The Eloquence of Blood (2 page)

“Who is Père Pinette?”

“Rector of the Professed House—our house near the church of St. Louis. For fully professed Jesuits who work in Paris but aren't connected with Louis le Grand.” Damiot started toward the vaulted stone passage leading from the Cour d'honneur to the street. “Our Père Pinette takes ceremony as seriously as a general takes battle.”

“Well, it is the Prince of Condé's ceremony,” Charles said, following him into the dank, echoing passage, “and he
was
France's greatest general.” He caught up with Damiot and lowered his voice. “I know we're all deeply honored that the Condé has left us—um—part of himself, him being a Prince of the Blood. But I confess that dead royalty leaving their hearts and entrails and so on to churches and monasteries has always seemed to me a little bizarre. Why is it done?”

Damiot looked at Charles as though he'd asked why the sun rose. “Because it's always been done.” He shrugged. “Surely it's obvious. A man's heart is the most important earthly part of him, so to leave that to a monastery or a church is to confer a very great honor.”

“Yes, I suppose I can see that. About what the heart means.” Charles assumed a puzzled frown. “But what does it mean if he leaves you his—um—bowels and so on?”

Damiot's mouth twitched. “Fortunately, the Condé left us only his heart, so restrain your thirst for knowledge. Seriously, Maître du Luc, a royal personage gives an incomparable gift when he leaves his heart in the keeping of those who will pray for his soul and honor his life. Such a gift is a mark of the greatest honor and can only enhance the reputation of the community chosen. Which is another reason we
cannot
be late.”

Charles forced his numb feet to move faster. “I'll be frozen to death before we get there, so it won't matter if I'm late.”

“Don't be so dramatic, it's not really cold at all for Christmas Eve. You should have been here last year.”

“Dear Virgin of Sorrows,” Charles muttered under his breath, reaching under his cloak to rub the old war wound in his left shoulder, which minded the weather even more than the rest of him did.

This winter was his first in Paris and he was hating the cold. He tried to remind himself that this was only Paris, and they were only going to the church of St. Louis across the river, not setting out over snowy wastes for a frozen Jesuit mission in New France. Nevertheless, Charles suspected that if the devil appeared out of the street passage's chill shadows and offered him sunbaked warmth in trade for his soul, he'd have a sharp spiritual struggle on his hands. Not that winter wasn't cold in his native south of France. It snowed there, too, but less, and at least the sun showed itself. This endless northern gray threatened to sink deeper into his soul than the cold had sunk into his bones. But when he'd made the mistake of saying so, his fellow Jesuits had only laughed and told him darkly to wait until January.

The sniffling lay brother who had drawn the day's duty as porter opened the narrow postern door and let them out into the rue St. Jacques. Wind whipping merrily up from the Seine hit them full in the face.

“If you're so warm, Père Damiot,” Charles said through his chattering teeth, “you can give me your cloak!”

“That was Saint Martin who gave away his cloak, Maître du Luc, not our blessed Saint Ignatius.” Damiot grinned at Charles. “Besides, I am a priest, and you are a lowly scholastic.” Charles, though a teacher, was still in what was called the scholastic phase of the long Jesuit training, still studying as well as teaching, and years from priesthood and final vows. Which was why his title was
maître
, which meant master, and not
père
, Father. “So if there is any cloak-giving,” Damiot said, in the pious tones of a novice seeing himself in line for the papal throne, “it should go the other way. For the good of your soul, of course.”

Happily trading mild barbs, they went down St. Geneviève's hill. Charles, twenty-eight, with wide shoulders and his Norman mother's thick, straw-colored hair, was taller than most Frenchmen. But the thin, dark, thirty-five-year-old Damiot was only half a head shorter and their long strides matched well enough. Their love of words and the stage also matched, Charles being a rhetoric teacher and producer of college ballets, and Damiot being the author of this year's holiday farce—for Louis le Grand Jesuits only—to be done the day after Christmas.

