At the river end of the street, the spire of St. Severin’s church reached from its ancient gray stone and swallows soared and dove around it. The trees showing above courtyard walls along the street seemed to have twice as many leaves as they’d had on Monday, when Charles and Jouvancy rode out of the city. Summer had really come. With a sigh of contentment, Charles leaned on the windowsill, soaking up the light and warmth. During the winter, the golden afternoon light-on the rare occasions when the sun had shone-had seemed like a cruel trick, promising warmth and giving none. Just thinking about the snow-swept, frigid winter, which had lingered far into April, still made him shiver. He sent up a prayer to St. Medard and whatever other saints saw to weather that the summer would be long, and hot enough to drive even the memory of snow from his Mediterranean bones. When the supper bell rang, he left his window open and went to the refectory, happier than he remembered being in a long time.
But when he was back in his room, replete with mutton stew and the greetings of students and fellow Jesuits after his few days away, his eyes kept straying to the still unpacked saddlebag on the floor. The ballet livret inside was nagging at him about its unfinished scenes. First, though, he turned his back on the saddlebag and went to his prie-dieu. He’d prayed little so far that day, and it was nearly time for Compline. Scholastics weren’t obliged to pray the canonical hours, but they were required to spend an hour a day in prayer, starting with the Hours of Our Lady and going on to other prayers. They were also required to make two examinations of conscience each day, and Charles would have to tell his confessor that he had not come anywhere near that at Versailles. As he collected himself to begin the Hours of Our Lady, Compline bells began ringing from churches and monasteries across the city. Their urgent, discordant clanging suddenly made Charles think that prayers must sound like that to God: urgent, clashing, drowning each other out, some sweet, some harsh as crow calls, all wanting notice.
He finished his own pleas and opened his eyes in time to see a level ray of evening sun strike the little painting of Mary and the Holy Child on the wall in front of the prie-dieu. Mother and baby glowed in its light, and their smiles seemed to welcome him home. One of those sudden updrafts of the spirit took him beyond pleading or wanting or worrying, and he laughed aloud. He was home indeed, and here was his family.
Mocking himself a little for his overflowing feeling, he got to his feet, picked up the saddlebag from the floor, and tossed it onto his bed. He untied the flap, reached in, and pulled out the livret. And stared in bewilderment at what he held, because it wasn’t the livret. It was a book of sorts, roughly stitched like the livret, but he’d never seen it before. Fending off the panicked thought that he’d left the livret at Versailles, he upended the saddlebag. And went weak with relief when he pulled the livret from the tangle of his dirty shirt and drawers.
Puzzled, he picked up the other book again, carried it to the window, and opened it. On its first page, in elaborate script, was written: “Armand Francois de la Motte, Comte de Fleury.”
Chapter 15
FRIDAY NIGHT INTO THE FEAST OF ST. ELISÉE,
SATURDAY, JUNE 14, 1687
THE FEAST OF ST. VITUS, SUNDAY, JUNE 15, 1687
Dumbfounded, Charles turned the roughly stitched pages. Except for the flourished name, the script was cramped and hard to decipher. Charles stood at the window trying to read it until the light failed. He lit his candle and kept on reading until the wick was consumed and the flame guttered out. Then he lay awake, wondering who had put the mémoire in his bag. His first guess was the Duc du Maine. Maine had taken Lulu’s silver tobacco box from Fleury’s room and could easily have taken the journal. The journal might even have been the true object of Maine’s search on Lulu’s behalf, the night Charles had talked to him in the gallery corridor. But the boy seemed to Charles like someone who would mostly shut his eyes to trouble. So if Maine had not gone to La Chaise’s rooms while the Jesuits were out and put Fleury’s book in the saddlebag, who had?
The first part of the mémoire was a conventional, self-aggrandizing account of the Comte’s public and military life, and the name-dropping included only other men, most far better known than Fleury. But the second part was another matter. It began innocuously enough, with comments on court happenings. But it soon degenerated into Fleury’s highly colored and self-congratulatory record of lecherous escapades with maidservants. There was also an account of his violent pursuit of a female courtier whom he called simply Venus, including a tale of buying a magical powder guaranteed to make Venus throw herself into his arms. Then came page after malicious page recounting his fellow courtiers’ alleged peccadillos, none of which the said courtiers would want known-or even suggested.
Lulu and her misdeeds figured largely in it. Fleury wrote salaciously of catching her wading bare-legged, skirts to her knees, in the Latona fountain, of seeing her in the arms of the Prince of Conti in a gallery arcade, of watching her climb onto the roof of the palace and sit singing at the top of her voice, until the king sent two of his gentlemen out onto the roof to bring her in. He wrote indignantly that she’d cursed and thrown her silver tobacco box at him when he scolded her for smoking her little clay pipe. He gloated over keeping the box. To punish her, he said, but from a few entries about expenses and furious envy of a rich nephew, Charles suspected that Fleury had meant to sell the little box.
But the worst was that one day late in April, so Fleury claimed, he’d been walking in the gardens, near the Grotto of Persephone, an imitation classical temple with an underground chamber pretending to be the door to the spring goddess’s underworld. He’d stopped to talk to a gardener trimming a yew hedge. They’d both seen the handsome young footman Bouchel come out of the little temple, but Bouchel hadn’t seen them. Then Fleury and the gardener were “rewarded,” as Fleury put it, by “the sight of lovely Persephone herself, Mademoiselle de Rouen, coming languidly from the temple, rosy and smiling.”
When Charles finally shut the book and went to bed, he lay sleepless, going over and over what he’d read. The night was warm, and he threw back his blanket and pushed up the sleeves of his long linen shirt. Considering the source of the story, it might not even be true. But if it were true, and if the unnamed gardener had been Bertin Laville, it could explain the gardener’s death and the money his wife had found in the house after he died. If the gardener had seen Bouchel and Lulu come out of the grotto, he might have tried to blackmail the footman. Charles found it hard to think of Bouchel as a killer, but he could imagine him killing to protect Lulu.