Charles smiled politely. He and everyone else had seen those same dancing seasons a hundred times. Aside from the technical problems, his artistic sympathies were with Beauchamps.
“You say Maître Beauchamps has done this before? Tried to change your livret, I mean?”
Charles knew perfectly well that this duel of wills between professor-librettist and hired dancing master was a fixture of every ballet production in every college, even without formidable personalities like Jouvancy and Beauchamps involved. But the more he knew about the lay of the land here, the better.
Jouvancy put a trembling hand to his forehead. “He does it every ballet,” he said in a resonant whisper, and became before Charles’s eyes every persecuted, aging monarch in the history of drama. “It is why I am as you see me, a man old before my time.”
Charles bit his tongue to keep from laughing, thinking that Jouvancy, who was probably in his middle forties, could have made a fine career in Molière’s company. With the sense of delivering his next line, Charles said what he suspected the rhetoric master was waiting to hear.
“With your permission, mon père . . .” Wickedly, he hesitated, and Jouvancy shot him an impatient look. “Perhaps—if it would be of use—I could convey your judgment to M. Beauchamps and free you for other things?” Charles finished brightly.
Jouvancy let his hand fall from his face. His large gray eyes were luminous with a finely judged opening of hope.
“You?”
“Yes, mon père,” Charles said gravely. “I would be honored to be of service.” And just stopped himself from adding, “Your Majesty.”
“Very well.” Jouvancy’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction. “It is all one to me,” he added mendaciously. “Speak to him—no, inform him—this afternoon. I cannot be bothered, the whole thing is beneath me. The man must be taught that he cannot dictate in this manner to a learned theoretician. Telling him so will be good practice for you.” Jouvancy grinned suddenly and came offstage. “And whether it will or not, none of these boys would be upright at the end of a pirouette with that thing on his head. But don’t tell him that.”
“But surely he knows?”
“Hmph. He thinks he has only to show them, shake his stick at them, yell at them, and they become gods of the dance. No matter if he is demanding that they dance on their hands in a sack. No theory, that’s the trouble with Beauchamps. But he is just a practitioner, so what can one expect? A great one, I grant you that—but a practitioner all the same. The man cares nothing for theory.”
Charles kept his mouth shut. He was all too familiar with the age-old theoretician vs. practitioner argument, but calling Beauchamps just a practitioner was like calling the pope just a priest.
“A chiming clock!” Jouvancy snorted. “The ancients would never think of anything so absurd!”
“Well, they didn’t have clocks,” Charles said reasonably.
“True. But never forget, the arts are for imitating nature, Maître du Luc. ‘The monkeys of nature,’ as our dear Père Menestrier says so well in his learned treatise on ballets. Are there clocks in nature? No, there are not clocks in nature.”
“But there is time,” Charles murmured, admiring a sketch for the Horizon’s shimmering costume, half black, half white.
Jouvancy chuckled. “All right, Maître Charles du Luc. I see we will get on together. And whether we do or not, we have a ballet to present in just two more weeks. Not to mention the tragedy.” He cocked his head, his eyes bright with curiosity. “Though I am pleased to have you here, I have been wondering—so late in our rehearsals, a bare two weeks before a show, is a peculiar time to acquire an assistant. Not that I am ungrateful, of course.” He waited hopefully.
Smiling blandly, Charles shrugged and gave the answer he’d prepared. “My superiors decided I had been at Carpentras long enough. In addition to teaching at the school, I had also been a student there, you know.”
“I see. Well, your arrival comes just as I am realizing that this production is hopeless.”
“Hopeless? Do they really dance so badly?”
“No, no, thanks to Beauchamps, they dance very well, most of them. But they do not care why they dance. They do not care that the dance is meant to show every movement of the emotions and the eloquence of the soul shining through the body. Without that, it is nothing. Yet these wretched boys only want to show the shapely leg, jump higher than their confrères, and wear the richest costume. Though surely you know all that. Boys are boys, even at little Carpentras.”
“True,” Charles laughed. “But as long as they didn’t trip over their feet and the ballet amused parents and patrons, the rector there was satisfied.” Though Charles hadn’t been. Only rarely had he come across a boy who had it in him to make what he danced burn with beauty. “After all, the ballets are to adorn the yearly prize-giving and provide some enjoyment for the boys near the end of the school year, are they not, mon père?”
“Of course, but you are at Louis le Grand now. The king himself is our patron, my dear Maître du Luc, which means that he helps pay for the ballet. As well as the year’s academic prizes. Do you have any idea what those suitably bound tomes we give as prizes cost? So the ballet must be superb, because we cannot afford to lose the king’s money! Anything less would be an insult, since King Louis was such a very gifted dancer himself. And I do not say that only because he is the king. Look.”
He pointed to the wall behind Charles. Charles turned in his chair and saw a gilt-framed painting of a half-grown boy in a golden tonneau—a stiff, tight-waisted coat standing out over his breeches like a very short skirt. The coat’s full sleeves were tied with yellow ribbons at elbow and wrist, and the shoes, heeled and square-toed, sported rayed golden suns. The boy’s face was still softly rounded and his silky light brown hair curled on his shoulders. He wore a crown with golden rays, and above it a tall sheaf of waving white plumes.
“That is the king,” Jouvancy said reverently. “Only fourteen, dancing as France’s Rising Sun in Cardinal Mazarin’s Ballet of Night. I was there and I tell you, it was magnificent. My father wanted me to see the king reclaim his kingdom after the horrors of the nobles’ revolt—the Fronde, that was, before your time. Anyway, the room—in the Petit-Bourbon palace—was crowded beyond belief, and my father and I, being of little importance, were shoved away in a corner. It was February, but the room was stifling from the crowd, and I soon fell asleep on the floor—I was just ten. The ballet really did last all night, twelve hours. My father shook me awake at daybreak and lifted me up onto his shoulders in time to see our young Rising Sun come in at the east windows. Ah—” Something of the ten-year-old’s wonder on that long-past morning glowed on Jouvancy’s face. “It seemed to me that the sun himself had truly danced down into our midst. He did his sarabande down the room, with all the Graces dancing in his train. All around me courtiers were weeping and kneeling. Such a fine dancer he was, a beautiful dancer.” Jouvancy sighed. Then he laughed and returned to the present. “Though you’d never think it to look at him now,” he said, glancing down somewhat complacently at his own trim figure, “because he has become a very fine eater. Not fat, really. Just—ah—solid.”
In spite of his current feelings about Louis XIV, Charles was moved by this glimpse of the young monarch reclaiming his kingdom. But he still didn’t much want to talk about the king.
“What is this year’s ballet called, mon père?”