The rich smell of roasting chestnuts sweetened the air around them and they caught an occasional flare of warmth from the street vendors' small fires. Though the rue St. Jacques was the Latin Quarter's main street, it was emptier than usual. Many students from the University of Paris and the quarter's teeming colleges—secondary schools for boys from ten to twenty or so—had left for the holidays. A handful of servants were hurrying home from the Petit Marché, the market a little up the hill beyond the college. Tools on their shoulders, men working on an old College of Les Cholets building that now belonged to the Jesuits were heading for the warmth of taverns. Charles saw one of them—likely a master carpenter, given his better clothes—break away from his fellows and make for the Necessity Man, who stood in the shadow of a gateway. The Necessity Man saw him coming and held out an old theatre mask from his assortment. The carpenter put it on, and the Necessity Man took off his voluminous cloak and held it up while his customer settled himself on a large bucket. Then he wrapped the cloak around both man and bucket and turned his back, leaving his masked customer to answer nature's call in disguise, if not in privacy.

A clattering of wheels and the ring of horseshoes on stone made Charles and Damiot leap aside and press themselves against a wall, the rue St. Jacques being wide enough for two carriages to pass and not much more.

“I am battling the sin of envy, Maître du Luc,” Damiot shouted in Charles's ear, as carriages hurtled in opposite directions.

“Why?” Charles shouted back.

“Because our Louis le Grand
confrères
who teach theology and philosophy have nine days for their Christmas break. Their classes don't start again until the second of January.”

They started walking again, brushing at the mud the carriage wheels had thrown onto their cloaks.

“While you,” Damiot went on, “a martyr to rhetoric, and I, even more of a martyr to grammar, have a bare four days.” He cast his eyes up at the unprepossessing heavens. “Why, oh ye saints and fates, was I set on Lady Grammar's stony way instead of the easy path of Lady Philosophy?”

“Lady Philosophy probably decided not to trust your slippery way with words. As for your sense of injustice, it's the twenty-fourth and our vacation started at noon. We have till the morrow of Holy Innocents, the twenty-ninth. That's four and a half days. Five and a half till we teach, since the morrow of Holy Innocents is a Sunday, which means our classes start again on Monday the thirtieth.”

“Oh, don't split hairs, that's the worst of you rhetoricians. Just imagine the peace if we could send them all home, rhetoric and grammar classes along with theology and philosophy. Think about it, no boys in the college till after the Feast of the Circumcision!” January first, the Feast of the Circumcision, commemorated the ritual circumcising of the baby Jesus eight days after his birth. “With a few more days added to the break,” Damiot went on, “most of them could go home or to some relative nearby.”

“The thought has its points,” Charles said dryly. “But it would still be a bit rushed to send the boys from Poland and China home and back again by January second.”

“Yes, all right. But as things are now, there's hardly even time for Père Jouvancy to take a group of them down to the school's country house at Gentilly.” Père Joseph Jouvancy, the renowned senior rhetoric professor, oversaw Charles's work in the college, both his teaching and his ballet production.

Charles shuddered. “He told me they'll walk to Gentilly after Mass tomorrow. As cold as it is! A great Christmas treat, he called it. He can't wait. Unbelievable.”

“Gentilly is a bare few miles away, but even that little
promenade
will be rushed, because they'll walk back again on Holy Innocents.” The Feast of the Holy Innocents on December twenty-eighth commemorated King Herod's massacre of boy babies when he tried to find and kill the newborn Jesus.

“But,
mon père
, we tell them that keeping them on college property protects them from worldly temptations. Are you denying that argument?” Charles's eyes were wide and blue with feigned dismay.

“Logic.” Damiot snorted in disgust. “That's the other worst thing about you rhetoricians. Besides that, nothing could protect some of our—oof!” He ducked as the wind blew a clot of snow off a gargoyle leering down at them from the church of Saint-Séverin. “I'll tell you one thing, sending them home would save the school money. Judging from the belt tightening we've been doing lately, surely that would be welcome.”

Charles grunted agreement. “I've heard we have a bequest coming, though.”

“So I've heard, too. If it's true, it's not before time—I never want to see another bowl of bean pottage! On the other hand,” Damiot added ruefully, “Saint Ignatius did say we should live like the poor.”

“Saint Ignatius
was
a saint, after all . . .”

They melted into the gloom of the Petit Châtelet, the fortress entrance of the bridge called the Petit Pont, at the end of the rue St. Jacques. When they emerged onto the bridge, its tall stone houses somewhat sheltered them from the wind. But the bridge road was all too short. On the Right Bank, the wind seemed to blow even colder than on the Left, and they grabbed their wide-brimmed, flat-crowned black hats and gave up talking in favor of simply getting where they were going.

