Judith Rock: The Rhetoric of Death

“… they serve God and their king. Souls are saved. No faithful servant of the Church-or the Society of Jesus-can deplore that.”

Charles reached for a strawberry tart from the platter that had appeared on the table, and craned his neck to see who Guise was lecturing. Several places away, a hawk-nosed old man shook his head, his wispy white hair waving like feathers around his skullcap. Charles caught the word heretic and then the old man sat back in his chair, disappearing from view.

“Old woman,” Guise said savagely under his breath.

Wanting more than anything not to talk about heretics, Charles stuffed the whole tart into his mouth, turned his head away from Guise, and pretended to be absorbed in the checkerboard pattern that continued around the side wall.

“And you?” Guise demanded at his back. “Do you agree with me?”

“About what?” Charles said, around the mouthful of pastry and without turning.

“Heretics.”

Hoping to give deliberate offense so that Guise would leave him alone, Charles chewed the rest of his tart and swallowed before he turned. Guise was still waiting, his nostrils pinched with anger.

“Saving souls is part of what God requires of us,” Charles said evenly.

“And are you squeamish about the method, like old Dainville?”

An updraft of anger seared Charles’s chest and heated his face. Squeamish? Method? Squeamish about the king’s dragoons tying his uncle Jean Marc du Luc’s new young wife to a bedpost and refusing to release her until she recanted her faith? While her frail newborn screamed for food? Annette du Luc had pleaded through the night to be allowed to feed the sick child. Finally, her little boy’s misery was too much and before the sun rose, she agreed to become Catholic. But the baby died, worn out with sickness, terror, hunger, and wailing. Annette died, too, because she wrested a knife from a half-drunk dragoon and attacked the soldier who had kept her from her child. Jean Marc had been sent to the galleys. That had been more than a year ago, and no one knew whether he still lived, or even whether to hope he did, considering what everyone knew about the living death of galley slaves. Charles forced words through his anger.

“Our Savior is a God of love, Pere Guise.”

Guise’s sculptured lip curled. “Is it loving to let heretic souls be damned?”

“Is it loving to torture them into false conversion?” Charles shot back. “Is it loving to kill children?”

Something moved behind Guise’s eyes, and he gazed at Charles with new interest. “The south,” he said lazily, “Provence, Languedoc, the filthy strongholds of heresy.” He leaned toward Charles like a cold shadow. “Have you grown so loving to your neighbors-and your kin, perhaps-that heresy no longer troubles you? Holy Scripture commands us to ‘compel them to come in.’ ”

“If you read further in that same fourteenth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel, you will find that those who refuse are not hunted down and tortured until they accept the invitation. More to the point, can we ever be too loving to our neighbors? Whom Holy Scripture commands us to love as ourselves?”

“And whose souls we are required to save. Un roi, une loi, une foi, Maitre du Luc. Or has your tender heart carried you as far as treason?”

An insane desire to plunge his little table knife into Guise’s well-padded ribs washed over Charles. He folded his hands tightly in his lap and studied his white knuckles.

“Consider our Jesuit rule of education,” he said softly. “Our Ratio. About which we cannot possibly disagree. It directs us to make learning pleasurable. Should we not, even more, make the learning and acceptance of God’s true religion pleasurable?”

Guise sat back, watching him as a cat watches a wounded bird. “A follower of Epicurus, are you? The highest good is pleasure? How interesting.”

“Epicurus held that pleasure comes from the practice of virtue. And few faithful theologians would dispute that our savior preached love and virtue.”

“So love and pleasure are one?”

“Hah, Pere Guise, you old dog, you should know,” Montville said loudly from Guise’s other side. “Corrupting our new professor already?” He leaned around Guise, smiling broadly, his eyes warning Charles to smile with him. “I hope your dinner was to your satisfaction, maitre?”

“Very much so,” Charles said warmly, profoundly grateful for the boisterous interruption.

“Good, you’ll need sustenance to get through your first afternoon of rehearsals.”

“Ballet!” Guise spat on the floor, narrowly missing Charles’s arm. “Womanish nonsense. A waste of time and money.”

“I’ll be sure and tell King Louis you said that, next time I’m at court.” Montville laughed, slapping Guise on the back.

“Our official plan of studies says nothing about ballet!” Guise replied stiffly. “‘Tragoediarum et comoediarum, quas non nisi latinas ac rarissimas esse oportet, argumentum sacrum sit ac pium.’ That is what it says!”

“Yes, yes.” Montville laughed. “‘Tragedies and comedies should be rare,’ we all know what it says.”

“It says extremely rare,” Guise snapped. “And pious.”

“And we send reports to Rome every year and mostly they only object to the expense,” Montville said, the light of battle in his eye. “For plays and ballets alike. How do you explain that?”

“The Society of Jesus is deeply in need of reform.”

Montville’s infectious laughter pealed out again. “You become more like our good Jansenists every day!” He leaned closer to Guise. “Is it your old sins troubling you, mon pere?”

Charles’s lips twitched as Guise grew white around the nostrils. But before Guise could answer, the rector rose for the final grace and everyone rose with him.

The final grace’s “amen” echoed from the walls and the professors on the dais filed silently into the passage, to be followed by the boys, table by table. Pere Montville hurried Charles outside, past the lay brothers putting a dozen wooden chests down near the doors and setting their lids open to reveal game boards, chessmen, darts, toys, and pastimes for the hour of quiet recreation that followed dinner.

“Never mind Pere Guise,” Montville said, making for the main building’s rear door. “He is a good librarian. But he suffers from the handicap of being a Guise. My advice is to do as I do, try hard to stay out of his way. Now. You will spend this hour with Pere Jouvancy.” He flashed Charles a sideways grin. “Though whether you will find it an hour of quiet recreation, I beg leave to doubt.”

Nerving himself to face his new boss, Charles held the heavy door open for Montville and followed him into the gray day’s indoor gloom. Pere Joseph Jouvancy, senior rhetoric master, was as famous for his brilliant teaching and his rapport with students as for the elegant Latin tragedies he wrote. Drama in schools run by religious orders was a centuries-old tradition, but dance with it was the Jesuits’ new contribution. Though King Louis no longer danced himself, the French court had been in love with ballet for a hundred years, ever since Queen Catherine de Medici brought it to France from Italy. For persons of any social standing, dancing well was an indispensable part of claiming one’s rightful place in the world. Charles, like most people, had heard the cautionary-and true-tale of the young noble who so disgraced himself by dancing badly at court that he was sent abroad by his father until the resulting scandal died down. The Jesuit college ballets trained dancers for the ballets still staged occasionally at court, and for the frequent and lavish productions at great country chateaus. Unlike those ballets, the Jesuit productions had more or less edifying themes, no female dancers and no romantic plots, yet they still attracted glittering audiences and wealthy patrons for the college.