Judith Rock: The Eloquence of Blood

The rich smell of roasting chestnuts sweetened the air around them and they caught an occasional flare of warmth from the street vendors’ small fires. Though the rue St. Jacques was the Latin Quarter’s main street, it was emptier than usual. Many students from the University of Paris and the quarter’s teeming colleges-secondary schools for boys from ten to twenty or so-had left for the holidays. A handful of servants were hurrying home from the Petit Marche, the market a little up the hill beyond the college. Tools on their shoulders, men working on an old College of Les Cholets building that now belonged to the Jesuits were heading for the warmth of taverns. Charles saw one of them-likely a master carpenter, given his better clothes-break away from his fellows and make for the Necessity Man, who stood in the shadow of a gateway. The Necessity Man saw him coming and held out an old theatre mask from his assortment. The carpenter put it on, and the Necessity Man took off his voluminous cloak and held it up while his customer settled himself on a large bucket. Then he wrapped the cloak around both man and bucket and turned his back, leaving his masked customer to answer nature’s call in disguise, if not in privacy.

A clattering of wheels and the ring of horseshoes on stone made Charles and Damiot leap aside and press themselves against a wall, the rue St. Jacques being wide enough for two carriages to pass and not much more.

“I am battling the sin of envy, Maitre du Luc,” Damiot shouted in Charles’s ear, as carriages hurtled in opposite directions.

“Why?” Charles shouted back.

“Because our Louis le Grand confreres who teach theology and philosophy have nine days for their Christmas break. Their classes don’t start again until the second of January.”

They started walking again, brushing at the mud the carriage wheels had thrown onto their cloaks.

“While you,” Damiot went on, “a martyr to rhetoric, and I, even more of a martyr to grammar, have a bare four days.” He cast his eyes up at the unprepossessing heavens. “Why, oh ye saints and fates, was I set on Lady Grammar’s stony way instead of the easy path of Lady Philosophy?”

“Lady Philosophy probably decided not to trust your slippery way with words. As for your sense of injustice, it’s the twenty-fourth and our vacation started at noon. We have till the morrow of Holy Innocents, the twenty-ninth. That’s four and a half days. Five and a half till we teach, since the morrow of Holy Innocents is a Sunday, which means our classes start again on Monday the thirtieth.”

“Oh, don’t split hairs, that’s the worst of you rhetoricians. Just imagine the peace if we could send them all home, rhetoric and grammar classes along with theology and philosophy. Think about it, no boys in the college till after the Feast of the Circumcision!” January first, the Feast of the Circumcision, commemorated the ritual circumcising of the baby Jesus eight days after his birth. “With a few more days added to the break,” Damiot went on, “most of them could go home or to some relative nearby.”

“The thought has its points,” Charles said dryly. “But it would still be a bit rushed to send the boys from Poland and China home and back again by January second.”

“Yes, all right. But as things are now, there’s hardly even time for Pere Jouvancy to take a group of them down to the school’s country house at Gentilly.” Pere Joseph Jouvancy, the renowned senior rhetoric professor, oversaw Charles’s work in the college, both his teaching and his ballet production.

Charles shuddered. “He told me they’ll walk to Gentilly after Mass tomorrow. As cold as it is! A great Christmas treat, he called it. He can’t wait. Unbelievable.”

“Gentilly is a bare few miles away, but even that little promenade will be rushed, because they’ll walk back again on Holy Innocents.” The Feast of the Holy Innocents on December twenty-eighth commemorated King Herod’s massacre of boy babies when he tried to find and kill the newborn Jesus.

“But, mon pere, we tell them that keeping them on college property protects them from worldly temptations. Are you denying that argument?” Charles’s eyes were wide and blue with feigned dismay.

“Logic.” Damiot snorted in disgust. “That’s the other worst thing about you rhetoricians. Besides that, nothing could protect some of our-oof!” He ducked as the wind blew a clot of snow off a gargoyle leering down at them from the church of Saint-Severin. “I’ll tell you one thing, sending them home would save the school money. Judging from the belt tightening we’ve been doing lately, surely that would be welcome.”

Charles grunted agreement. “I’ve heard we have a bequest coming, though.”

“So I’ve heard, too. If it’s true, it’s not before time-I never want to see another bowl of bean pottage! On the other hand,” Damiot added ruefully, “Saint Ignatius did say we should live like the poor.”

“Saint Ignatius was a saint, after all…”

They melted into the gloom of the Petit Chatelet, the fortress entrance of the bridge called the Petit Pont, at the end of the rue St. Jacques. When they emerged onto the bridge, its tall stone houses somewhat sheltered them from the wind. But the bridge road was all too short. On the Right Bank, the wind seemed to blow even colder than on the Left, and they grabbed their wide-brimmed, flat-crowned black hats and gave up talking in favor of simply getting where they were going.

The church of St. Louis, just beyond St. Catherine’s well on the rue St. Antoine, was an Italian oratorio of a building in pale stone. As they started up the church steps, the setting sun burned a rent in the clouds and stained the columned front with red. The door beneath the pediment’s big gold and blue clock burst open and Pere Jean Pinette, rector of the Jesuit Professed House beside the church, came out onto the porch. Impatience was visible in every line of him. Charles bit his lip to keep his countenance, thinking that Pinette’s pale bony face and red-rimmed eyes made him look like an evil-tempered rabbit. His nose even twitched as it started to drip in the cold air.

“Get inside, you’re late.” Pinette swiped at his nose and stared in the direction Charles and Damiot had come from. “At last, thank the Blessed Virgin!” The sound of running feet behind them made Charles and Damiot turn to see a long-legged novice flying toward the steps, red cheeked from the cold.

“They are coming, Pere Pinette!”

“Walk decently! Go and get the torches. I don’t know how you’ll keep them alight in this wind, but see that you do!”

Pinette chivied Charles and Damiot into the church, where three hundred other shivering Jesuits stood facing the door. They represented the three Paris houses of the Society of Jesus: the Professed House here beside St. Louis, the college of Louis le Grand, and the Paris Novice House. Charles and Damiot, last to arrive from Louis le Grand, started meekly toward the back row, but Pinette hissed, “No time!” and pushed them into the row just inside the doors. As they fumbled under their cloaks for their three-pronged ceremonial hats called bonnets, Pinette’s voice boomed through the nave.

“Nearly here, be ready!”

The gathered Jesuits stopped hugging themselves for warmth, straightened their bonnets, and stood as though carved from black stone. Like soldiers, Charles thought, ducking aside to put his outdoor hat and Damiot’s out of the way behind a statue of St. Ignatius. Ignatius, ex-soldier and courtier, founder of the Society of Jesus, had thought of his Jesuits as stalwart and obedient soldiers. That was part of what had attracted Charles, an ex-soldier himself, to the Society. After seven years, though, the soldier image was no longer one of the things he cherished about being a Jesuit. And obedience was his greatest stumbling block.