Abell clanged, and Charles looked up hopefully from the livret in his lap. He’d had more than enough of Hercules-Louis’s anti-Huguenot labors.
“… And then,” Pere Jouvancy prattled on happily, “the ballet’s fourth and final part.” Ballets had parts and entrees where plays had acts and scenes. “The crown of everything that has gone before! This part’s first entree has Hercules throwing down the giants trying to scale heaven-a compliment to Louis’s piety in destroying the Huguenots, of course. In the second entree, Hercules razes Troy-that is Louis destroying the nests of heresy. Huguenot churches,” he added helpfully, as though Charles might not get it.
Charles kept his eyes on the livret and said nothing.
“And the third entree-Hercules helping Atlas hold up heaven-that is Louis defending true religion. And then the last entree and the best!” Jouvancy’s face was as gleeful as a rule-breaking boy’s. “We have a new machine for that one. It’s a seven-headed Hydra representing the Huguenots’ false religion, and the Opera workmen have made it wonderfully dragonish and horrible! Hercules defeats the monster and sends it back to hell, as our crowning compliment to the king and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes!” Fortunately for Charles, Jouvancy rushed on without waiting for a reaction. “Then comes the tragedy’s last act and the ballet’s grand finale-with both casts onstage, of course. And after that, we have the dear old philosopher Diogenes-that’s Pere Montville-descending from the heavens with his lantern. If that cloud machine can be stopped from creaking like the gates of hell! Diogenes brings the boys receiving the laurel crowns and the rest of the prizes onto the stage. And then, grace au bon Dieu, we can all breathe!” He threw himself back in his chair and beamed at Charles. “But we cannot breathe yet, because that was the warning bell for afternoon classes. We must hurry.”
He started for the door and Charles got slowly to his feet, staring at the livret in his hand.
“Maitre du Luc? Is something wrong?”
“No. That is-I beg your pardon, mon pere, I was just thinking.” He put the livret on the desk and joined Jouvancy at the door.
“Of what?”
Charles dredged up a smile. “Of what we are readying for the stage.”
“I am glad to see you take it so seriously! Avaunt, then, into the lists!”
He plunged down the stairs. Charles followed, thinking that, in spite of his distaste for the strident allegory of both ballet and tragedy, he couldn’t hold the little priest’s enthusiasm against him. He suspected that, for Jouvancy, the stage and the doings of heroes were often more real than the world beyond the college walls. The rhetoric master seemed to see the Edict of Nantes’s revocation the same way he saw Hercules’s labors: as a heroic story ripe for stage effects.
Outside in the courtyard, the students had put away their games and were scattering to classes. Jouvancy caught up with a group of older boys and shepherded them briskly toward the rhetoric classroom Montville had pointed out earlier. Feeling his mouth go dry, as though he were once more a student dancer about to step onstage, Charles followed in their wake.
“Your new realm, Maitre du Luc,” Jouvancy said over his shoulder, as they went into the weathered stone building and turned left into the classroom. The big room had the usual beamed ceiling and plain plastered walls, but its tall, small-paned windows flooded it with the day’s sunless light. The students were taking battered plumed hats from pegs along one wall and hanging up their black gowns. In shirts and breeches, and wearing the oddly shabby hats, they took their places on rows of benches. Charles followed Jouvancy to the small dais, eyeing the dusty tapestry in somber browns and greens that hung behind it. The tapestry showed Socrates forced to drink hemlock by his enemies. Feeling the thirty or so pairs of assessing eyes on his back, Charles wondered if drinking hemlock might be easier than facing new students. His heart was thumping and his mouth was still as dry as the morning’s bread. But this happened every time he faced a new class, and he concentrated on gathering spit in his mouth, so he could talk when the moment came.
“Bon courage,” Jouvancy murmured to Charles with a knowing grin and took his place behind the oak lectern.
Charles sat down in one of the platform’s two carved oak chairs, but before Jouvancy could begin speaking, a boy of sixteen or so raced in. As he peeled off his gown, Charles recognized him as the boy who’d stopped to watch the lay brother’s juggling before dinner. Tall and slim in his black breeches and a bright yellow silk shirt, the boy grabbed a hat and slid onto a bench, seemingly impervious to the tense silence. His fellows looked studiously straight ahead. Jouvancy fixed the boy with a long, quelling stare but, to Charles’s surprise, no interrogation followed.
“Let us stand and pray, messieurs,” Jouvancy said, releasing Yellow Shirt from his scrutiny.
