The Eloquence of Blood (45 page)

“Ah, Maître du Luc, she is—I am—we—the first forty days of mourning for Monsieur Brion are over, you know,” he finally managed, in a rush of words, and clasped his hands rapturously on his breast. “It still cannot be public, but—we are betrothed!”

Charles laughed for pleasure at the news. “I congratulate you both with all my heart!”

Wondering if Morel had been let into the secret of the contraband silver yet, Charles threaded his way through the crowded anteroom toward its other door, which led directly to a tiny backstage area where two lay brothers waited to change the minimal scenery.

“Done already,
maître
,” a brother said, when Charles put his head around the door. “We picked up the candles. No time to replace them now, but the chandelier will do well enough.”

As Charles turned away, the clock struck two. He braced himself for the beginning of the musical overture by Monsieur Charpentier and his musicians, positioned in the
salle
at the side of the stage. But nothing happened. Shrugging, Charles started to gather the boys for the customary prayer. Delays and theatre production were nearly synonymous, after all.

Then Père Montville hurried into the anteroom, hissing “
Maître
,
messieurs
, before you begin, a word!” His small dark eyes were bright with excitement. “We are unexpectedly honored with the presence of two
Legitimés
of France! A son and daughter of the king and Madame de Montespan have arrived, the Duc du Maine and Mademoiselle de Rouen.” He eyed the performers sternly. “When you go out onto the stage, they will be directly in front of you. Do our college all the honor in your power by your dancing and acting today,
messieurs
. Let your eloquent voices and bodies speak feelingly of the teaching you have received in this college named for our king.”

Charles seized the moment of quiet for the prayer. “And that we may do as Père Montville has bidden us, let us pray,
messieurs
.” The quiet in the little room deepened. Even Bertamelli was utterly still, his head so bowed on his clasped hands that the boy next to him reached out and steadied his slipping headdress of flowers and small birds.

“Our Father in heaven,” Charles prayed, “let what we do today be a means of grace to those who watch and those who perform. Let us tell the story of your saints with reverence and joy. Grant us, we pray, a blessed Lenten season”—he hesitated, visited by the remembered taste of Lent's endless salt fish—“but first, grant us a happy Fat Tuesday tomorrow!”

That got a rousing “amen,” everyone crossed himself, and the delayed musical overture sounded from the
salle
. Charles and Morel lined up their troops in order of appearance, eased open the stage door into the wings, and Charles walked between the flats to take a last look at the audience before the ordered mayhem of performance began.

From the chandelier hanging over the middle of the stage and the iron holders fixed to the side flats, candles cast a welcome yellow glow. But the gray light from the long room's windows was as somber as Lent itself. Charles reminded himself that nevertheless, the snow was gone, melted in the chill, dripping rain that had come with February. And that Lent brought spring as well as salt fish.

He feasted his color-starved eyes for a moment on the deep blue satin of the Duc du Maine's suit and his sister's rose brocade, bright among the more sober colors of their attendants. As he looked, though, he wondered whether the young woman, whose voice was more carrying than Bertamelli's, was going to chatter to her brother throughout the show. The overture was nearing its end. Charles's gaze swept one last time over the audience, and he smiled in surprise as he saw Lieutenant-Général La Reynie standing at the back of the
salle des actes
, next to Père Damiot. Wondering if they'd found something to talk about before the music began, and hoping that they had, he went back through the wing to the stage door and pulled it all the way open.

Celse
's overture was ending. Michele Bertamelli was waiting in the doorway in his spring-green coat and breeches, the wreath of flowers and birds—symbols of youth—nested in his dark curling hair, a branch of yellow silk flowers in his hand. Charles put a hand on his shoulder and guided him farther into the wing, ready for his entrance. In the pause between the overture and the first notes of
Celse
's first act, Bertamelli lifted his radiant face to Charles and gave him a smile that made Charles's breath catch in his throat, a smile so joyous and young that winter and sorrow might never have existed. Then the music began again, and the little Italian filled his lungs and burst onto the stage like spring itself.

—G. M. Trevelyan,
Autobiography of a Historian

 

 

 

T he Eloquence of Blood
is fiction, but the story happens in real places and some of its characters are real seventeenth-century people. Charles du Luc is fictional, but his college of Louis le Grand still stands on the rue St. Jacques, in Paris's Left Bank University quarter. Its rhetoric teachers really did produce ballets, drama, and even opera, as part of teaching eloquence of body and voice. In 1687, the Latin tragedy
Celsus
and Marc-Antoine Charpentier's opera
Celse
(called a
tragédie en musique
) served as the annual pre-Lenten performance, celebrating the end of Carnival and ushering in the season of Lent, which began two days later, on Ash Wednesday.

As I was writing the book, people often asked me if a single woman could have adopted a child, as Anne Mynette does in the story. They could and did, even though in formal law, adoption had become illegal. But customary law—doing things as they'd always been done—was still strong in France. Anyone who wanted to adopt went to a notary and had papers drawn up detailing what they would do for the child. If they wanted money or property to go to the child after their own death, they drew up a
donation entre vifs
. Nothing could be willed to a child who was adopted or illegitimate. Also, people of the time made a harsh distinction between an orphan of married parents and a nameless foundling, and it is this distinction that worries Charles in relation to Martine. The concern for maintaining bloodlines—through children of one's own blood or children whose parentage, and therefore blood, was known—was growing in France and would eventually eliminate adoption altogether.