The church of St. Louis, just beyond St. Catherine's well on the rue St. Antoine, was an Italian oratorio of a building in pale stone. As they started up the church steps, the setting sun burned a rent in the clouds and stained the columned front with red. The door beneath the pediment's big gold and blue clock burst open and Père Jean Pinette, rector of the Jesuit Professed House beside the church, came out onto the porch. Impatience was visible in every line of him. Charles bit his lip to keep his countenance, thinking that Pinette's pale bony face and red-rimmed eyes made him look like an evil-tempered rabbit. His nose even twitched as it started to drip in the cold air.

“Get inside, you're late.” Pinette swiped at his nose and stared in the direction Charles and Damiot had come from. “At last, thank the Blessed Virgin!” The sound of running feet behind them made Charles and Damiot turn to see a long-legged novice flying toward the steps, red cheeked from the cold.

“They are coming, Père Pinette!”

“Walk decently! Go and get the torches. I don't know how you'll keep them alight in this wind, but see that you do!”

Pinette chivied Charles and Damiot into the church, where three hundred other shivering Jesuits stood facing the door. They represented the three Paris houses of the Society of Jesus: the Professed House here beside St. Louis, the college of Louis le Grand, and the Paris Novice House. Charles and Damiot, last to arrive from Louis le Grand, started meekly toward the back row, but Pinette hissed, “No time!” and pushed them into the row just inside the doors. As they fumbled under their cloaks for their three-pronged ceremonial hats called
bonnets
, Pinette's voice boomed through the nave.

“Nearly here, be ready!”

The gathered Jesuits stopped hugging themselves for warmth, straightened their
bonnets
, and stood as though carved from black stone. Like soldiers, Charles thought, ducking aside to put his outdoor hat and Damiot's out of the way behind a statue of St. Ignatius. Ignatius, ex-soldier and courtier, founder of the Society of Jesus, had thought of his Jesuits as stalwart and obedient soldiers. That was part of what had attracted Charles, an ex-soldier himself, to the Society. After seven years, though, the soldier image was no longer one of the things he cherished about being a Jesuit. And obedience was his greatest stumbling block.

With a rueful quirk of his wide mobile mouth, Charles resumed his place in this soldierly gathering of men to honor France's greatest general, the Prince of Condé, who had died on December eleventh. The Great Condé, as he was called, Louis II of Bourbon, was a soul newly reclaimed for Holy Church after a lifetime of freethinking apostasy. Because Jesuits had helped return him to the fold, he had left them the great gift they were assembled to receive. This was only the ceremonial reception of the gift, though. Its interment in the wall behind the high altar would be in April, to give time for the writing of new music for the funeral Mass and the creation of elaborate church decor for the occasion.

The Professed House rector raked a last sharp look over his troops and barked, “Doors!”

Novices hauled the church's great doors open wide, and Pinette went out to stand at the edge of the porch. The first row of Jesuits filed out past him and stood one on the end of each step. Charles was on the bottom step in the wind's path, holding his
bonnet
on with one hand. Damiot was just above him. From the alley at the side of the church, four novices came with flaring, spitting torches. Two stopped at street level and two climbed to stand wide apart just below Pinette.

The sound of slowly rolling carriage wheels, the rattle of harness, and the slow beat of scores of hooves drew all eyes to the west. Along the street, people hurrying to get out of the early-evening cold stopped and crossed themselves, and the men took off their hats. Black and slow under the last slash of crimson in the clouds of Christmas Eve's sunset, the Great Condé's procession came. The first riders passed St. Catherine's well, a score of black-caparisoned horses carrying noblemen so blackly clad they were only white faces in the dusk. Behind them rolled two black-plumed carriages, the first with the heraldic arms of the Bishop of Autun, the second with those of the Prince of Condé. Behind the carriages rode yet more men-at-arms. The first carriage drew up at the church steps and a lackey sprang down to lower the carriage step and open the door. Two clerics emerged and together helped a slow-moving mass of sable and silver to descend. The Bishop of Autun stood stiffly upright and straightened his mitre as one of his attendants pulled the episcopal crozier from the carriage. The second carriage disgorged three more clerics, one of them bearing a small box of pale gold. They paced gravely to their bishop, and the box bearer set his burden on the bishop's upturned, black-gloved palms.