The Rhetoric of Death (41 page)

The muted sound of slowing horses and carriage wheels drew all eyes to the doors. The boys stood like statues, in perfect fourth positions. Le Picart signaled the trumpeters hidden in a side alcove and a deafening processional made Charles flinch. Two lay brothers opened the great double doors. Charles II's son, eleven-year-old Charles Lennox, swept through them and opened the door of the first carriage, which had his coat of arms blazoned on it. He bowed deeply as the chief ambassador, Kosa Pan, descended from the carriage. The ambassador was resplendent in a long-sleeved tunic, curiously draped breeches, and a tall, narrow hat with a small brim, all of heavy gold silk covered with intricate gold stitching. His brilliant black eyes darted everywhere with lively curiosity, but he meekly allowed young Lennox to lead him inside. His two attendant Siamese nobles and M. Torf, a Frenchman who had accompanied the entourage from Siam, followed them. Kosa Pan bowed to Le Picart and the attendant nobles knelt with their noses in the carpet and their silk-clad rumps in the air. Before the desperately straight-faced students could give way to giggles, a new trumpet blast announced the next carriage.

In spite of Lennox's efficiency with Kosa Pan, an excited crowd was gathering in the street. Elbowing each other, they watched the other two ambassadors, a glum elderly man in blue silk embroidered with gold flowers and a young man in green silk and a fur-trimmed hat, alight from the carriages. As the last of the entourage trailed through the college doors, there was a pause in the music and a child's piercing treble voice rose from the crowd.

“
Maman,
they are just like monkeys!”

The great double doors swung shut. Charles hoped the Siamese didn't have enough French to understand the remark, but Kosa Pan's dancing eyes and brief snort of tolerant laughter told him otherwise. As the ambassadors' servants began laying brocade-wrapped gifts at the rector's feet, Charles faded back along the salon wall and retreated to the courtyard.

Half the linguists had abandoned their line and most had their gowns nearly off their shoulders. Charles chivvied them back into order just as Montville and two of the trumpeters emerged into the court and placed themselves below the red-draped upper windows, facing the long line of students. A blasting fanfare from the third-floor salon, answered by the courtyard trumpeters, signaled that the ambassadors had reached their red armchairs. The first linguist stepped smoothly forward. He bowed to the open windows, delivered greetings in French, bowed again, and exited around the outside of the benches. The second boy welcomed the guests in Siamese, and if his pronunciation made the ambassadorial mouths quiver, it also brought wide, appreciative smiles for the effort. Twenty more languages followed and finally the Chinese boys advanced, red silk flashing under their gowns. They delivered a brief antiphonal Chinese oration, expressing the college's joy in welcoming honored Mandarins from the East.

They withdrew and a longer fanfare announced Père La Chaise, escorting the king's German sister-in-law Liselotte, Madame, as she was styled by her royal title. She and her bevy of ladies acknowledged the ambassadors, who rose and bowed in return. Then Madame was shown to the middle chair of three upholstered in blue cut velvet, set between the benches and the stage. As she arranged her billowing lemon satin skirts around her, Père La Chaise sat down on her right. Her ladies claimed the first bench, their white linen headdresses, called fontanges, standing up on their ringleted heads like half-folded fans.

The other benches began to fill, as the boarding students not in the performance took their places. Charles saw Père Montville showing the
Mercure
editor to a good place near the front, and Beauchamps and the musicians emerged from the senior refectory, their tiring room, and arranged their music on stands. The mothers, aunts, and sisters of the students filled the windows, their jewels and gowns gleaming even in the subdued light, and their men, equally dazzling, flowed into the courtyard. Members of religious orders began arriving in a flood of black, brown, and white: Augustinians, Cordeliers, Carmelites, Jacobins, and Celestines.

With a last look at his audience, Charles slipped through the door to the understage, where Pernelle, cheeks flushed with excitement, stood beside her assigned gear wheel. The flirtatious Frère Moulin was still not in evidence, and the other brothers were too busy to pay her any attention. Charles smiled at her and went up through the trap and through the rhetoric classroom windows into a simmer of anticipation. Pale under their makeup, boys were dressing, muttering lines, practicing steps, and discovering that, once dressed, their churning insides needed the latrine. Père Jouvancy, calm and eagle-eyed, was everywhere at once. The clock chimed the quarter before one, preliminary music began in the courtyard, and a hush descended on the classroom.

