A Plague of Lies (5 page)

Charles called Jouvancy’s attention, the priest signed a blessing toward La Reynie, and the two Jesuits rode on. Telling himself that whatever trouble came of what he’d just been asked to do, it would be La Reynie’s trouble and not his, Charles nudged Flamme into the lead. They passed the Convent of St. Michel and the line of the old walls, and the road angled southwest, past the Prince of Condé’s townhouse and toward the village of Vaugirard. Beyond Vaugirard they would join the royal Versailles road, which left Paris on the Right Bank and crossed the Seine at the village of Sevres. The ride from Paris to Versailles was a short one for a man in a hurry, but Charles had strict orders to take the journey slowly for Jouvancy’s sake, stopping often, and they did not expect to arrive until the afternoon.

“How far is it to Versailles, exactly?” Jouvancy asked, craning his neck to look up at the dome of the Luxembourg palace as they passed it. “I’ve been there, but not for many years, and then not from Paris.”

“It’s five miles,” Charles said, filling his lungs with the scent of flowering trees from the Luxembourg Gardens. Then he looked sharply at Jouvancy. “Are you tiring,
mon père
?”

“No, no, we’ve just set out, I am very well. Five French miles, I suppose you mean.”

“I could give you the distance in some other country’s reckoning, if that would please you better.”

“Pride is a great fault in a lowly scholastic,
maître
,” Jouvancy said with mock gravity. “But go on, show off your knowledge.”

Twisting in his saddle, Charles answered with a grin and a small mock bow. “Know, then,
mon père
, that we have fifteen English miles to ride, or, if you prefer, twenty Russian miles. In Spanish miles, the figure is less tiring—something under four and a half miles. And the German distance is easier yet, only a
soupçon
more than three miles.” He frowned and then shook his head. “I used to know Italian miles, but I’ve forgotten them.”

“I, also. Well, then, I shall ride in German miles and arrive fresh as the world’s first morning. Or at least,” the rhetoric master said wryly, “still able to stand up after I dismount.”

As the road bent south, the houses and convents thinned and gave way to fields and vineyards. They rode companionably, without speaking, listening to the country sounds of birdsong, cows and sheep, and field laborers calling to each other. Then there were more vineyards than fields, and the houses of the wine-growing village of Vaugirard began to line the road. They rode past the old church, with its carvings of vines and grapes, and stopped in the little arcaded marketplace to let Jouvancy rest for a time.

They tethered their horses to an iron ring in the stone arcade and Charles loosed the saddlebag with Madame de Maintenon’s gift in it and tucked it under his arm. As they walked slowly across the cobbled square to drink from the fountain in its center, Charles saw several curious faces watching them from upper windows, but it wasn’t a market day so the square itself was mostly empty. Jouvancy sat down on a tree-shaded bench, and Charles sat beside him. The church bells rang nine o’clock and the office of Terce, and Jouvancy took out his breviary. As a priest, he was required to say the offices, though in the solitary Jesuit manner, unlike the Benedictines. As merely a scholastic, Charles was not yet bound to say them, but he knew many of the prayers by heart and joined Jouvancy silently.

At the prayers’ end, they sat quietly. Then Jouvancy put his breviary away in his pocket. Charles opened the saddlebag, brought out two winter-withered but still sweet apples, and offered Jouvancy one. They munched in companionable quiet and
watched the little there was to see: maidservants with pitchers and buckets coming and going from the fountain, and a few old men walking under the arcade, their sticks tapping the stone. Pigeons drank from the puddled gravel near the fountain, the males strutting and chasing the softly cooing females.

“Spring,” Jouvancy snorted, watching them. He looked sideways at Charles. “You will do well to remember that it is always ‘spring’ at Versailles, Maître du Luc.”

Charles turned to stare at him and then began to laugh. “
That
sort of spring, you mean?” He nodded toward the pigeons.

“It is no laughing matter.”

“But I’ve heard the court is greatly changed,
mon père
, since the king has become more sober and devout.”

“The
king
may have become more sober and devout—and not before time, he’s in sight of fifty—but the court is forever full of ill-disciplined young people, and even Madame de Maintenon cannot change young blood into old.”

