Plague of Lies (9781101611739)

by Rock, Judith

  “After this second flouting of our rules,” Le Picart said, “I called in Monsieur Genet, our college corrector.”

  The blacksmith shuffled his feet in embarrassment and tried to hide the cane behind his gray-stockinged leg.

  “He went to Monsieur Montmorency’s chamber—where Monsieur Montmorency’s tutor, Père Vionnet, should have been but inexplicably was not—and Monsieur Montmorency declined to take his caning and instead broke the latch on the postern door in the course of his attempt to leave. He still refuses to explain any of this. Including Père La Chaise’s note to me on Wednesday night, when Monsieur Montmorency was sent back from Versailles. Now I am faced with dismissing him from the college. Before deciding that, I would like to know just what is going on. So what more can you tell us, maître?”

  Charles had a sudden coughing fit to give himself a moment to think. There were far too many people here for him to speak freely. His eyes met Le Picart’s and he tilted his head slightly toward the group around Montmorency. “Père La Chaise did not take me into his confidence concerning his note to you, mon père.”

  Le Picart looked hard at him. “I see.” He transferred his look to Montmorency’s tutor. Vionnet should have looked contrite over his failures, but he only looked bored. All tutors were ecclesiastics, but not all were Jesuits. Charles had heard that Vionnet was a superfluous priest from one of the Montmorency estates.

  “Père Vionnet,” the rector said, “I ask you once more, why did you not report your pupil’s absence last night? And why were you not in his chamber when the corrector came?”

  Charles thought that if Vionnet had been a Jesuit, the rector’s tone would have made him pray for the sky to fall and hide him.

  But Vionnet only looked up from examining a fingernail and shrugged. “Even tutors must sleep, mon père. And answer calls of nature.”

  “Your duties, Père Vionnet, include knowing where your pupil is at all times and having him under your eye most of the time.”

  Vionnet smiled and shrugged. “He finds it distasteful to have a nursemaid. I find it distasteful to play nursemaid to a man of eighteen.”

  “Then perhaps other employment would be more to your taste,” the rector snapped. His voice would have frozen hell’s flames.

  Vionnet regarded him with the half-closed eyes of a disdainful cat. “Oh, Madame de Montmorency has already found me new employment, which I’ll begin when this summer term ends.”

  “Unless you want to go earlier, you will fulfill your duties here according to my orders. Or both you and your pupil will leave the college in well-publicized disgrace. Is that how you want to return to Madame de Montmorency? And you, Monsieur Montmorency, is that how you want to return to your mother?”

  Montmorency seemed to deflate and shook his head.

  Vionnet returned to examining his fingernail. “Your word is law here, of course, mon père. I only hope nothing happens to make you lose the gift Madame de Montmorency plans to make to the college when Monsieur Montmorency leaves in good order at the end of the term.”

  “Plans may change for many reasons.” Le Picart’s voice was as dangerously smooth as an uncoiling snake. “But I sincerely advise you to hope you have nothing to do with any change there may be.”

  Vionnet’s head jerked up and his eyes widened. “Yes, mon père.”

  Charles looked down to hide his smile. The words seemed pulled out of Vionnet without his volition, and from the startled look Montmorency gave him, his pupil thought so, too.

  “Monsieur Montmorency.” Le Picart rose. “Unless you wish to return in disgrace to your mother today, you will return to your chamber and take your strokes of the férule from our corrector. The choice is yours.”

  “Come, monsieur,” the blacksmith rumbled at Montmorency. “It won’t be so bad, you’ll see. I’m sure your father has given you worse many a time.”

  Montmorency, whose mother had always seemed to Charles far more alarming than any father, bowed slightly and stiffly to the rector and turned to face the blacksmith. The boy’s eyes were hot with misery and his mouth was trembling. Not at the threat of the cane, Charles realized, but at being so shamed before witnesses.

  “At your pleasure, messieurs.” With more dignity than Charles would have thought he could muster, Montmorency stalked out of the office.

  The silent proctor followed on his heels, and the blacksmith made an awkward and rueful bow to the rector and followed. The tutor went, too, but without taking any leave of Le Picart. Wishing he could follow them, Charles waited.

