Judith Rock: The Rhetoric of Death

Then Montville had appeared at Joly’s door and swept Charles away to tour the college. They’d started at the opulent chapel on the south side of the Cour d’honneur, as the main court was called, and from there Montville had chivied him over the entire property, explaining who taught what to whom and where, and where they all lived, ate, and studied. A secondary school, like all the Jesuit colleges, Louis le Grand’s students ranged from about ten to twenty years old. Its syllabus of studies followed the plan laid down by St. Ignatius and was based on Latin and Greek writers of the ancient world. The general shape of the Paris college’s life would be familiar to any Jesuit, but as Montville had said, each college also had its uniqueness. Louis le Grand was known as the nursery of France’s great men. The college’s day students outnumbered its pensionnaires, or boarding students, by nearly four to one. But the pensionnaires, the five hundred or so boys from noble and wealthy upper-bourgeois families, were its heart. It was these boys who acted and danced in the elaborate schedule of plays and ballets for a large and influential audience.

“An astronomy class?” Charles had said, peering through a window at perhaps a hundred half-grown, black-gowned boys crowded cheek by jowl on benches, windowsills and floor, listening to a small bespectacled Jesuit turning a large, wood-mounted globe of the heavens as he lectured. “Are all the classes so large?”

“No, not at all, those are day boys.” Montville had shrugged. “We try not to turn any qualified boy away, whether or not he can pay. We also have a handful of scholarship boys, who live together in a dortoir and are counted with the pensionnaires. Most of the day students are Parisians. They sleep and eat at home, or in cheap student lodgings. If we hadn’t been able to expand our property as much as we have, we’d have to sit them on bales of hay in the street and teach them there, like the university did a few hundred years ago. Fortunately, we’ve bought, stolen, won-depending on who tells the tale-a number of neighboring college properties, most of them defunct or derelict. Mans, Marmoutier, most of les Cholets. But it’s taken decades, and without our Pere La Chaise-the king’s confessor-speaking for us at court, we’d still be arguing over the loot, so to speak. Some of it, I may say, cost us a good deal to repair. Ceilings coming down, rooms you couldn’t swing a cat in, rats fighting the fleas for floor space. But on the whole good bargains, and our classes are spread over all of them. The University of Paris, our less than good neighbor across the rue St. Jacques, is sick with envying our property. And our popularity. But what do they expect? The lackwits still teach as though it were eleven hundred-something and poor Peter Abelard were on the faculty!”

The acquisitions had turned Louis le Grand into a minotaur’s maze of largely old and ill-matched buildings, most built of weather-blackened stone, a few half-timbered in the old fashion, some five stories high, some only two. Blue slate roofs pitched at clashing angles sprouted a mushroom growth of chimneys and dormer windows, an exuberant roofline further punctuated with towers as ill assorted as the buildings. The largest tower, on the south side of the Cour d’honneur, had bells and its own windows. A smaller tower at the southeast corner had a bell and a clock, and a windowed hexagonal tower on the north side looked to Charles like it might be an observatory. Though what anyone hoped to see through the clouds of this northern sky, he couldn’t imagine.

The melange of buildings was honeycombed with courtyards. The vast Cour d’honneur, which opened from the street passage leading from the postern door and the rue St. Jacques, was graveled, with a few old trees around its edges shading a half dozen stone benches. The other courts were smaller, some invitingly green with turf and big plane trees, like the fathers’ garden near the rue de Rheims, enclosed now on two sides by the sparkling new stone of the main college library. Montville and Charles had passed a chattering group of Englishmen leaving the garden, and Montville had explained that visitors came from all over to marvel at Louis le Grand’s enormous collection of books. Then he’d walked Charles through the quiet, shady court where the pensionnaires lived with their tutors in private rooms and small dortoirs, then under a classical archway and back into the Cour d’honneur.

Now, as they crunched across the grayish gravel, Montville pointed to the range of windows reaching nearly to the ground floor on the main court’s east side.

“Your senior rhetoric classroom, maitre.”

“How many are in the class?”

“Only thirty or so. We try to keep the boarders’ classes smaller. And you wouldn’t want a hundred boys in your ballet! The lay brothers and workmen from the Opera will build your stage out from the classroom windows. Your performers change costumes in the classroom and the windows let them come and go from the stage. We cover the whole courtyard with a canvas awning; do they do that at Carpentras? I suppose the sun is the problem there, but here it’s rain. If it rains enough, though, the canvas collects puddles and sags and-well, you can imagine what happens then! You might start praying now for the miracle of a dry performance day!” Montville cocked an eye at the clouds. “Early summer was stifling,” he said, as a fine rain began to spatter on their hats. “Though you’d never think it now!”

“I hope this cold and wet won’t hurt the harvest,” Charles said. “At home, it promised well, after too many years of drought.”

“Too much drought, too much rain, always too much hunger. And too little charity,” Montville said soberly.

“Much too little charity,” Charles agreed. And not least because the king sees only his passion for a wholly Catholic France instead of his people’s needs, he thought, but didn’t say. Color and movement caught his eye and he exclaimed with pleasure at a sudden fountain of colored balls rising and falling across the courtyard.

“Oh, dear,” Montville murmured, as they stopped to watch. “Poor Frere Moulin refuses to believe that we are not all panting to see his juggling. The courtyard proctor is going to enjoy this.”

Charles saw that Frere Fabre, his dour nursemaid of the morning, was standing beside the juggling lay brother, gazing spellbound at the spinning balls. All over the court, heads were turning. An older student on his way to dinner dropped surreptitiously out of his classmates’ double line to watch. The juggler said something to him, but as the boy moved closer, another boy ran back from the line and grabbed his sleeve. The first boy shook him off angrily. The newcomer shrugged and hurried toward the refectory, and the first boy began talking to the juggler. Fabre abruptly turned his attention from the juggling to the talk, and what looked like an argument quickly blossomed between him and the student. Charles marveled at the ease with which the juggler, looking in surprise from the student to Fabre, kept the balls rising and falling without mishap. But the bright moment the spinning balls had made in the gray morning ended as the courtyard proctor and another Jesuit bustled toward the little group. The proctor bore down on the juggler, who caught the balls and stowed them so deftly in his apron that they might never have existed. The other Jesuit upbraided the student. Fabre faded unobtrusively toward the refectory.

“Come, Maitre du Luc, even if you are not hungry, I am!”

Montville steered Charles toward the court’s northeast corner, where lines of boys streamed through the refectory’s wide door. Its windows wore metal grids against balls and other missiles of play, Charles noticed, as he looked up at the tower clock.