A Plague of Lies (4 page)

“No,
mon père
.” Nor had he ever wished to be, Charles didn’t say, folding his hands. He looked up and saw Le Picart watching him and seeing—as usual—more than Charles wanted seen. Charles forced obedience across his tongue.

“I will do my best,
mon père
,” he said. “For Père Jouvancy.”

“And for our king.” Le Picart emphasized every word.

“With all our hearts,” Jouvancy said, making the words sound like a liturgical response in the Mass.

Charles bowed his head, letting Le Picart take the gesture for agreement if he would.

Chapter 2

T
HE
F
EAST OF
S
T
. D
IANE
, M
ONDAY
, J
UNE
9, 1687

I
t was five wet, cool days before Père Jouvancy’s health and the weather were finally judged fit for a ride to Versailles. They were five distractedly hectic days for Charles: trudging back and forth from the infirmary with the ballet
livret
, rewriting all that Jouvancy didn’t like of what he’d written during the rhetoric master’s illness, assisting in the morning grammar class, and teaching the rhetoric class. He also met with the college dancing master, Pierre Beauchamps, to decide which dances should be taught next and oversaw the older students’ weekly almsgiving. As he passed and repassed the bust of the king on the courtyard wall, Charles had the absurd conviction that Louis’s bland stone face grew increasingly smug and satisfied at his unwilling preparations for visiting court. Finally, all seemed done that could be done, and Père Jouvancy, Père Le Picart, Père Montville, and Charles were all ready to leave that Monday.

But on Monday morning, Père Le Picart and Père Montville found themselves embroiled in a dispute over the college water pipe and could not leave Paris.

“No help for it, Père Montville and I will have to hire a carriage early tomorrow morning. That will get us there in time for
the presentation. But I want you and Père Jouvancy to go this morning, as planned,” Le Picart told Charles. “A slow ride in the good air will be better for him than a lurching gallop in a carriage. And he can rest well overnight—I understand from Père La Chaise that we will be expected to make an appearance at several court events tomorrow.”

So with Le Picart’s blessing, Charles and Jouvancy rode away from Louis le Grand into a day that was early summer perfection. The climbing sun promised warmth and the air was sweet. As sweet as it got in Paris, anyway. The sky’s soft blue looked newly washed, and courtyard trees were bright clouds of green above the stone walls. The people in the streets seemed as glad of it all as Charles was.

Père Jouvancy, expansive in the little rebirth of convalescence, was smiling on everyone and everything and letting the dappled mare Agneau, “Lamb,” choose her pace. Charles held his own horse, the restive black gelding called Flamme, to the same sedate walk. The gelding, named for his fiery spirits, tossed his head and danced, trying to change Charles’s mind about their speed until the crowded street forced him to give in and pick his way.

As he rode, Charles finally admitted to himself that he was more curious about this visit than he’d anticipated. His parents had met at court, after all. Not at the palace of Versailles, of course, which had not existed in their young days, but at the old Louvre palace across the Seine. And if he didn’t enjoy it, well, at least the visit would be short. The Jesuits would be presenting the gift, then returning to Paris on Wednesday, or Thursday at the latest, if Jouvancy needed an extra day to rest after all his exertion. Meanwhile, Charles told himself, it was a perfect day, he was on horseback, and there was no Greek to teach.

Though the sun was not far above the Left Bank’s blue-gray roof slates and thrusting spires, Paris was already hard at its selling and buying. As Charles and Jouvancy reached the rue de la Harpe, a water seller’s eerie, quavering cry of “
A-a-a-a-l’eau!
” rose from a narrow lane like the wail of a damned soul. A girl ran suddenly in front of Flamme and Agneau, holding out a bunch of late jonquils, yellow as the ribbons in her black hair, to a young professor in a clerical gown. Smiling and making suggestions Charles tried not to hear, the cleric told her he had no coins and tried to take a kiss instead of the flowers. She snatched back the jonquils and held them up to Charles, who also had to confess to a lack of money.

The girl smiled at him. “You’re better to look on than that other one. A kiss from you, then?” She hung for a moment on his stirrup, her red lips forming a kiss.

Jouvancy chose that moment to turn toward Charles. “Begone, girl,” he shouted, flicking a hand at her as if she were an errant chicken. “Go, out of his way!”

The girl let go of the stirrup and shrieked with laughter, pointing at Charles’s flaming face. Charles, grateful that the street din made it impossible for Jouvancy to say much to him, mustered what dignity he could and rode on. Street sellers shouted themselves hoarse, vying with one another like competing opera singers. “Asparagus! Leeks! New brooms!” rose above a rumbling chorus proclaiming old pots, lottery tickets, rosaries, and spring salad greens. A clutch of miaowing cats added their voices as they followed a woman balancing a two-handled pot on her head, gesturing with a ladle and singing the freshness of her milk.

“
Bonjour
, Maître du Luc!” a familiar deep voice called over the cacophony.

Charles reined in his horse and turned in the saddle to see Lieutenant-Général Nicolas de La Reynie, head of the Paris police and one of the king’s most influential officeholders, doffing his wide-brimmed, gray-plumed hat and smiling slightly. Behind him, a burly sergeant in the plain brown coat and breeches of La Reynie’s men kept his eyes stolidly on the swirling crowd.

“A very good day to you, also,
mon lieutenant-général
,” Charles called back, bowing slightly in the saddle. “I am glad to see you.” He’d occasionally helped La Reynie in the past, and though at first his help had been unwilling, he’d come to respect the man, and even like him.