Jouvancy commended their enterprise to God and the boys crossed themselves, put their hats back on, and sat down. The rhetoric master beamed at them.
“I have now the very great pleasure of presenting my new assistant and your new professor,” he said. “The learned young chevalier of rhetoric, and sometime chevalier of arms, just like our dear St. Ignatius: Maitre Charles du Luc.”
Charles went to the lectern and the students rose. As one, they swept off their hats and executed a beautiful ensemble bow. Charles gave them a lesser bow, as his age and ecclesiastical status dictated, though he was sorry he had no hat to flourish, skullcaps being socially useless. The boys ceremoniously replaced their hats and resumed their seats. Once seated, though, they surprised Charles by plucking the old hats off again and stuffing them under the benches.
“I thank you for your most courteous welcome, messieurs,” he said, smiling at them. “I am lately come from the Society’s college at Carpentras, where I taught rhetoric and produced ballets and plays. I am most honored to be at Louis le Grand and I trust that our association will be both a pleasant and a profitable one. I know that Pere Jouvancy holds you to the highest standard, in the rhetoric of the body as in the rhetoric of words. I, too, shall hold you to that standard.”
He stepped back and Jouvancy took his place.
“Two weeks.” Jouvancy glowered over the lectern at the rows of boys. “Two more weeks to put a perfect Clovis and a perfect Hercules on our stage. Both of which are now, as you too well know, as far from perfection as the east is from the west.” His gaze settled on Yellow Shirt. “And so, from this day, you will work like demons. Or I will personally flay you alive.”
Yellow Shirt stared at the floor, but most of Jouvancy’s audience traded sideways looks. Some of the faces were bright with upwelling laughter, but some wore startled frowns. A few boys crossed themselves.
“Oh, for the bon Dieu’s sweet sake, that was a simile!” Jouvancy barked. “A figure of speech! This is a senior rhetoric class and you cannot even recognize a figure of speech?”
A pink-cheeked boy of fifteen or so, with guileless blue eyes and a thatch of straight brown hair like a roof, put up his hand.
“Yes, Monsieur Beauclaire?” Jouvancy said, still glaring at the students.
“Mon pere, would you not rather have us work like angels? That would also be a simile.”
Snorts of laughter broke out and turned instantly into bouts of coughing.
“I suspect that angels take things a good deal easier than their infernal counterparts, Monsieur Beauclaire.” Jouvancy’s eyes were dancing now, but his expression was professorially sober. “Being sure of divine grace, you understand.”
The class nodded as solemnly as a college of Cardinals. Charles grinned broadly, and Jouvancy dusted his hands together as though he and Beauclaire had clarified the theological problems of the age.
“Now,” he said briskly. “The cast of Clovis here in front of the dais and mark out your stage. Bring your scripts. Labors cast, speakers as well as dancers, mark your stage there against the windows.”
The students exploded in a whirlwind of movement. Benches were stacked and pushed against walls, tragedy scripts flew from piles on a side table, and the students sorted themselves into their places. The shabby condition of the hats explained itself as Charles counted fifteen ballet cast members, including Yellow Shirt, scattering the hats along invisible lines to mark out a stage with the long open windows as its back wall. Jouvancy thrust a ballet livret into Charles’s hands.
“Make the speakers say their lines, and the dancers walk their floor patterns.”
Charles nodded. Floor pattern, the path a dancer traced on the stage, was as much part of a dance as the steps. And that it be accurate was doubly important, given all the singers, speakers, scenery, and machines with whom dancers usually shared the stage.
“No steps,” Jouvancy said, “floor patterns only. Their spacing needs work. And see that they come readily on their cues. M. Beauchamps will rehearse the steps and music when he comes. Those waiting for a cue,” he said, raising his voice, “stand in your correct place and no talking. Anyone playing the fool, Maitre du Luc will bring to me for flaying.”
He flashed Charles a smile and hurried away to the actors at the other end of the room, obviously in his element. Clutching his livret, Charles advanced on the ballet cast, thinking that Louis’s court was probably a more forgiving audience than this wary huddle of teenaged boys. He remembered only too well how it felt to face a new professor, an unknown quantity who could make life miserable if he chose. He stopped in front of them.
“You began rehearsing this ballet in May, I understand, messieurs. And I have only this morning read the livret. May I rely on you to help me catch up?”
To his relief, most of them nodded. The irrepressible boy with the thatched head stepped forward.
“Yes, Monsieur Beauclaire?”