  “Now,” Le Picart said. “Say what you would not before the others.”

  Charles folded his hands and composed himself to be clear and brief. “Our errand went very well—”

  “I already know all that. Père Jouvancy arrived before you and made his report. I sent him to rest. I want to know exactly why Montmorency was sent back here. Père La Chaise’s note said only to keep the boy here in the college and otherwise explained nothing, no doubt because he feared that the wrong person might read it. I assume that whatever happened at Versailles explains why Montmorency has been so unmanageable since he returned. God knows he is not bright, but he has never till now been a rule breaker. The bon Dieu permitting, he will soon finish his time with us. And if he can be prevailed upon to conduct himself acceptably in the meanwhile, I would prefer—for practical reasons—to let him finish.”

  “Well you know, of course, about the Polish marriage that is being negotiated for the king’s daughter. And clearly you are also aware of Montmorency’s strong feelings about it, given his fight with Sapieha.”

  “Yes. What of it?”

  “Montmorency fancies himself in love with the girl.”

  Le Picart brought a hand down hard on his desk. “What?”

  “He swears that he will prevent Mademoiselle de Rouen from going to Poland. He asked me if I thought the king would let him win her right to stay in single combat.”

  The rector stared at Charles, slowly shaking his head. “Dear Blessed Mary.”

  “Montmorency is also doing his best to become one of the Prince of Conti’s followers. And Conti encourages him, though I cannot see why, unless for the Montmorency name.”

  “Père La Chaise has spoken to me of his doubts concerning Conti’s loyalty,” Le Picart said grimly.

  “I should tell you that Père La Chaise thinks there may have been a spy in Monsieur Louvois’s entourage during the recent inspection of the eastern fortifications. He thinks it was Conti’s spy. I suspect that Lieutenant-Général La Reynie thinks so, too. I saw him in the street the morning we left Paris, and he asked me to report anything I heard about Conti. But he refused to say why.”

  “But what possible use can Conti have for Montmorency? Who would trust the poor boy with anything of importance?”

  “No one, I would think. But Père La Chaise sent Montmorency home after I heard the boy telling Conti and his coterie that Mademoiselle de Rouen would not go to Poland if he could prevent it.” Charles hesitated and then decided to say the worst and have it over. “He also said he wished the king had died last winter, because then Mademoiselle de Rouen would not have to leave France.”

  The quill Le Picart was toying with bent double in his hand.

  “I have always known that our Monsieur Montmorency is stupid. But the fool is flirting with treason.”

  “I think,” Charles said, “that he means treason only in his feelings. I’m sure he would be appalled to see the king lying dead at his feet. Unfortunately, he does not have enough imagination to realize what he could bring on himself. He also harped on seeking vengeance for Louis the Thirteenth’s beheading of the Duc de Montmorency fifty years ago.”

  “That Montmorency was nearly as stupid as this one.” Le Picart made a disgusted sound and slapped in irritation at a fly, which fell from the air and landed at his feet. “For half a liard, I would pack this one off home and let his mother be as furious with me as she pleases!”

  Cha
rles had often thought he would pay a good deal more than that small-change coin to be rid of Montmorency. But he realized that the rector’s mentioning money was not an accident.

  “How much has she promised us when he finishes his education honorably, mon père?”

  Le Picart’s lean shoulders rose and fell, and he looked sideways at Charles. “More than I can afford to throw away by dismissing him now. I, the man, would turn my back on the money gladly. However I, the college rector, cannot.”

  The college had been short of funds since last autumn. War was in the offing and people were keeping a tight hold on their money, and a looked-for bequest to the college had gone elsewhere during the winter. In February, Madame de Montmorency had “asked” that her son be given a good part in the February theatre performance, and her satisfaction with the school’s obedience to her veiled order had resulted in a welcome gift of gold. Now a second and larger gift was in the offing. So long as she was satisfied.

  “I take it that you are not going to dismiss Montmorency?”

  Le Picart’s face worked as though he were swallowing something as bitter as antimony. “No. I am not. I will do what I can to let him leave honorably at the end of August—and what I can to keep him away from court. So we will do what Père La Chaise asks and set a watch on him. You will be responsible for him in the rhetoric class and the rehearsals. When do those begin?”

