Judith Rock: The Rhetoric of Death

“Yes.” She poured her share of the wine. “The thing is, he flirts with me.”

“What?” Charles’s heart sank. “He knows you’re a woman?”

“If he doesn’t, then he likes boys.”

“Moulin definitely likes women. This is all we need. Stay away from him. As much as you can, anyway. Pick your nose, spit, scratch, make yourself disgusting.”

“I can do that.”

“I doubt it,” he said under his breath, and turned back toward the window. Outside, August the seventh’s sun was gilding the Sorbonne roofs. “Come on, boy, the day of reckoning is upon us.”

The clock chimed the quarter before midday. Uncomfortably aware of dinner swallowed too fast, Charles was alone in his rooms, wiping a linen towel over his face and hands and doing what he could to tame his hair, which curled like young vines in the humid warmth.

The morning had been all too short. Ignoring the courtyard chaos of students and faculty practicing for the Siamese reception ceremony, Charles and Pere Jouvancy had checked and rechecked props, costumes, and the slowly drying paint on the Hydra’s patch. As Charles went back and forth from stage to understage, he’d seen that Pernelle was holding her own acting the awkward boy quick to learn in spite of his muteness. To his relief, Frere Moulin had been nowhere in sight.

The only news from Lieutenant-General La Reynie was that his kitchen maid spy at the Hotel de Guise had heard a woman screaming somewhere in the house. And that Fabre, still held at the college in close confinement, was now refusing to speak to anyone.

Charles pulled his wrinkled shirt down smoothly over his black calecons, his knee-length underpants. Today he wouldn’t be teaching and demonstrating, so he had no reason to wear breeches. Just as well in the heat, he thought, taking the tight-across-the-shoulders cassock the clothing master had given him from the hanging rail. He pulled it on, tied the cincture, made sure his rosary hung straight down, and put on the three-pronged formal hat. His mouth was as dry as an over-roasted turkey, the way it used to be when he performed as a student. Terpsichore, St. Genesius, St. Vitus, he prayed, give wings to the dancers’ feet. Make the actors’ words stick to their memories like Paris mud. Don’t let the giants fall off the ladder. Whisper “right” and “left” in Armand Beauclaire’s ear. The clock chimed twelve. At a quarter past, the Siamese were coming. Charles hastened downstairs.

It was a little cooler than yesterday and less humid, and the awning made a pleasant shade. A breeze fluttered around its edges and rippled the stage curtain into a blue velvet lake. Lay brothers were making a last check of the benches and straightening the rows. Nearly all the windows below the awning and with views of the stage were open. The women in the audience would sit there, as though in box seats. Straight across from the stage, the third-floor windows of the little salon, where Charles had stood before daylight, were hung with swags of red drapery and three high-backed armchairs were drawn close to the sills. The Siamese would sit there, with a perfect view of the stage and high enough above the crowd to satisfy their notions of honor. In Siam, Jouvancy had said, honor meant being placed well above the ground and social inferiors. The ambassadors’ letter from King Narai to King Louis, treated as if it were Narai himself, had apparently created endless confusion on the journey from the coast to Paris, since no one could be housed higher than the room where the letter lay in its elaborate casket.

In the center aisle between the benches, the student linguists were gathering to welcome the ambassadors in twenty-four languages. Their scholars’ gowns had been brushed, their hair was unnaturally neat, and their hands had been scrubbed. The inseparable pair of twelve-year-old Chinese boys stood a little apart, black eyes flashing as they talked excitedly and pointed at the red-draped windows. Pere Montville, the ceremony’s director, burst out of the main building, slammed the door behind him, and was nearly flattened as an allegorical emblem the size of a small table crashed to the ground.

“Help!” he yelled to the lay brothers. “You have ten minutes to get that back in place.” He rolled his eyes at Charles, who had come running. “We’ll get through it. We always do. And tomorrow we’ll be looking forward to next year. That’s because we’re insane, and you seem to fit right in, Maitre. Bonne chance this afternoon!”

The clock chimed a quarter past twelve.

“Ah, mon Dieu,” Montville implored, casting his eyes up at the canvas awning. He bore down on the linguists. “Form up in your line and stay there!”

He hurtled back through the rear door, Charles on his heels. When they reached the grand salon, Montville made his way through the crowd of excited Jesuits to stand on the rector’s left, under the archway between the salon and the antechamber. The king’s confessor, Pere La Chaise, stood on the rector’s other side. Charles slid along the salon wall and worked his way to a vantage point behind La Chaise’s right shoulder. A strip of thick carpet patterned in red and gold ran from the rector’s feet across the antechamber’s patterned stone floor to the street doors. The college’s most noble students, dressed in satin and lace under their scholar’s gowns, were ranged along both sides of the carpet, fidgeting and whispering. The five boys nearest the double doors-the natural son of the late Charles II of England, and the sons of the Grand Generals of Poland and Lithuania-had lent their personal carriages to bring the Siamese from Berny, two leagues south of Paris, and would escort the ambassadors into the college. Le Picart clapped his hands to call everyone’s attention.

“Remember,” he said sternly, “this visit is supposed to be incognito, since the ambassadors have not yet made their formal entry into the city. We do not want to draw a crowd, so you must get them out of the carriages and inside as quickly as courtesy allows. Do not let them stand in the street and look at everything. The music should help to draw them. I hope.”

The muted sound of slowing horses and carriage wheels drew all eyes to the doors. The boys stood like statues, in perfect fourth positions. Le Picart signaled the trumpeters hidden in a side alcove and a deafening processional made Charles flinch. Two lay brothers opened the great double doors. Charles II’s son, eleven-year-old Charles Lennox, swept through them and opened the door of the first carriage, which had his coat of arms blazoned on it. He bowed deeply as the chief ambassador, Kosa Pan, descended from the carriage. The ambassador was resplendent in a long-sleeved tunic, curiously draped breeches, and a tall, narrow hat with a small brim, all of heavy gold silk covered with intricate gold stitching. His brilliant black eyes darted everywhere with lively curiosity, but he meekly allowed young Lennox to lead him inside. His two attendant Siamese nobles and M. Torf, a Frenchman who had accompanied the entourage from Siam, followed them. Kosa Pan bowed to Le Picart and the attendant nobles knelt with their noses in the carpet and their silk-clad rumps in the air. Before the desperately straight-faced students could give way to giggles, a new trumpet blast announced the next carriage.

In spite of Lennox’s efficiency with Kosa Pan, an excited crowd was gathering in the street. Elbowing each other, they watched the other two ambassadors, a glum elderly man in blue silk embroidered with gold flowers and a young man in green silk and a fur-trimmed hat, alight from the carriages. As the last of the entourage trailed through the college doors, there was a pause in the music and a child’s piercing treble voice rose from the crowd.