“Is it true, maitre, that you were a soldier?” Beauclaire glanced toward Jouvancy at the front of the room and lowered his voice. “A real one, I mean. Not just a church soldier.”
Charles balanced for a moment on the horns of that dilemma and, in the interests of getting on with the rehearsal, took the easy way out.
“I fought in the Spanish Netherlands, yes.”
Enthralled, the boys crowded closer and questions poured out.
“Were you a mousquetaire? Did you have a sword? Were you wounded?”
“Yes to all three. But I am a truer soldier now, you know.” He said it because he was expected to say it, and because thinking of himself like that had been part of wanting to be a Jesuit. The soldier image had always hovered over the Society of Jesus, founded as it had been by an ex-soldier. But that image was irreparably tarnished for Charles now, and the word “soldier” coupled with religion made him cringe.
“How were you wounded?” someone said. “Didn’t you have armor?”
“Mousquetaires don’t wear armor,” Beauclaire said loftily. “My brother is a mousquetaire.” He frowned consideringly. “Maitre du Luc, I see a fault of logic. Weapons are forbidden in the college, of course, but the church kills heretics. So why should you not be able to still carry your musket and sword when you go outside the college?”
Remembering tales of the armed and armored processions of Paris clerics during the Wars of Religion, Charles mentally awarded Beauclaire an “alpha” for logic. But he held up a restraining hand, glad for once for the rule that only questions relevant to the class should be discussed.
“You pose an interesting and important question, Monsieur Beauclaire. Our task, though, is to rehearse this ballet. You might not mind being flayed alive by Pere Jouvancy, but I would, especially on my first day. So let us turn to Hercules and his labors. We will start with the prologue. Who speaks it?”
A gangling boy with fine reddish hair stepped forward, stumbled over his feet, and was saved by another boy grabbing the back of his shirt.
“I’m clumsy, me,” the stumbler said equably over the chorus of laughter. He pushed his white linen shirt back into his breeches. “That’s why I only get to talk, maitre.”
His voice was a beautiful light tenor. Past cracking, Charles hoped.
“And your name?”
“Jacques Doute, maitre.” He bowed too low and Charles put out an arm to keep him on his feet.
“Let us hear you then, Monsieur Doute. The rest of you, take your places, wherever you are when the ballet begins. Who is Hercules?”
Yellow Shirt, staring out a window as though Charles were not there, held up a languid hand.
“Step forward, please, monsieur,” Charles said crisply. “You are?”
Charles had deduced the boy’s name. But he wasn’t about to ignore more rudeness, Jouvancy’s nephew or not. With an elaborate sigh, Yellow Shirt turned from the window.
“I am Philippe Doute.”
Charles locked eyes with the boy and raised an eyebrow, waiting for the expected and courteous “maitre.” When it was grudgingly given, he said, “You and Monsieur Jacques Doute are brothers?”
“Cousins, maitre,” Jacques said brightly, when Philippe didn’t answer. “But Pere Jouvancy is only Philippe’s uncle, not mine. His mother was Pere Jouvancy’s sister, you see, and so-”
“Thank you.” Charles held up a hand to stem the tide of family history. “We will hope that Monsieur Philippe Doute dances more generously than he speaks. If Monsieur Jacques Doute gets through his speech without mistakes, we will continue with the first entree, but without steps or music. You will enter promptly on your cue, walk the floor pattern of your dance briskly, paying particular attention to your spacing with regard to your fellow dancers, and exit. Entendu?”
The boys nodded that they understood and withdrew from the hat-defined stage. Jacques Doute took his place in what would eventually be a wing, downstage of the curtain. When the cast had made a pocket of stillness and silence in the noise of the tragedy rehearsal, Charles banged the end of a bench on the floor three times, signaling the beginning in the best Moliere tradition. Jacques Doute tripped twice on his way to the center of the stage’s width, but when he began to speak, it was with the ease and confidence of the great Moliere himself. As Charles listened, he wondered if Moliere, who had been a day student at Louis le Grand when he was still only little Jean Poquelin, had shown his talent even then and been allowed to act and dance. And if he had gone through a clumsy period, and what his teacher had done to train him out of it. Jacques got through his prologue faultlessly, gestured magnificently to open the invisible curtain, and was nearly run over as the Nemean lion and his suite, Hercules’s first challenge, galloped onstage. The six boys paced at speed through their puzzlelike floor pattern and rushed off. Philippe Doute entered and stalked through his solo’s pattern. The lion ensemble returned and wove energetically around him. Philippe barely looked at them. But whenever he faced upstage, he gazed intently out of the long windows.
