“Of course she is,” La Chaise murmured, keeping an eye on the white plume. He smiled without mirth. “I doubt she will give up trying to retake the king’s affections while there is breath in her body. But she’s too indolent to bother much about her children.”
The king suddenly stood, and everyone sitting stood with him. He gave the signal for the proceedings to begin, and everyone sat down. A dozen men in the first row of the Ring rose again and bowed to a dozen women. As always, the ball would open with a branle. All the pairs came onto the floor, made their honors of bows and curtsies to the king and each other, and linked hands in order of rank to form a long line. Music began beyond the open double doors of an adjoining room, and the line began to wind its way around the dance floor. Each of these couples would dance a paired dance before the evening was over.
Though Charles had been a good dancer, and part of his work at the Jesuit college was creating and producing the student ballets, he couldn’t, of course, dance in public now. But he loved watching people dance. He did wish, though, that someone would open a window to cool the thick air. He scrutinized the dancers performing the branle. The branle was a simple dance, an occasion to show off rank and finery, and because the occasion was in honor of the king’s daughter and the Polish nobles who had come to negotiate her marriage contract with their prince, the finery was very fine indeed. At the head of the branle was the Prince of Conti, devastatingly handsome in a suit of what Charles at first thought was black satin. But as Conti moved, the bright candlelight struck gleams of dark red and blue from his coat and breeches, and Charles saw that the suit was of a costly weave called, appropriately enough, “Prince.” The cloth reminded Charles of the man-changeable, neither one thing nor the other, beautiful. Conti moved with the grace of Apollo himself, the blue and silver plumes of his broad beaver hat waving as he danced. He was such a magnificent dancer that Charles almost forgot his dislike of the man in the pleasure of watching his entrancing skill.
His partner, of course, was the bride-to-be. Her rose satin gown, covered with a delicate web of snow-white lace, was so obviously meant for a maiden’s blush that the effect was nearly comic. Her curling dark blond hair shone under an old-fashioned net of pearls, and ropes of pearls were wrapped around her bare shoulders, hugged her long neck, and swung from her ears. As the dance went on and the room grew hotter, Charles found himself wondering how much the girl’s finery weighed.
When the branle ended, the dancers separated, men standing in one row, women in the other, and faced the king. They made their honors to him and then to each other, and the men escorted the women back to their seats. But the Prince of Conti, instead of resuming his seat, returned to the floor. He faced the king, standing gracefully in dance’s fourth position, one foot advanced before the other, and bowed deeply. As he replaced his hat, the sound of a foot beating grave triple time was heard, and the traditional second dance of a ball, the noble courante, began.
“King Louis used to dance this himself,” La Chaise murmured, nodding slightly down at the white plume waving above the high-backed royal chair.
As Charles watched Conti stepping and balancing and turning his way through the dance’s sinuous floor pattern, he caught sight of the Duc du Maine sitting near the king’s end of the Ring. Absorbed and wistful, the boy’s shoulders twitched as he watched, his breath visibly catching in his throat as the excitement of the dance reached out to his lame body. Watching him, Charles thought sadly that but for his lameness, Maine might have shown his father’s talent reborn. He clearly had the passion. Conti ended his dance and made his bow. Then he returned to Lulu and, with another fluid bow, invited her back onto the floor.
The two took their places and made their honors. As the girl rose from her curtsy, she raised her eyes to her father, and the fury in them took Charles’s breath away. Then the upbeat of the gavotte sounded and her face became as smooth and expressionless as a mask. Her dancing burned with life; as she turned, jumped, balanced, and posed through the lively gavotte, her feet might almost have set fire to the floor where she stepped. Charles felt her every move in his own body and wished he could dance with her. The gavotte was also a proud dance, and the blue-black and rose pattern of royal order and balance she and Conti wove together coaxed sighs of pleasure from the watchers. When the pattern was complete and they made a final reverence to the king and to each other, Conti took his seat again in the Ring.
With another brief glance at the king that Charles thought must have struck him like lightning, Lulu advanced on the younger of the Poles. Charles felt almost sorry for the hapless ambassador as she gave him her hand-and a look colder than the Polish winter. The Pole, wearing French coat and breeches now, was competent enough at French dances, though his carnation-colored suit clashed badly with Lulu’s rose silk. He was also sweating heavily, and Charles saw the girl flinch as sweat flew from his moustache during a jumped turn. When the dance ended, the Pole returned Lulu, who had steadfastly refused to look at him, to her chair. His face was as red as his carnation coat-with embarrassment as well as exertion, Charles thought-and his coat’s back was dark with sweat. The man’s sigh of relief was audible as he regained his seat, and a woman in a bright yellow wig, in the Ring’s second row, laughed loudly. A ripple of laughter spread through the salon.
But near the door, the laughter turned to protest, and Charles looked to see what was happening. He stared in disbelief as one of his students from Louis le Grand, eighteen-year-old Henri de Montmorency, pushed through the standing watchers, apparently headed for the dance floor. Montmorency’s pride and high nobility had not saved him from being painfully bewildered in the classroom or from being the only student Charles had ever had who was incapable of even the simplest dancing. Charles watched him narrowly. Surely Montmorency did not mean to dance here. Surely even he knew that all the dancing pairs and their dances had been chosen before the ball began. But Charles had learned that with Montmorency, it was best not to make assumptions. He began trying to edge through the crowd toward the boy, but La Chaise pulled him back.
“What are you doing?” he rumbled in Charles’s ear. “No one can leave yet.”
“One of my students just arrived.” Charles nodded toward the boy, as wedged in now by the crowd as Charles was and obviously seething with frustration. “I need to find out what he’s doing here.”
La Chaise frowned. “You think he’s here without permission from the college?”
“He may be,” Charles said. It was as good a reason as any to get to Montmorency, and it might well be true. The closer some boys got to leaving the school, the less they cared about offending the rules they’d lived by for so long.
“No matter,” La Chaise said, “you’ll have to wait till the ball ends. The king brooks no interruptions to these ceremonies.”
And, indeed, as though to underscore the words, King Louis slowly turned his head and looked up at the whispering Jesuits, who whipped off their bonnets.
“Forgive us, Sire,” La Chaise murmured, and they bowed their heads.
The annoyed king turned back to the dancing, and La Chaise’s grip on Charles’s cassock forbade him to move so much as a toe.
To Charles’s relief, Montmorency stayed where he was, even as the final dance of the evening began. Charles was interested to see that it was one of the new English contredanses, in which all the evening’s couples danced facing each other in two lines. He’d heard of this style’s recent import to France but had never seen it, and he was fascinated by the simple but lively meeting and parting of the dancers and the bright swirl of color as pairs changed places up and down the line.