Nicolas de La Reynie, first head of the Paris police, is real, and so are Père Jacques Le Picart, Père Joseph Jouvancy, dancing master Pierre Beauchamps (a passionate collector of paintings), and composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. The seventeen-year-old Duc du Maine, seen briefly at the February performance, was a legitimized son of Louis XIV. His sister is fictional, and I've given her the fictional title of Mademoiselle de Ronen. Père Claude François Menestrier, who appears at the end of the story, was a renowned creator of elaborate spectacles for European courts and public occasions. He wrote several books on dance and is regarded as the first European dance historian. He and Jouvancy planned the sumptuous decor for the April 26, 1687, interment of the Great Condé's heart in the altar wall of the Jesuit church of St. Louis. There is a drawing of the decorated church in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris, showing sweeping blue drapery and a myriad of skulls—whether real or of papier-mâché, it is hard to tell. The Great Condé was a Bourbon, a royal Prince of the Blood, and it had long been customary for royalty to leave their hearts, and sometimes their entrails, to religious institutions for separate burial. To receive a “relic” of this kind was considered a great honor for a religious house.

The sad story of Claire Clemence, wife of the Great Condé, is true, though her devoted servant Marin is imagined. Claire Clemence died in 1694, after many years of virtual imprisonment at the remote Condé castle of Chateauroux, in the province of Berry.

As for what else is real in the story, Louis XIV really did fear and dislike Paris, because of his experiences there as a child in the 1640s revolt against the monarchy. The war minister Louvois, who ranked above La Reynie, loathed any kind of disorder—especially in Paris and especially on the rare occasions when the king visited, as he did on January thirtieth 1687 for the dinner the city fathers gave him at the Hôtel de Ville. And the Capuchin friars really were the firefighters of Paris.

As for Henri Brion's smuggling scheme, it, too, happened—though the instance I know about happened in the eighteenth century, and that time, it was Jesuits who hid silver under the chocolate . . .

1. How does Charles struggle with his role as a man of the cloth versus that of being a man of worldly desires? How did he come into this position and how does his vocation both cause him to struggle (to give in to temptation) and provide him with direction?

2. Were you initially suspicious of the church in having a hand in the deaths of both Martine and the notary? Why? Who else had sufficient motivation to kill, especially as the
patrimoine
was surrounded by confusion?

3. Discuss the class structure (and the boundaries) of seventeenth-century Parisian society. How does social standing and parentage affect one's destiny? What might the future hold for an orphan, or young woman without a solid financial future?

4. Do you think the Jesuits did the right thing as tension against them began to mount—even as their silence began to put the students in jeopardy? How do you think they could have diffused the climate of violence?

5. What motivates Charles's commitment to the investigations? Why does he insist on clearing Gilles of the crime, even though it would not lift the veil of suspicion off the Jesuits?

6. Why does Gilles refuse to reveal the name of his companion? What might be the repercussions? What would be the sacrifices? Why do you think Charles agrees to keep his investigation as discreet as possible?

7. How does the song allow the townspeople of Paris to deal with their outrage over the deaths of Martine and Brion? Is this a form of free speech or would you consider it intimidation or harassment? Do you think those who distributed the lyrics should have been punished?

8. Why did the beggars come to Charles's rescue against the attacking street mob, risking their safety to save him? How does Charles repay this kindness—and how is his behavior toward the poor different from the prevailing attitudes of the time?

9. Who is Reine and what was her life like before begging? What is her role in the streets—to both the Jesuits and the police? How does she work with all sides to create dialogue, to help keep a semblance of peace?

10. Were you shocked to learn the killer's true identity and motivations?

11. Where you surprised to learn who stole Anne and Martine's donation paper? Who was he ultimately trying to protect?

12. What is “the Sacred Heart” and how does it play a role in the novel? From Martine's necklace, the Prince of Condé's heart, and the symbol in Charles's dream—how are all these ideas united?

Turn the page for a sneak peek into Charles's next adventure . . .

 

FEAST OF ST. CLOTHILDE, TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1687

 

T
he storm-riding demons of the air were gathered over Paris, hurling thunder and lightning at the city's cowering mortals. Every bell ringer in the city was hauling on his ropes, turning the church bells—baptized like good Christians for just this purpose—into widemouthed roaring angels fighting off the storm with their own deafening noise. The terrifying spring thunderstorm had begun north of the river, but now it raged directly over the rue St. Jacques, sending thunder echoing off walls and stabbing roofs and cobbles with spears of rain. In the Jesuit college of Louis le Grand, teachers and students were praying to aid the clanging bells. But the prayers of the senior rhetoric class dissolved into gasps and cries when lightning struck nearly into the main courtyard.

The near miss made assistant rhetoric master Maître Charles du Luc's skin tingle. And startled him into wondering if the demons of the air, in whom he mostly didn't believe when the sun was shining, were bent on making this day his last on earth.

“
Messieurs
, I beg you, calm yourselves,” he shouted over the noise to his students huddled together on the classroom benches. “All storms pass. The bells are winning, as they always do, because we baptize them to make them stronger than the demons of the air. Listen! The demons are fleeing toward the south now.” By force of will and voice, he called the boys back to their unfinished praying.

When he looked up after the “amen,” one of the students, Armand Beauclaire, was frowning thoughtfully at the oak-beamed ceiling. Beauclaire, a round-faced sixteen, with a thick straight thatch of brown hair, put up a hand and shifted his gaze to the teachers' dais at the front of the room.

“Yes, Monsieur Beauclaire?” Charles called over the storm's receding noise, girding his mental loins. Beauclaire's questions were always interesting and never easy to answer.