“A good time to pray,
messieurs
,” Jouvancy said to the students happily. “Keep your headdresses on, God will understand.”

They gathered around him. Jacques Douté bowed his head, closed his eyes, and fell over his feet. Charles caught him and murmured, “Good, you got that over with in here.”

Jouvancy glanced sideways at them. “Dear Lord,” he prayed, “you took a body like ours, and our bodies are glorified in You. Please make us all, actors and their words, dancers and their movements, musicians and their music, stagehands and their work, instruments of Your truth. Let all we have made together be to Your glory.” He paused. “And, dear Lord, extra courage wouldn't come amiss.” The “amen” was full-throated and garnished with laughter.
Clovis
's opening actors scrambled for last sips of water, smoothed tunics and straightened helmets, and streamed through the windows to their places. Charles followed and settled himself and his thumping heart in the prompter's wing.

The overture ended and Jacques Douté, blessedly sure-footed and commanding, spoke his prologue. Two lay brothers Charles didn't know drew the curtains apart and revealed the shadowy green forest, and the stage magic began to work its will. The audience grew quiet and attentive, as though the tragedy's sonorous Latin cast a beneficent spell. The robust swordplay drew cheers. Roars of laughter greeted the antics of comic characters. And if the tragedy cast a spell, the ballet wove a deep enchantment. The Siamese, who had watched the tragedy in polite bewilderment, came alive when the dancers appeared. Crowded close to the windows, they laughed and pointed and applauded.

When Hercules and his suite celebrated winning the Hesperides with a gravely joyous minuet, in a garden of golden fruit under a pink and gold and purple sunset, the audience breathed a collective sigh of contented wonder. Disaster threatened briefly when Armand Beauclaire went beautifully right, instead of correctly left. But, to Charles's amazement, Beauclaire realized his mistake and pirouetted smoothly out of harm's way. When the treasure-hunting Argonauts sailed their ship across the stage, the sea of billowing blue ribbons was so realistic that Charles saw a face or two in the audience turn faintly green. When the big-headed giants tried to scale heaven and fell thudding back to earth, even severe Carmelites held their sides laughing.

Holding his three-foot hourglass, Walter Connor danced Time's sarabande with majestic menace. As the sparkling sands of time and life drained visibly away, people blanched and shrank back in their seats. As Hercules slew the smoke-breathing Hydra, the audience leapt to its feet, applauding and cheering. Even the sober-faced German Madame smiled and nodded happily as the red smoke drifted over her head.

And when the exuberant Ballet Général began, Charles was half afraid the audience would surge onto the stage and join in. Hercules's long chaconne was a tour de force. Applause drowned the creaking of his pink cloud as Diogenes—Père Montville—wobbled to earth. Holding his lantern high, he brought the students receiving prizes onto the stage. To Charles's delight, Antoine Douté won the lower grammar class's prize, a fat Latin tome that he hugged proudly to his skinny chest. Finally, the trumpets accompanied Madame and her ladies from the courtyard and the Siamese down from their aerie. Royalty, ambassadors, and nobles went to the reception in the fathers' refectory, and the cast and less exalted remainder of the audience surged together, hugging, kissing, bragging, and congratulating.

Giddy with relief, flooded with happiness at the beauty he'd helped to make, and moist-eyed with pride at the students' achievement, Charles gave—and received—exuberant congratulations. Mme LeClerc made her way toward the stage, holding Marie-Ange and Antoine both firmly by the hand, and Charles jumped to the ground to greet her. He congratulated Antoine on his prize and both children forgot their manners and hugged him. Mme LeClerc was so excited that she forgot to reprove them.

“Your show was miraculous,” she cried, throwing up her hands. “The saints must be dancing in heaven!” Under cover of giving him a smacking kiss on the cheek, she said in his ear, “Is Mademoiselle Pernelle all right, is she with you?”

He jerked his head at the stage. “Below. All is well, madame. After you sent her to me, did the police return?”

