Judith Rock: The Rhetoric of Death

“Maman, they are just like monkeys!”

The great double doors swung shut. Charles hoped the Siamese didn’t have enough French to understand the remark, but Kosa Pan’s dancing eyes and brief snort of tolerant laughter told him otherwise. As the ambassadors’ servants began laying brocade-wrapped gifts at the rector’s feet, Charles faded back along the salon wall and retreated to the courtyard.

Half the linguists had abandoned their line and most had their gowns nearly off their shoulders. Charles chivvied them back into order just as Montville and two of the trumpeters emerged into the court and placed themselves below the red-draped upper windows, facing the long line of students. A blasting fanfare from the third-floor salon, answered by the courtyard trumpeters, signaled that the ambassadors had reached their red armchairs. The first linguist stepped smoothly forward. He bowed to the open windows, delivered greetings in French, bowed again, and exited around the outside of the benches. The second boy welcomed the guests in Siamese, and if his pronunciation made the ambassadorial mouths quiver, it also brought wide, appreciative smiles for the effort. Twenty more languages followed and finally the Chinese boys advanced, red silk flashing under their gowns. They delivered a brief antiphonal Chinese oration, expressing the college’s joy in welcoming honored Mandarins from the East.

They withdrew and a longer fanfare announced Pere La Chaise, escorting the king’s German sister-in-law Liselotte, Madame, as she was styled by her royal title. She and her bevy of ladies acknowledged the ambassadors, who rose and bowed in return. Then Madame was shown to the middle chair of three upholstered in blue cut velvet, set between the benches and the stage. As she arranged her billowing lemon satin skirts around her, Pere La Chaise sat down on her right. Her ladies claimed the first bench, their white linen headdresses, called fontanges, standing up on their ringleted heads like half-folded fans.

The other benches began to fill, as the boarding students not in the performance took their places. Charles saw Pere Montville showing the Mercure editor to a good place near the front, and Beauchamps and the musicians emerged from the senior refectory, their tiring room, and arranged their music on stands. The mothers, aunts, and sisters of the students filled the windows, their jewels and gowns gleaming even in the subdued light, and their men, equally dazzling, flowed into the courtyard. Members of religious orders began arriving in a flood of black, brown, and white: Augustinians, Cordeliers, Carmelites, Jacobins, and Celestines.

With a last look at his audience, Charles slipped through the door to the understage, where Pernelle, cheeks flushed with excitement, stood beside her assigned gear wheel. The flirtatious Frere Moulin was still not in evidence, and the other brothers were too busy to pay her any attention. Charles smiled at her and went up through the trap and through the rhetoric classroom windows into a simmer of anticipation. Pale under their makeup, boys were dressing, muttering lines, practicing steps, and discovering that, once dressed, their churning insides needed the latrine. Pere Jouvancy, calm and eagle-eyed, was everywhere at once. The clock chimed the quarter before one, preliminary music began in the courtyard, and a hush descended on the classroom.

“A good time to pray, messieurs,” Jouvancy said to the students happily. “Keep your headdresses on, God will understand.”

They gathered around him. Jacques Doute bowed his head, closed his eyes, and fell over his feet. Charles caught him and murmured, “Good, you got that over with in here.”

Jouvancy glanced sideways at them. “Dear Lord,” he prayed, “you took a body like ours, and our bodies are glorified in You. Please make us all, actors and their words, dancers and their movements, musicians and their music, stagehands and their work, instruments of Your truth. Let all we have made together be to Your glory.” He paused. “And, dear Lord, extra courage wouldn’t come amiss.” The “amen” was full-throated and garnished with laughter. Clovis’s opening actors scrambled for last sips of water, smoothed tunics and straightened helmets, and streamed through the windows to their places. Charles followed and settled himself and his thumping heart in the prompter’s wing.

The overture ended and Jacques Doute, blessedly sure-footed and commanding, spoke his prologue. Two lay brothers Charles didn’t know drew the curtains apart and revealed the shadowy green forest, and the stage magic began to work its will. The audience grew quiet and attentive, as though the tragedy’s sonorous Latin cast a beneficent spell. The robust swordplay drew cheers. Roars of laughter greeted the antics of comic characters. And if the tragedy cast a spell, the ballet wove a deep enchantment. The Siamese, who had watched the tragedy in polite bewilderment, came alive when the dancers appeared. Crowded close to the windows, they laughed and pointed and applauded.

When Hercules and his suite celebrated winning the Hesperides with a gravely joyous minuet, in a garden of golden fruit under a pink and gold and purple sunset, the audience breathed a collective sigh of contented wonder. Disaster threatened briefly when Armand Beauclaire went beautifully right, instead of correctly left. But, to Charles’s amazement, Beauclaire realized his mistake and pirouetted smoothly out of harm’s way. When the treasure-hunting Argonauts sailed their ship across the stage, the sea of billowing blue ribbons was so realistic that Charles saw a face or two in the audience turn faintly green. When the big-headed giants tried to scale heaven and fell thudding back to earth, even severe Carmelites held their sides laughing.

Holding his three-foot hourglass, Walter Connor danced Time’s sarabande with majestic menace. As the sparkling sands of time and life drained visibly away, people blanched and shrank back in their seats. As Hercules slew the smoke-breathing Hydra, the audience leapt to its feet, applauding and cheering. Even the sober-faced German Madame smiled and nodded happily as the red smoke drifted over her head.

And when the exuberant Ballet General began, Charles was half afraid the audience would surge onto the stage and join in. Hercules’s long chaconne was a tour de force. Applause drowned the creaking of his pink cloud as Diogenes-Pere Montville-wobbled to earth. Holding his lantern high, he brought the students receiving prizes onto the stage. To Charles’s delight, Antoine Doute won the lower grammar class’s prize, a fat Latin tome that he hugged proudly to his skinny chest. Finally, the trumpets accompanied Madame and her ladies from the courtyard and the Siamese down from their aerie. Royalty, ambassadors, and nobles went to the reception in the fathers’ refectory, and the cast and less exalted remainder of the audience surged together, hugging, kissing, bragging, and congratulating.

Giddy with relief, flooded with happiness at the beauty he’d helped to make, and moist-eyed with pride at the students’ achievement, Charles gave-and received-exuberant congratulations. Mme LeClerc made her way toward the stage, holding Marie-Ange and Antoine both firmly by the hand, and Charles jumped to the ground to greet her. He congratulated Antoine on his prize and both children forgot their manners and hugged him. Mme LeClerc was so excited that she forgot to reprove them.

“Your show was miraculous,” she cried, throwing up her hands. “The saints must be dancing in heaven!” Under cover of giving him a smacking kiss on the cheek, she said in his ear, “Is Mademoiselle Pernelle all right, is she with you?”

He jerked his head at the stage. “Below. All is well, madame. After you sent her to me, did the police return?”