Judith Rock: Plague of Lies

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

The storm-riding demons of the air were gathered over Paris, hurling fire and thunder at the city’s cowering mortals. Every bell ringer in the city was hauling on his ropes, and his bells-baptized like good Christians for just this purpose-were wide-mouthed roaring angels fighting off the storm with their own deafening noise. The 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-year-old with a thick straight thatch of brown hair, put up a hand and shifted his gaze to the teacher’s 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.

“Is it really demons, maître ? If the demons of the air cause thunderstorms, why do the storms always end? Why don’t the demons win sometimes?”

“Win? You want that demons win?” The outraged speaker was the elder of a pair of brothers from Poland.

“No, Monsieur Sapieha, he doesn’t want them to win.” Charles hoped he was responding to what Sapieha had actually said. It was often hard to tell, Latin being the language of the college, but the Sapieha brothers’ Latin was heavily accented and mixed with Polish. “Monsieur Beauclaire only wants to know why they don’t win, which is a very different question and an excellent one.” But it was not a question Charles was going to discuss there and then. When not dodging lightning, he personally doubted the demon theory, though many people-including most of his fellow teachers at Louis le Grand-did not. And he had to get the class through a lot more pages of Greek before the afternoon ended.

Charles was in the scholastic phase of his long Jesuit formation, with ordination and final vows still some years away. Teaching was part of Jesuit training, and Charles was a teacher of rhetoric, the art of communication in both Latin and Greek.

He raised his eyebrows at Beauclaire. “Perhaps the demons always lose because good is stronger than evil,” he said. And hoped that his belief in the second half of his sentence was enough to justify his evasion. “But now, back to our book!”

As the storm receded outside and he tried to find his place in the book open on the oak lectern in front of him, Charles wondered if he looked as unconfident as he felt. The senior rhetoric master, Père Joseph Jouvancy, was in the infirmary recovering from sickness. And the second senior master, Père Martin Pallu, had just fallen ill with the same unpleasant malady. Which left Charles in sole charge of the thirty senior rhetoric students. But, no help for it, there were still two hours of class before the afternoon ended. He smoothed the book’s pages open, pushed his black skullcap down on his curling, straw-blond hair, and twitched at his cassock sleeves. The long linen shirt under the cassock showed correctly as narrow bands of white at wrists and high-collared neck, and the cassock hung sleekly on his six feet and more of wide-shouldered height. With a deep breath and a prayer to St. John Chrysostom, the only Greek saint he could think of at the moment, Charles tackled the Greek rules of rhetoric, sometimes reading from the book, sometimes explaining what he read.

But under the reading and explaining, he felt more than a little overwhelmed by his responsibilities. Behind the teacher’s dais where he stood was a tapestry showing the unfortunate philosopher Socrates drinking his fatal cup of hemlock. Its graphic rendering of an unpopular academic’s fate made for an uncomfortable teaching backdrop, he’d always thought.

He paused, giving the class time to write down what he’d said, and let his eyes wander over the benches. The boys were bent over small boards braced on their laps, their feathered quills scratching across their paper, and all he could see of them were the tops of their heads above their black scholar’s gowns. Louis le Grand’s students ranged in age from about ten to eighteen. The youngest in this class was thirteen, a little Milanese named Michele Bertamelli, whose mass of curls was as black as his hat. Most of the bent heads were French and every shade of brown, apparently God’s favorite color for hair. But there were also boys from England, Ireland, Poland, and the Netherlands-one with hair flaming like copper, some as blond as Charles himself was, thanks to his Norman mother’s Viking forbears. Today, though, there were fewer boys than there should have been, because three of them were in the student infirmary with the same contagion Jouvancy and Pallu had.

Charles glanced out at the courtyard and saw that the rain had nearly stopped. The storm was south of the city now, and the bell ringers of Paris were letting their ropes go slack. Relieved at no longer having to shout over the noise, he went back to feeding his fledgling scholars Aristotle’s rules for rhetoric. But even as he tried to make his dry morsels of knowledge tempting, his thoughts kept circling around all that he should have finished and hadn’t.

His biggest worry was the summer ballet and tragedy performance, only two months from now, on August sixth. In Jesuit schools, both voice and body were trained for eloquence, and part of his job was directing the ballet that went with the school’s grand tragedy performance every summer. This year, under Jouvancy’s watchful eye, Charles was working on the ballet’s livret -the plan of its four Parts-and would be directing the ballet itself. Happily, this year’s ballet was an updated version of the 1680 college ballet, so he was only rewriting instead of coming up with something new from scratch. Full rehearsals were about to start, but because of Jouvancy’s illness and this extra teaching, Charles was seriously behind. And what if Jouvancy’s illness returned and worsened, as illness so often did? If that happened, Charles knew that he might end up directing the tragedy and the ballet.

He finished his lecture and told the class’s three decurions -class leaders named for Roman army officers commanding ten men each-to collect the afternoon’s written work and bring it to the dais. Then he set them to hear each of their “men” recite the assigned memory passage. Today it was from St. Basil’s writings. Greek recitation was never popular, and when the decurions delivered the bad news, thirteen-year-old Bertamelli sprang from his seat and flung his arms wide.

“But, maître ,” the Italian boy wailed, “I cannot speak Greek, it hurts my tongue!”