La Reynie pushed his way past a leek seller to Charles’s side and said, with a half smile and a raised eyebrow, “Do you know, I think that’s the first time you’ve ever said that.”

Lifting his hat again, he bowed to Père Jouvancy. Charles introduced them, and Jouvancy smiled absently at La Reynie, then went back to watching a loud quarrel over the right of way between a vinegar seller and an impatient Benedictine on a mule.

“Is it well with you, Monsieur La Reynie?” Charles asked.

“Well enough,” the police chief returned, but his eyes were following something across the street.

Knowing that look, Charles turned his head to see who was unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of it. A pair of men, short capes rakishly draped on their shoulders and swords at their sides, turned into a shop doorway beneath a sign with a golden quill.

Charles looked down at the
lieutenant-général
. “Are you thinking of visiting that bookshop?”

“I am. And inquiring about what they’re selling upstairs.”

“Ah,” Charles said, knowing—as anyone in Paris would know—that
La Reynie meant books from Holland. “Dutch pornography or Dutch politics?”

“There’s a difference?” La Reynie said ironically, his black gaze still on the shop.

Holland was a perpetual source of pornography and of books and pamphlets attacking everything French, especially the king and his policies. Louis had made finding the illicit imports, and their sellers and buyers, part of La Reynie’s job.

“A new spate of tracts has turned up,” the
lieutenant-général
said, turning his attention back to Charles. “Vile things that look like pornography at first glance, but are in fact libels on the king and Madame de Maintenon.”

Charles tried not to imagine what such tracts might look like. “Well, I wish you good hunting.”

La Reynie grunted. “Where are you and Père Jouvancy riding to?”

“Interestingly enough, to Versailles,” Charles said. “To present a gift to Madame de Maintenon.”

“Well, don’t mention the tracts. As far as I know, she hasn’t heard about them, and God send she never does.” La Reynie eyed Charles. “You don’t look eager to arrive at court.”

“I’m not.” Charles glanced at Jouvancy to make sure he wasn’t listening. But the rhetoric master was absorbed in watching a hatter shaping the brim of a shiny black beaver hat just inside the open window of his shop.

“Maître du Luc.” La Reynie put a lace-cuffed hand on Charles’s bridle. “Do me the favor of keeping your eyes open while you are there.”

“Open for what? Don’t you have
mouches
at Versailles?” La Reynie, like everyone with power, had “flies”—spies—in high places, listening and reporting.

“Swarms of them. And everyone, no doubt, can identify them on sight. Do you know who the Prince of Conti is?”

“I know he’s a Prince of the Blood. Close kin to the king.”

“Yes.” La Reynie studied the cobbles, as though debating what to say. “Questions are being raised—again—about Conti and his intentions toward the king. I would like you to store up anything you hear. Gossip, who Conti talks to, everything. It would be a great favor to me if you would do this.”

“Why do I think you’re not going to tell me why you’re asking this?”

“Because you’ll listen more acutely if you’re not trying to hear what you think I want you to hear. Send me word when you return to Paris, and I will come to the college to hear what you have to tell me.”

Charles hesitated, his interest piqued and his conscience protesting. On the Friday just past, his confessor had reminded him—yet again—that he must learn to live quietly within the bounds of his lowly place in the Society.
On the other hand
, his logical self said,
isn’t Père Le Picart sending you to Versailles for the good of the king?

“Very well. If I hear anything, I will certainly tell you—though you know that I will have to tell Père Le Picart first. And I will not be free to come and go on my own at court.”

La Reynie laughed. “I don’t recall that that has ever stopped you,
maître
.”

The shot went home, and Charles winced. “Anyway, I cannot imagine that a lowly Jesuit scholastic like myself will hear or see much of use to you.”

“Oh, come, surely you know that it is in the presence of those who don’t count that people are careless.”

“You flatter me,” Charles said, straight-faced, and they both laughed.

La Reynie’s eyes went to the bookshop again, and Charles, watching him, thought about how much his opinion of the man had changed. Something he would have sworn would never happen when they were first thrown together. The early sun was strong on the
lieutenant-général
’s face, and Charles saw how deep its lines were growing. Well, the man was sixty-one, more than twice Charles’s own twenty-nine. Sixty-one was a full age for working day and night, as La Reynie did. He turned back to Charles, reaching to steady a radish seller who stumbled beside him. The woman glanced up at him, mumbled her thanks, and walked on a few paces. Then she stared, round-eyed, over her shoulder as she realized who had helped her. La Reynie’s courtesy to the lowly street vendor made Charles respect him all the more.

“When you return,” La Reynie repeated, “send for me.”

“I will. Monsieur La Reynie—please—how is it with Reine?” Reine was a beggarwoman whose mysterious past was intertwined somehow with La Reynie’s own, though he refused to say much about how and why.

La Reynie’s chin came up and his eyes turned wary.

Having good reason to know that this man’s secrets were inviolable, Charles said quickly, “It’s only that I think of her sometimes and hope she’s well.”

The wariness softened and the older man smiled fleetingly. “She’s well. Growing older. Like me. But well. She’s asked about you, too.”

Charles smiled, inordinately pleased by that. “She’s in my prayers.”

“As, I hope, am I. I wish you a good ride. And that you will go about your court business looking as lowly as possible and letting your ears flap.” He looked toward Jouvancy. “I wish you both a good journey.”