Free The Rhetoric of Death by Judith Rock Page B

before he vanished, seen that his mind was anywhere but on his dancing. Had something—or someone—in the courtyard drawn him away? Jouvancy had said that the boy was bright. But he was also sixteen, and sixteen, whether bright or dull, wasn’t known for its wisdom.
    Charles rang the bell at the college’s small postern door to the right of the formal entrance and then stepped back to look up at the carved and painted tympanum above the tall double doors. When the Jesuits opened their Paris college more than a century ago, they’d called it the College of Clermont. Now the tympanum said “Collegium Magni Ludo,” The College of Louis the Great, and was topped by a crown and the royal fleur de lis, which proclaimed King Louis XIV’s patronage.
    A lay brother opened the postern and Charles hurried through the echoing stone-vaulted passage to the Cour d’honneur, toward the sound of Beauchamps’s violin. The dancing master was still driving the harried, and now heroless, dancers toward the mythical Hesperides. With a sigh for the ephemeral allure of earthly paradises, Charles went to report his failure to find Philippe Douté.

Chapter 5
    W hen Charles finally gained the quiet of his chamber that night, he was too tired even to look out the window at Paris. He stripped down to his shirt, fell into bed, and stretched out, past caring whether his feet hung over the edge. He fell asleep between one thought and the next, to dream that he was dancing a gigue while Pernelle played Beauchamps’s little fiddle.
    When he woke, he was curled into a tight ball and the day’s first light was gray around the shutters. He said the waking prayers, yawned his way to the window to open shutters and casement, and leaned out. Across St. Jacques, the dome capping the university’s new church was just visible in the growing light. The air was blessedly mild and birds poured their songs into the early quiet. A sharp rap at the door made him turn reluctantly from the window as Frère Fabre came in, sloshing water out of a pitcher. The brother set the pitcher down, rubbed with his foot at the puddle, and then glared at his wet shoe.
    â€œShaving will make you late for Mass.” He squelched out of the room. Charles sighed and mopped up the water, shaved, and cleaned his teeth. He was tying the cincture around his cassock when a second rap on the door was followed immediately by Fabre’s red head. “The Mass bell’s about to go, come on, I’ll show you a short way to the chapel.”
    Charles clapped an old, darned skullcap on his head and followed his self-appointed guide. This main building of the college had once been a grand family hotel, as townhouses were called, the Hôtel au Cour de Langres. Grandeur still lingered on the ground floor, where visitors were received. But in the century and a quarter since the Society had acquired the property, the upper floors had been reconfigured again and again to accommodate the growing college and were now haphazard mazes of small chambers, studies, cramped salons, dead-end passages, and low doorways. Fabre led Charles around corners, up and down inconsequential steps waiting like traps in dark passages, and finally down a last steep flight of stairs to a small door set into a corner.
    The door opened on an echoing dimness and a soft rustling, a sound like homing birds folding their wings, as Jesuits and students gathered. At the chapel’s east end, the high altar gleamed with gold and silver. Where the aisles crossed, a faux dome’s painted angels and saints spilled from a tender blue summer sky, and reached their plump hands down to struggling mortals. Charles loved these joyously painted ceilings, with their message that heaven and earth could touch, that mortals could reach heaven from the earth’s muddy ground. He found a place on the end of a backless bench and settled to the business of opening himself to the