  “On Monday. I hope Père Jouvancy will completely recover now.”

  “I think he will. I have ordered him to rest until then. Very well. Montmorency’s tutor can watch him from supper through the rest of the evening.” Le Picart’s nostrils flared. “And I will set one of the proctors to watch the tutor. A cubiculaire can take the morning watch.”

  Charles took his leave, gave Jouvancy’s saddlebag to a lay brother to deliver, and went upstairs to prepare for supper. When he reached the third floor and opened the door to his bedchamber and tiny study, a burst of gratitude sang through him. After the opulence of Versailles, the plain plastered walls and beamed ceiling, the sun pouring through the west window onto the dusty board floor, the narrow, gray-blanketed bed and scanty furniture, all seemed like a modest heaven. Heaven not least because he could close the door and have the two small chambers to himself.

  Charles dropped his saddlebag on the floor, hung his cloak over the old-fashioned rail attached to the wall and his outdoor hat on the hook beside it, and pulled off his riding boots and put them in the wall cupboard. Then he shoved his feet into his square-toed, high-tongued black shoes and went to the small table to clean his hands and face. A folded piece of paper with his name scrawled on it lay beside the water pitcher. He opened it and saw that it was a note from Père Thomas Damiot, his best friend in the college, who lived across the passage. Damiot was also the priest in charge of the bourgeois men’s confraternity, a religious and social group called the Congregation of the Holy Virgin, which met at Louis le Grand. Charles was his assistant. The note told Charles that an elderly member of the Congregation had died, and that Damiot wanted Charles to help him at the Monday morning funeral Mass at Holy Innocents cemetery across the river. Charles was pleased, because he rarely got to serve at a Mass. Finding his water pitcher empty and dry after nearly a week unused, he instead scrubbed the road dust from his face and hands with a linen towel. He combed his hair and, having a little while till the supper bell, opened his window and looked out.

  The din of the rue St. Jacques, the Latin Quarter’s main street, rose to meet him. Warm in the late-afternoon sun, the square-cobbled street was full of people walking, riders on horseback and muleback, street vendors trying to sell the last of their wares, slow loaded carts, and carriages with red-and-gold wheels, whose cursing drivers tried to find a way through it all. Across St. Jacques, the dome of the Sorbonne church shone in the sun, and Charles crossed himself as a chanting procession of clerics and laypeople passed beneath his window, carrying a statue of St. Antoine, whose feast it was. Day students just released from Louis le Grand, Montaigu, St. Barbe, and the quartier’s other colleges raced down the hill toward the river, shouting and shoving and taunting each other for sheer exuberance at being done with classrooms for the day. Older students in the short black gowns of the University of Paris, along with still older and more dignified students of law, theology, and medicine, thronged bookshop displays on tables set up in the street, indifferent to the traffic. Clerics of all kinds came and went in longer gowns of black, brown, gray, and white. Pairs of nuns and other women walked together, and coiffed maidservants looking for late-day bargains crowded around the illegal makeshift market stalls blocking traffic where side streets joined St. Jacques. A juggler on stilts had stopped at the corner of the little rue des Poirées just across the street and was surrounded by an applauding crowd. As a cart driver came level with him, the juggler tossed one of his six spinning balls wild, and the driver caught it and threw it back with a friendly insult.

  At the river end of the street, the spire of St. Severin’s church reached from its ancient gray stone and swallows soared and dove around it. The trees showing above courtyard walls along the street seemed to have twice as many leaves as they’d had on Monday, when Charles and Jouvancy rode out of the city. Summer had really come. With a sigh of contentment, Charles leaned on the windowsill, soaking up the light and warmth. During the winter, the golden afternoon light—on the rare occasions when the sun had shone—had seemed like a cruel trick, promising warmth and giving none. Just thinking about the snow-swept, frigid winter, which had lingered far into April, still made him shiver. He sent up a prayer to St. Medard and whatever other saints saw to weather that the summer would be long, and hot enough to drive even the memory of snow from his Mediterranean bones. When the supper bell rang, he left his window open and went to the refectory, happier than he remembered being in a long time.