Entree by entree and floor pattern by floor pattern, the ballet’s first part ground on. The sullen Hercules/Louis was bearing down on the mythological Hesperides and its golden apples-a political allegory for coveted and prosperous Holland-when Jouvancy clapped his hands and shouted for silence. An elegant man in his fifties, in shoes with red heels and a sky blue coat and breeches, stood in the doorway. With a flourish of his be-ribboned, silver-headed walking stick, he swept off his wide-brimmed beaver hat and bowed. Charles caught his breath as the boys murmured “Bonjour, Maitre Beauchamps,” and bowed in return. Jouvancy led the dancing master to Charles and introduced them, Charles managed some awestruck words of greeting and admiration, and there were more bows. Then Pierre Beauchamps surveyed the ballet cast and glanced at Charles’s livret.
“So we have arrived at the enchanting Hesperides,” he muttered under his breath. “Would that we had, Maitre du Luc. Would that we may by the seventh day of August.” He turned to the students. “Very well. The approach to the Hesperides again, messieurs, if you please. Take your places. We begin with Hercules’s solo. With music and steps. Perfect steps.”
The dancers melted into position. Beauchamps’s thin, stooped manservant, whose long bony face was creased in what looked like a permanent mask of worry, flipped his greasy tail of brown hair over his shoulder and opened a wooden box. He took out a small fiddle, a violon du poche, and dusted it with the skirt of his jacket. Beauchamps took the fiddle, tucked it under his chin, nodded sharply at the dancers, and began to play. All dancing masters were, of necessity, musicians, but Beauchamps was nearly as accomplished a musician as he was a dancer. But the stage remained empty and the music stopped.
“Philippe Doute!” Beauchamps thundered, looking furiously around the room.
The cast and Charles looked, too, but Philippe was nowhere to be seen. Heels rapping like hammer blows on the bare wooden floor, Beauchamps strode to an open window and stuck his head out.
“Philippe! Where are you? Get in here and dance before I use your guts for fiddle strings!”
“Um-he was by an open window when you came in, Maitre Beauchamps,” a small, slight blond boy said. “Looking out. And then-he stepped over the sill while everyone was bowing to you. He went toward the latrine. Perhaps he isn’t feeling well.” The boy put a hand discreetly on his belly.
The dancing master rolled his eyes at Charles. “Maitre du Luc, will you be so good as to see if Hercules is in the privy?”
Charles was nearly at the door before he realized that he didn’t know where the latrine was, but Jacques Doute caught up with him and pointed to the southeast corner of the courtyard.
“Through the arch there, on the left behind the screen of rose bushes, Maitre du Luc.” The wind whined across the court and whipped Charles’s cassock around his legs. Behind him, the fiddle began again as Beauchamps drove Hercules’s suite to the Hesperides without its leader. Overhead, clouds scudded past in a sky more like November than July. Half hoping that Philippe really was ill rather than playing the fool, Charles hurried through the arch Jacques had pointed out and into a smaller courtyard. Skirting the hedge of old roses, he stopped in the doorway of the long, low, wooden latrine building.
“Philippe Doute? Are you here? Are you ill?”
Birds fluttered in and out of the latrine’s low eaves, but nothing else disturbed the dark, malodorous quiet. Charles took a few steps inside and was peering along the row of seats when unseen hands shoved him hard between the shoulders. He crashed to his knees and heard someone pound away across the gravel court. Charles scrambled up. Jouvancy’s nephew or not, he thought grimly, this time Philippe Doute would get what was coming to him. A flash of yellow disappeared through a second narrow arch, and Charles followed it into a yet smaller courtyard, which was empty and surrounded on three sides by outbuildings. Its fourth side was a high wall with a wooden gate. The sound of running feet was loud beyond it.
“Philippe! Don’t be an idiot, come back!”
The gate was locked. Cursing his old wound, Charles jumped for the top of the wall, hauled himself up with his good arm until he could get a leg over, and dropped into the narrow cobbled way that ran behind the college. The boy was out of sight, but his running echoed between the walls that hemmed both sides of the lane. Charles’s long legs ate up the distance. And where the lane turned sharply left, he caught another flash of yellow and a glimpse of black hair. He put on a burst of speed and emerged into the rue St. Jacques, only to flatten himself against a building as a carriage flew past inches from his nose. Dodging the end of a ratcatcher’s pole hung with pungent evidence of the catcher’s skill, he darted into the street. A panting, leather-aproned man pushing a bundle-laden handcart stopped beside him and lowered the cart’s handles to the ground for a rest. Intent on the hunt, Charles vaulted onto the cart so he could see over the crowd.