Charles considered the rhetoric master with some surprise, wondering at this irritable, moralistic fault finding. He’d never heard Jouvancy in this mood before.

“And so you are warning me,
mon père
?” he said carefully.

“Yes, and you can stop laughing up your sleeve about it. I saw that little flower seller flirting with you on the way out of the city! The court is also full of young, bored, pretty women.”

Torn between laughter and offense, Charles kept quiet and watched the pigeons. After a moment, he said, “Do you really think me so vulnerable,
mon père
? So uncertain in my vows?”

“I don’t doubt the sincerity of your vows, but you are young and male and well featured. As for what uncertainty there may be, time will tell.”

“Well,” Charles said, trying for lightness, “then it’s to the
good that I passed my twenty-ninth birthday on Saint Bobo’s Day, and am rapidly becoming not all that young.”

“Saint Bobo?” Jouvancy frowned and shook his head. “I have never heard of any Saint Bobo.”

“He lived a long time ago, in Languedoc. He’s much loved in the south and we call him Bobo, though his Christian name was Beuvron. He fought Saracen pirates to stop them raiding our coast. My father gave me Beuvron as my third name, since I was born on his day.” Charles grinned sheepishly. “But my family likewise calls me Bobo.”

Charles expected laughter, but Jouvancy only grunted and smiled faintly. Anxiously, Charles studied the priest’s fine-drawn profile, thinking that if the rhetoric master was already tired enough to be so fractious, perhaps they should turn back to Paris now. The priest’s light blue eyes were still shadowed and he was thin, but he had always been small. His slenderness added to his grace, which seemed bred in the bone and not something learned.

Thinking that Jouvancy might have personal reasons for cautioning him, Charles said, “Were—forgive me,
mon père
—but were you already a Jesuit when you last visited Versailles?”

“No.”

“Then I can imagine that you must have attracted much attention. But I am already a Jesuit under first vows. There must be some respect for clerics at court.”

Jouvancy snorted. “Have you forgotten Madame de Maintenon’s nickname for Père La Chaise, who holds what many would judge the most eminent clerical position in France?”

The little priest stood up, slapping the crown of his wide-brimmed black hat farther down over his fine fair hair, and stalked back toward the horses. Hoping that his superior’s current
mood was not going to color their whole trip, Charles hastily closed the saddlebag and followed him. He held the older man’s reins and stirrup and helped him mount, strapped the bag on the front of his own saddle, and swung himself up.

They rode in silence until they reached the southwest side of the village. There, Charles asked a boy with a flock of hissing geese if the road they were on joined the road to Versailles. Told that it did, somewhere beyond the village of Issy, they rode on, still without speaking. The warming air was thick with the smell of earth and Flamme danced and curvetted, shaking his head against the reins. Charles held him back reluctantly. The horse was not the only one who would have loved a gallop through the sloping vineyards green with new leaves, but Jouvancy could not be left to follow in Charles’s dust. They both had to content themselves with drinking in the spring air as though it were the local white wine. But under Charles’s pleasure in the day, he was still uneasy about Jouvancy’s mood and concern for his virtue.

Charles had indeed had a sharp struggle with his vow of chastity, but that was known only to his confessor. He’d done his penance and remade his vows, choosing chastity finally and with his whole heart. Before entering the Society of Jesus, however, he’d had plenty of experience with women. During his two years as a soldier, he’d bedded several willing and pretty women, whom he remembered with affection. He hoped their memories of him were equally happy. But all that was past.

Charles and Jouvancy heard the royal road to Versailles before they saw it. Galloping hooves, rattling harness, bouncing carriages, and belligerent cries disputing the right of way made them feel they were back in Paris. When the small road they were on unwound its last curve, they reined in, gaping at the stream of fast-moving traffic in both directions. Luxurious private
carriages, red and gold and black, and drawn by anything from two to eight horses, sped along the wide and level road surface. Charles caught glimpses of brocaded interiors and richly dressed men and women inside—and once, of a beady-eyed lapdog at a carriage window, its black-and-white ears streaming in the wind. A slow-moving hired coach trundled past, weighed down by fifteen or twenty laughing, singing tourists returning from Versailles to Paris. The road was also thick with agile pedestrians, women as well as men, dodging not only coaches but also riders on horseback. Young men in wind-tangled wigs under plumed hats, dark velvet-trimmed coats, and gleaming riding boots—boots that made Charles catch his breath with forbidden covetousness—rode their lathered horses as recklessly as the king’s hard-bitten mail couriers, going as though their lives depended on arriving before anyone else at Versailles or Paris. Charles and Jouvancy joined the cavalcade, going slowly and steadily like the tortoise in Aesop’s fable, and were quickly covered in everyone else’s dust.

