass.
Of course he wouldn’t, it would be treason on the college stage
, the cool-eyed critic in him said acidly.
The king is the divinely anointed body of France. Kings preserve order. Order allows good to flourish.
Charles shook his head.
But whose good?
he thought back at it. Not waiting for its predictable answer, he turned from the window to his work.

The ending bell finally rang. The students filed out and were met by a
cubiculaire
, a Jesuit scholastic who shepherded groups of boarding students to and from classes and saw that their chambers had sheets, candles, braziers, and the like.

As the
cubiculaire
chivied the boys toward their living quarters
in the student courtyard, Charles went gratefully out into the watery late-afternoon sunshine. But before he was halfway across the court, someone called his name, and he looked back to see the college rector, Père Jacques Le Picart, the head of Louis le Grand.

Bowing, Charles greeted him, noting Le Picart’s muddy riding boots and spattered cloak. “You’ve had a wet ride,
mon père
.”

“Wet enough,
maître
. The storm caught me on the way back from Versailles.”

They walked together to the rear door of the main building where their rooms were, Le Picart asking Charles about his own afternoon and nodding in sympathy at his worry over the approaching rehearsals. But the rector seemed preoccupied, and before they reached the door, he said, “Have you visited Père Jouvancy today,
maître
?”

Charles shook his head. “I’ve had no chance,
mon père
. But Père Montville told me as we were leaving the refectory after dinner that he’s much better and able to eat now.”

“Good.” The rector studied Charles for a moment in silence. “Will you come with me to the infirmary? I must speak with him. The matter may concern you, as well.”