“No, thank the Virgin! She can come back to us, if you think it's safe.”

Charles hesitated. “I—no, she'll be leaving soon.” Though how, he still had no idea.

Seeing Père Jouvancy and Maître Beauchamps bearing down on Charles, Mme LeClerc curtsied and took the children's hands to steer them through the crowd. Jouvancy stopped to congratulate his nephew and speak briefly with Mme LeClerc. Then he and Beauchamps rained praise on Charles, who shoved away his worry about Pernelle and praised them fulsomely in return. The three of them linked arms and went to make their appearance at the rector's reception, feeling like heroes indeed.

But before they reached the fathers' refectory, Lieutenant-Général La Reynie appeared seemingly from nowhere, detached Charles from Jouvancy and Beauchamps, and drew him into an empty antechamber.

“I didn't see you in the audience,” Charles said pleasantly, but his stomach lurched at the lieutenant-général's expression.

“I was at the Hôtel de Guise—outside with the two men I've set to watch. The Duchesse de Guise is seeing no one and the footman who answers the door insists that Père Guise is not there and that no one there knows where he is. The only way I can get in without bringing more trouble on myself than I want is with an order from the king. Which I doubt he would give me against a Guise, with only the evidence that I have.”

“What will you do next?” Charles said.

La Reynie glared at Charles. “I came here to take Frère Fabre into custody, but Père Le Picart will not give him up. I will not force him in the presence of his guests. But tomorrow I will have Fabre, one way or the other. And you will help me get him, if it comes to that. I want an end to this.”

“He may not be guilty—”

“I will have him, and find out whether or not he is guilty. You are still my fly here, Maître du Luc. Hear me. If Fabre conveniently flits as the other two did, you and you alone will answer for it. Your ballet is over, get back to work. Convince your rector that if he doesn't want scandal, he'd better give me his prisoner.”

He stalked away, leaving Charles fallen from the heights of his triumph to cold, hard earth.

D
usk had fallen on the empty Cour d'honneur. Festive torches burned at the entrance to the street passage and beside the archway into the north court, where voices and laughter sounded from the parties in students' rooms. Charles, who had volunteered himself and “Jean” to put away costumes and props, sat on the empty stage, dangling his feet into the open trapdoor. The front curtains had been taken down, and the flickering torchlight was just enough to let him see Pernelle, standing in the understage, and licking crumbs of a tart he'd brought her from her fingers. Her hat was on the floor, her hair was tangled, and her shirt was stained with sweat, and she looked happier than Charles had seen her since before their lives diverged.

“You did well down there,” he said, trying to ignore the catch in his voice.

“I liked it. Oh, and that Moulin who was bothering me? He wasn't here—no one seemed to know where he was. You should be very pleased with your show, Charles. It was magnificent.”

“I thought you'd hate all the Protestant-baiting and Louis-gilding.”

“Oh, I did. But it didn't ruin the boys' triumph. Or yours. You're very good at what you do, I didn't realize how good.”

“Thank you.” He shook his head in amazement. “Who would ever have thought we'd work on a Jesuit performance together?”

Her eyes danced. “Shall we do a Huguenot ballet next?”

“In which King Louis can be hubris-crazed and fall off the giants' ladder!”

They laughed and then a silence fell between them. The court was nearly dark now and the sounds of revelry from the student receptions were growing louder. Charles sighed, reluctant to leave their refuge and face all that waited for them. “We should escape upstairs before the students' guests start heading for the postern.” He picked up a scholar's gown from the stage floor and tossed it down to her. “Put this on—someone left it on a bench. If we meet anyone, keep your head down and look like a boy caught over-reveling.” He stood up and stretched. “I took more food from the reception up to my rooms, so we—”

“Du Luc!”

The voice's rage jerked Charles sharply around, automatically feeling for the sword he hadn't worn in years. A disheveled and haggard Père Guise strode out of the street passage into the torchlight.

“Hide,” Charles barely had time to say to Pernelle, before Guise was at the foot of the stage. Charles pushed his astonishment aside and said mildly, hoping to quiet the man, “What is it,
mon père
? Where have you been?”