Free A Plague of Lies by Judith Rock Page B

pronounced it ready, and armed himself with a ladle.
    “Bowls and spoons are in the cupboard,” he said to Charles, who got three brown pottery bowls from a shelf and set the small table with the spoons. The king’s confessor placed the fragrantly steaming bowls beside the spoons and brought a knife for the bread and cheese, and the three of them stood with folded hands and bowed heads while he said the grace. Then, tired and momentarily at peace in the darkling room, they sat and ate hungrily, comforting their bodies with bread, wine, cheese, and La Chaise’s hot soup, and comforting their minds with good talk. Charles watched the candlelight gleam on St. Ursula’s reliquary and thought that perhaps their souls were comforted, too, by her presence. For the good of what they had to do here, he hoped she
was
present, because whatever the reliquary’s gold and lapis had cost Père Jouvancy’s pious grandfather, the little cross seemed smaller and more insignificant by the moment here in the grandeur of Versailles.

Chapter 4
    T HE F EAST OF S T . L ANDRY , T UESDAY , J UNE 10, 1687
    B efore half after nine the next morning, after a late and hasty breakfast of bread and the rest of the bouillon, Charles followed Père La Chaise and Père Jouvancy along the gallery corridor toward the central, royal part of the palace. Their heels echoed sharply on marble and parquet as they passed through a seemingly endless chain of sumptuous chambers opening one into the other. In spite of his determination not to admire the king’s ill-gotten grandeur, Charles caught his breath in wonder when they reached the Galerie des Glaces. Not long completed, the Hall of Mirrors was already one of the wonders of Europe. It was more than two hundred feet long, and the inner side of it was lined with “windows” whose panes were mirrors, reflecting back the sunlight from the outer windowed wall and the colors and jewels of the people moving between. Staring and blinking in the unaccustomed light, Charles realized that the benches and tables, and the enormous pots of orange trees in every window embrasure, were made of what looked like silver. He edged toward the nearest pot to see if it really was silver and walked into Jouvancy, who had stopped and was gazing upward.
    “Thank the
bon Dieu
for so much beauty,” the rhetoric master whispered, and Charles looked up, too.
    He had to admit that the ceiling was beautiful. Until he looked closely and saw that it was war spread over his head in sky blue and blood red and every other color in the artist’s palette. Louis XIV, in a billowing wig and a Roman soldier’s scanty armor, ramped over the battlefields of Europe, leading charges and trampling enemies against a background of smoke from burning cities, while a sky full of cheering angels watched and bosomy classical goddesses waited to bestow laurel crowns. Charles turned his attention to trying to catch sight of Père Le Picart and Père Montville among the throng of courtiers waiting for the war god’s appearance. La Chaise had set Bouchel to watch for the other two Jesuits outside and bring them to the gallery the moment they arrived.
    The king’s day, La Chaise had explained, rarely varied from its set schedule of private events and royal appearances, and there was little chance that this morning’s appearance would be late. From being waked at half after seven and the succeeding ritual of the royal dressing, to the reverse ritual of undressing and retiring to bed at half after eleven at night, Louis was the center around whom everyone else’s day revolved.
    The palace clocks began to chime the quarter before ten. Beside Charles, La Chaise sighed with relief at the sight of a pair of three-cornered formal Jesuit hats called
bonnets
coming toward them, bobbing behind the footman Bouchel, who was cleaving the gathered courtiers like Moses in the Red Sea. As the footman delivered Le Picart and Montville, a hush fell and every head turned