By late afternoon, the road had climbed gently and the Versailles-bound traffic had thickened even more. A voice behind Charles and Jouvancy bellowed, “Way! Way!” and a four-horse coach passed so closely that Charles nearly brushed knees with the postillion mounted on the right-hand lead horse. Flamme, exasperated at having been held back all day, shied madly sideways, tossing his head, and Jouvancy’s mare bared her teeth and snapped, nearly catching his ear. Just as Charles got Flamme settled, another coach going like devils out of hell hurtled toward them, the postillion blowing long and loud on a brass horn. Flamme reared, pawing the air. It took all of Charles’s horsemanship to get him to the side of the road. The mare, Agneau, having shaken her reins loose from Jouvancy’s grip, was now ignoring everything except the grass she was pulling
up. Jouvancy sat motionless in the saddle, squinting straight west into the late afternoon sun.

“There it is,” he said.

At the end of the tree-lined avenue, the sun struck gleams of gold from towering, gilded iron gates on the far side of a trapezoidal plaza. Two other tree-lined avenues, one on each side of their own, converged on the plaza, where what looked like half the population of a small town walked, lounged, and loitered, careful to stay out of the way of the busy gate traffic. There were men exercising horses on lead reins, other men walking braces of leashed dogs, and off to one side, Charles thought he saw two men dueling. But it was a good quarter mile from where they sat to the open space, he realized, and he might be wrong.

“Shall we go on?” Jouvancy said. “I confess I am ready to be done with riding.” His tone was light, but Charles saw with concern that there were gray shadows under his eyes and he was slumping tiredly, which he hadn’t been earlier.

“By all means,
mon père
. I, too, am ready to arrive.”

As the palace grew nearer, Charles felt as though a mounting wave of architecture were about to break over him.
Palace
, Charles thought, was really the only word for the place. Calling this sprawling pile of buildings a chateau was like calling Louis XIV merely a bureaucrat. As they crossed the plaza, Charles’s eye was caught by what looked like a shop front in the wall to the left of the gates. One horizontal wooden shutter was propped up as a sloping rooflet, the other let down to make a counter, behind which a
concierge
was renting out swords and plumed hats, required wear for all laymen entering the palace, to men too low in rank to have their own. Vendors from the new town that had grown up around the palace were selling pastries and lottery tickets and
eau de vie
. Obvious palace officials attended by retinues of lesser officials walked slowly, deep in talk. Several ladies—by
their dress and bold looks, of doubtful virtue—watched the men with practiced eyes, and one of them let her eyes linger on Charles as he passed.

At the gilded gate, the guards on duty asked their business. While Jouvancy explained, Charles stared balefully at the golden sun as big as a carriage wheel on the gate’s top, feeling already scrutinized by the Sun King’s personal surveillance. The guards let them pass into the wide green expanse that still lay between them and most of the palace buildings. Beyond was a second gilded gate that Charles hadn’t even seen till now. He shook his head, thinking that the scale of the place was so huge that some things were simply too big to be seen.

At the second set of gates, another guard questioned them and directed them to their right, across the smaller—but still enormous—court toward the palace’s south wing. Here there were no carriages, just strolling courtiers and clutches of pointing, gawking sightseers. When they finally reached the door, Charles dismounted and helped Jouvancy down from the saddle. Two grooms appeared seemingly from nowhere, one taking the horses’ bridles and the other removing the saddlebags. A young royal footman in a blue serge coat with red velvet cuffs and pockets hurried through the door, spoke sharply to the man with the saddlebags, bowed to the two Jesuits, and scanned the court beyond them.

“I’ve been watching for you,
mes pères
,” he said, in a voice that rasped like an old file and consorted oddly with his comely face and warm brown eyes. “But I was told there’d be four of you.”