Judith Rock - The Eloquence of Blood

“Dear blessed saints,” Mme LeClerc cried, “what is that?”

Charles looked over her head, squinting at what looked like a procession coming down the slope of the street, and sighed. “That is old Marin, the beggar.”

Marin was limping behind a string of mules being driven toward the river. The old man stumbled through their dung, his seamed face lifted to the sky, brandishing his stick and shouting, “Claire, blessed Claire, forgive me!”

“Ah, ma foi, it’s that old man of Reine’s,” Mme LeClerc said. “The poor thing grows worse and worse; he should be shut up somewhere. Because you never know what they’ll do, maitre, when they get like that; why, it could have been someone like him who killed the Mynette girl!”

“You knew Martine Mynette? And you know Reine?”

“Everyone knows Reine. I didn’t know the Mynette girl personally, of course, but I’ve seen her when I’ve gone visiting my friend Sybille, a baker’s wife in the Place Maubert. Little Martine Mynette was so pretty, blond as an angel.”

In silence, they watched Marin out of sight.

Mme LeClerc sighed. “His story is very sad, do you know it? But no, how could you, so new in Paris? I’ll tell you, maitre, but come into the shop, it’s growing colder out here than the devil’s-” She bit her lip, blushing, and hurried Charles through the door.

Shivering in the thinner cloak he’d been given to replace the good one snatched off his back in the street attack, Charles was glad enough to go. To his disappointment, though, the bakery’s chill was only a little less than the street’s, the oven having gone unlit while the family was away. Thumps from the workroom behind the shop, and Marie-Ange’s steady stream of chatter, told him that M. LeClerc was there, building a new fire.

“Well,” Mme LeClerc said, resting a hand on an empty counter, “the woman called Reine used to come around selling old clothes, and sometimes I gave her something to eat and we talked. Though I haven’t seen her lately.”

“I think she mostly begs now.”

“Ah, so you know her, maitre?”

“I’ve met her. And her daughter, Renee.”

“That one I do not know. But Reine, well, she has a past one does not talk about-especially not to you-but that’s men, isn’t it? Anyway, one day she told me that many years ago she fell truly in love with that mad old man who just passed!” Mme LeClerc’s plump shoulders climbed to her ears. “Who knows why women fall in love?” Her eyes grew vague for a moment and she glanced toward the back room and her husband’s noise. “Dear Saint Anne, who knows indeed?” Seeing the expression on Charles’s face, she laughed and said, “No, no, I am not regretting my Roger, not most of the time, but, dear God, how the man snores! I have been putting candle wax in my ears at night, but last night, in Gonesse, it fell too far in and it took three of us to get it out.” She frowned. “Where was I? Yes, Reine. So she fell in love with-now what is his name, I have forgotten-”

“He’s called Marin.”

“Marin, then. Well, old Marin was not always so old. He was about forty, still very much a man, when Claire Clemence’s tragedy happened. She was the Princess of Conde, and Marin was a servant in her house. Princess-how magnificent that sounds, but for her it was only sorrow. She lived alone with her servants in the Conde house here in Paris. Why alone? Because her ice-hearted husband hated her, poor thing. Well, one night, two men had a fight in her chamber. She tried to stop them, and Marin heard the shouting and ran in and threw himself between Claire Clemence and the men. He thought the two men were trying to kill her, but they were only trying to kill each other. I never learned what the fight was about, but it was certainly not about poor Claire Clemence, no matter what the thrice-damned Conde said after. She was more than forty by then, after all. And, so it was said, not quite right in her wits. What woman would be, treated as she was by the Conde! But the Conde used the fight as an excuse to accuse her of adultery. Almost overnight, she was gone from Paris, never to return. He shut her up in one of his chateaus, leagues from anywhere. With hardly the necessities of life, so they say. And never, not once, maitre, did her husband ever visit her, nor does her son. So they say.”

“She’s still alive?”

“Oh, yes, the poor creature.”

A gust of wind rattled the street door’s latch and blew the door slightly open, but Mme LeClerc was shaking her head sadly over her story and didn’t notice. Charles shuddered, as much from the story as from the chill.

“Marin’s madness lies at the Conde’s door, too,” Mme LeClerc said. “Marin had been in love with Claire Clemence since he was a boy, though Reine said there was never anything improper between them, and she would know, because no man keeps a secret from Reine, they say! When they took Claire Clemence away, Marin tried to follow, he tried to hold on to her carriage, but the footmen pushed him off. The fall broke his foot badly, that’s why he limps. He followed on his broken foot until he couldn’t go farther, and finally a carter found him and brought him back to Paris. Well, when the Conde heard that Marin had tried to find her, he was furious and spread terrible rumors about Marin and Claire Clemence. He made sure Marin would never get another place in anyone’s house, and he never did. By the time he got back to Paris, he was skin and bones, Reine said. They almost had to cut off his foot. The worst was that his sorrow over Claire Clemence being so reviled and taken away sent him mad.” Mme LeClerc hunched her shoulders and shivered a little. “He’s fearsome now, when the fit’s on him. He used to go to doors asking alms, and people gave him what he needed. He was often around the Place Maubert, my friend Sybille said, but he doesn’t go there now, they’re afraid of him and drive him out. And who can blame them, the way he raves and shakes that stick of his when he doesn’t get what he asks.”

Charles was silent, thinking that Marin had very rarely gotten what he asked. And understanding now what blasphemy it must seem to the old man for the heart of the Prince of Conde to rest in a jeweled box, on an altar draped with cloth of gold. After hearing the story, Charles felt ready enough to call it blasphemy himself.

“At least Reine still loves him,” Charles said, more to himself than to Mme LeClerc.

“Of course she does, she would do anything for him. As would I for my old Roger.” She raised her voice. “Who snores like a pig!”

A grunt came from the workroom. “Close the street door, Beatrice! It’s colder in here than the devil’s cursed cock!”

NEW YEAR’S DAY, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1, 1687

T he firstmorning of 1687 dawned clear and cold. Most people regarded New Year’s Day as a holiday, and there were no college classes. After Mass and the briefest of breakfasts, Charles and Pere Damiot, booted and cloaked and wearing breeches under their cassocks, went to the stables. Charles had told Pere Le Picart about being nearly stabbed in Monday night’s street brawl, and he was sending them to Vaugirard together, and on horseback for safety. To Charles’s great relief, Le Picart had not only given him and Damiot permission to go to Vaugirard in search of Paul Saglio, he had excused them from the celebration of the king’s return to health.

In the stable, a quiet gray horse stood saddled, bridled, and tethered to a post. The gray’s dam, the placid dappled mare that had eaten Reine’s bread on Monday night, was whickering softly from her stall, as though warning her offspring about the outside world. A young lay brother was trying to bridle the college’s third horse, a restive black gelding Charles had been wanting to ride for months. Charles watched the gelding sidle and stamp and then stepped forward and put an arm over the glossy neck. He murmured in the pricked black ear, and the horse stood still and took the bit without further protest.