Judith Rock: The Eloquence of Blood

After a breakfast of bread, a little cheese, and leftover soup, eaten standing in the fathers’ refectory and as near the fireplace as possible, Charles walked back through the archway between the fathers’ courtyard and the students’ court, thinking about the day before him. His first task was calling on Monsieur Edme Callot, an elderly member of Louis le Grand’s bourgeois Congregation of the Ste. Vierge. These Congregations of the Holy Virgin, based in Jesuit houses and colleges all over Europe, were social groups promoting spiritual formation and charity among men and boys. Besides Louis le Grand’s four student Congregations, two for pensionnaires, boarders, and two for externes, nonboarders, there were also two Congregations for men, one for bourgeois and another for artisans. Charles was in charge of almsgiving in the older pensionnaires’ Congregation, and he also helped with the bourgeois group, which his friend Pere Thomas Damiot served as priest. This morning’s call was a courtesy offering of Christmas greetings, accompanied by a plea to M. Callot for a contribution to the bourgeois Congregation’s alms budget.

Charles’s spirits rose as he emerged from the students’ court into the Cour d’honneur and crunched across its gravel to the street passage. The air was sharp in the nose, but through the bare branches of trees scattered along the court’s edges, the sky showed a thin blue in the growing light. The surprising promise of sunshine made the short walk to the Place Maubert a pleasant assignment. Scholastics were not supposed to leave the college alone without special permission, and his companion this morning was Maitre Louis Richaud, whom he knew slightly and who was visiting a member of the artisans’ Congregation.

Richaud was waiting in the passage. A scholastic like Charles, he was lean and quick moving, with perpetually watchful black eyes. Unlike Charles, he was not a teacher, but a cubiculaire, who helped provision the private student chambers and the small dormitories for the less well-born and wealthy boys, and also supervised students. Students in Jesuit colleges were rarely left alone, especially boarding students, most of whom were the scions of rich and influential families.

Charles and Richaud greeted each other, and the porter let them out into the shadowed street.

“My man lives just off the Place Maubert,” Charles said, as they started down the hill. “In the rue Perdue, I’m told, at the Sign of Three Ducks. And yours?”

“He’s a tallow chandler, well off for his kind, I think. His shop is on the west side of the Place. Where the gallows used to stand, he says.”

Richaud sounded almost regretful that the gibbet was gone, but Charles shuddered. He’d seen too many corpses in the army, including too many poor souls left hanging for the birds.

Though the Christmas festival lasted until the Feast of the Epiphany on January sixth, working people couldn’t afford to stop work for so many holidays in a row, and the street was fairly busy. A carter bawled encouragement to his horse pulling a load of cured skins up the hill for the bookbinders along the rue St. Jacques. Cheaply cured skins, Charles thought, as the smell from the cart hit his nose. Farther along, at the corner of the Benedictine Hotel de Cluny’s property, a clutch of tonsured, black-robed monks argued with three fishwives who had blocked most of the small side street with a temporary stall. The oldest woman was giving as good as she got, and swinging a large fish by its tail in wider and wider arcs. Charles grinned at Richaud.

“Looks to me like she’s warming up her arm to use that fish on someone,” he said, surprising Richaud into what Charles sensed was rare laughter. On impulse, Charles said, “Are you coming to our Christmas farce tonight?”

Richaud’s mouth tightened angrily and he walked a little faster.

Charles eyed him. “A Farce of Monks, I mean. By Pere Damiot. It’s good, very funny, you’ll like it.”

“I doubt it. But I have to go.”

“Have to? What do you mean? Every group of Jesuits puts on an in-house farce of some kind at Christmas! Surely you go every year?”

“No.” The negative fell like a stone at Charles’s feet. “But this year my confessor, Pere Dainville, has ordered me to go. He thinks I dwell too much on sin.” Richaud sniffed disdainfully, making his disagreement clear.

How like Pere Dainville, Charles thought, smiling to himself. The old man was his confessor, too. Though he seemed frail, he was as implacable as a wall in demanding truth from his penitents. But once he had it, he was compassion itself in setting penances. He was also inventive at finding ways to puncture the self-absorption that guilt so easily bred. During these last months, Charles had had the hard but comforting experience of just how inventive Dainville could be.

The next turning to the right, and the second to the left, brought them out in the long, Y-shaped Place Maubert. Its stone houses were well kept: some set back behind tall, solid wooden gates, others with doors opening onto the street. Some had been rebuilt in a more modern style, with brick and stone, but one still showed timbering, and another was old enough to have a corner finished with a small, round tower capped with blue slate. Most of the houses had ground-floor shops with garish signs. There was an enormous red-brown boot, a loaf of golden bread the size of a carriage wheel, and a towering candle with an orange flame as long as Charles’s arm. The painted tumble of chops and trotters and tongues on the butcher’s sign was so realistic, it made his stomach growl.

“I’ll be over there,” Richaud said, pointing to the candle.

“Can you wait there for me, if my business takes longer than yours?”

“Of course. The chandler loves to talk. Bon chance with your Monsieur Callot.”

“Good luck to you, too, with your chandler.”

Circling around servants and housewives gossiping and filling pots and jugs at the fountain in the middle of the cobbled Place, Charles angled south, looking for the rue Perdue. It turned out to be hardly wider than a footpath, and he wondered as he started along it if it was called Lost Street because of its size. Its houses, whose doors opened directly onto the street, were also smaller and looked less prosperous than those on the Place. He found three ducks carved in stone over a door just beyond the lane’s sharp turn. The door was opened by a gangling serving man tugging at the sleeves of his tight gray jacket, as if that would make them long enough.

“Bonjour,” Charles said, “I am Maitre du Luc. I would like to see Monsieur Callot, if I may.”

Still pulling at his sleeves, the servant nodded and stood back from the door. Charles walked into a small antechamber with a worn but handsomely patterned black-and-red stone floor. An oak staircase rose on the right, against dingy plastered walls. The manservant disappeared through a doorway opposite the street door, leaving Charles at the foot of the stairs, listening to violin music, thumps, and loud laughter from the floor above.

Minutes went by. In a pause in the music, Charles heard the manservant arguing heatedly with someone. The voices seemed to come from beyond the door the servant had gone through, and wondering how long he was going to be left waiting, Charles opened the door cautiously and looked in. The bed with faded green curtains, the ragged cushioned chair, and cooking utensils scattered around the cold hearth told him this was a lodger’s chamber-not surprising, since Parisians of all ranks rented out any extra foot of space, especially on ground floors or in attics. The voices came from beyond a door straight across the room.

“Oh, blessed saints,” a woman said impatiently, “he doesn’t care, so why should we?”