  But when he was back in his room, replete with mutton stew and the greetings of students and fellow Jesuits after his few days away, his eyes kept straying to the still unpacked saddlebag on the floor. The ballet livret inside was nagging at him about its unfinished scenes. First, though, he turned his back on the saddlebag and went to his prie-dieu. He’d prayed little so far that day, and it was nearly time for Compline. Scholastics weren’t obliged to pray the canonical hours, but they were required to spend an hour a day in prayer, starting with the Hours of Our Lady and going on to other prayers. They were also required to make two examinations of conscience each day, and Charles would have to tell his confessor that he had not come anywhere near that at Versailles. As he collected himself to begin the Hours of Our Lady, Compline bells began ringing from churches and monasteries across the city. Their urgent, discordant clanging suddenly made Charles think that prayers must sound like that to God: urgent, clashing, drowning each other out, some sweet, some harsh as crow calls, all wanting notice.

  He finished his own pleas and opened his eyes in time to see a level ray of evening sun strike the little painting of Mary and the Holy Child on the wall in front of the prie-dieu. Mother and baby glowed in its light, and their smiles seemed to welcome him home. One of those sudden updrafts of the spirit took him beyond pleading or wanting or worrying, and he laughed aloud. He was home indeed, and here was his family.

  Mocking himself a little for his overflowing feeling, he got to his feet, picked up the saddlebag from the floor, and tossed it onto his bed. He untied the flap, reached in, and pulled out the livret. And stared in bewilderment at what he held, because it wasn’t the livret. It was a book of sorts, roughly stitched like the livret, but he’d never seen it before. Fending off the panicked thought that he’d left the livret at Versailles, he upended the saddlebag. And went weak with relief when he pulled the livret from the tangle of his dirty shirt and drawers.

  Puzzled, he picked up the other book again, carried it to the window, and opened it. On its first page, in elaborate script, was written: “Armand Francois de la Motte, Comte de Fleury.”

  Chapter 15
r />   FRIDAY NIGHT INTO THE FEAST OF ST. ELISÉE,

  SATURDAY, JUNE 14, 1687

  THE FEAST OF ST. VITUS, SUNDAY, JUNE 15, 1687

  Dumbfounded, Charles turned the roughly stitched pages. Except for the flourished name, the script was cramped and hard to decipher. Charles stood at the window trying to read it until the light failed. He lit his candle and kept on reading until the wick was consumed and the flame guttered out. Then he lay awake, wondering who had put the mémoire in his bag. His first guess was the Duc du Maine. Maine had taken Lulu’s silver tobacco box from Fleury’s room and could easily have taken the journal. The journal might even have been the true object of Maine’s search on Lulu’s behalf, the night Charles had talked to him in the gallery corridor. But the boy seemed to Charles like someone who would mostly shut his eyes to trouble. So if Maine had not gone to La Chaise’s rooms while the Jesuits were out and put Fleury’s book in the saddlebag, who had?

  The first part of the mémoire was a conventional, self-aggrandizing account of the Comte’s public and military life, and the name-dropping included only other men, most far better known than Fleury. But the second part was another matter. It began innocuously enough, with comments on court happenings. But it soon degenerated into Fleury’s highly colored and self-congratulatory record of lecherous escapades with maidservants. There was also an account of his violent pursuit of a female courtier whom he called simply Venus, including a tale of buying a magical powder guaranteed to make Venus throw herself into his arms. Then came page after malicious page recounting his fellow courtiers’ alleged peccadillos, none of which the said courtiers would want known—or even suggested.

  Lulu and her misdeeds figured largely in it. Fleury wrote salaciously of catching her wading bare-legged, skirts to her knees, in the Latona fountain, of seeing her in the arms of the Prince of Conti in a gallery arcade, of watching her climb onto the roof of the palace and sit singing at the top of her voice, until the king sent two of his gentlemen out onto the roof to bring her in. He wrote indignantly that she’d cursed and thrown her silver tobacco box at him when he scolded her for smoking her little clay pipe. He gloated over keeping the box. To punish her, he said, but from a few entries about expenses and furious envy of a rich nephew, Charles suspected that Fleury had meant to sell the little box.