“What are you doing, you crazy priest?” The man pulled angrily on Charles’s cassock. “Get off my cart!”
Charles overbalanced and landed in a passing group of students wearing short scholar’s gowns. “Did you see a boy in a yellow shirt run past just now?” he asked breathlessly.
Smiling unpleasantly, the students closed around him and looked him insolently up and down. Charles added the short gowns to the hostile faces and came up with the unwelcome answer that these were University of Paris students. Though new to the city, he was well aware that its university hated Jesuits in general and Louis le Grand in particular, deploring its influence, its progressive humanist theology, its modern teaching methods, its ballet and drama. Most of all, the university hated the Jesuit college’s enjoyment of so much tantalizing property just across the street.
“Why do you want this boy in a yellow shirt, Jesuit?” one of the students drawled, recognizing the distinctive Jesuit cassock, which wrapped to the side instead of buttoning. “Good luck to him, he’s well away from your lies.”
“And what are you doing out without your priest hat?” another taunted.
Charles whirled as the second speaker plucked off his skullcap from behind and tossed it to one of his friends, who threw it into the gutter in the middle of the street. Hands twitching with the urge to thrash the lot of them, Charles planted his feet and locked eyes with each boy in turn. They seemed to register his height and breadth of shoulder for the first time and drew closer together.
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me, messieurs,” Charles said pleasantly. “Did any of you see a boy in a yellow shirt just now?”
They shook their heads.
“Then I thank you for your help, messieurs,” Charles said, sounding as though they were all in someone’s salon and still showing his teeth in what might be taken for a smile by the unwary.
The boys walked quickly away, casting apprehensive glances over their shoulders. Charles went to see if his new skullcap was salvageable. It was true that he shouldn’t be in the street without his hat, but he hadn’t planned on chasing a runaway Hercules out into Paris. Sadly, he surveyed his new skullcap, which rested like a funerary offering on a very dead cat and definitely was not salvageable. He left it where it was and started back to the college, zig-zagging through the traffic and peering down side streets and into shops in case Philippe was hiding somewhere. He guessed, though, that the boy was long gone, absorbed into the melee of the streets.
The cacophony that was Paris traffic-voices, feet, hooves, rattling wheels, barking dogs-beat against Charles’s ears as he walked. Everyone and everything shared the square-cobbled pavement and shouting matches erupted constantly, everyone being certain that the bon Dieu had put the next open foot of pavement there for him or her alone. Charles wove his way among the high-wheeled, painted carriages, students in short gowns, white-, black-, and brown-robed clerics on foot and on mules, professors lost in private fogs of thought, coiffed and basket-laden serving girls, the scavenging dogs, ragged street porters with loaded wooden carrying frames on their backs, and bewigged gentlemen whose ice-white linen gleamed against the jewel colors of their skirted coats as they swept iron-tipped canes before them to clear a path. Over it all, bawling street vendors cried everything from “brooms, brooms,” to “Portugal, Portugal,” which sounded so warmly exotic but meant shriveled little oranges.
Charles wondered why on earth Philippe had run. Running away from the college was not a light offense. Nor was shoving a professor to the ground in the process, though now that his temper had cooled, Charles didn’t intend to report that. But even without that black mark, Philippe had almost certainly lost his place in the ballet, if not in the college. Charles had seen him watching the classroom windows before he vanished, seen that his mind was anywhere but on his dancing. Had something-or someone-in the courtyard drawn him away? Jouvancy had said that the boy was bright. But he was also sixteen, and sixteen, whether bright or dull, wasn’t known for its wisdom.
Charles rang the bell at the college’s small postern door to the right of the formal entrance and then stepped back to look up at the carved and painted tympanum above the tall double doors. When the Jesuits opened their Paris college more than a century ago, they’d called it the College of Clermont. Now the tympanum said “Collegium Magni Ludo,” The College of Louis the Great, and was topped by a crown and the royal fleur de lis, which proclaimed King Louis XIV’s patronage.
A lay brother opened the postern and Charles hurried through the echoing stone-vaulted passage to the Cour d’honneur, toward the sound of Beauchamps’s violin. The dancing master was still driving the harried, and now heroless, dancers toward the mythical Hesperides. With a sigh for the ephemeral allure of earthly paradises, Charles went to report his failure to find Philippe Doute.