the box bearer set his burden on the bishop’s upturned, black-gloved palms.
The bishop mounted the stairs, one cleric going before him with his crozier, the other four coming behind. Jewels on the gleaming box flashed red, blue, and green in the torchlight. Pere Pinette bowed deeply to the bishop and kissed his ring. In clouds of silver frost, the bishop spoke and Pinette replied. Then Pinette received the box, which held the Great Conde’s mummified heart, and the bishop gave his blessing. From their places on the steps and inside the church, the Jesuits began a sonorous Te Deum. The bishop descended majestically down the church steps, back to his carriage.
“Allez, allez, mon cher eveque,” Charles thought toward the bishop behind his singing. “Achieve your carriage and get us out of this wind, or you’ll send us all to join the Conde before our time!”
But the bishop, warm in his sable, knew good liturgical theatre when he met it, and he paced solemnly on. When the episcopal posterior finally disappeared and the carriage door was shut, Pinette turned with equal majesty and bore the box into St. Louis, toward the gated altar where it would stay until its April interment behind the high altar. Still singing, the Jesuits who had stood on the steps followed him in double file, trying not to shove each other to get out of the wind. Those in the nave parted neatly before Pinette and his burden, allowed those who had been outside to pass, then closed behind them in procession toward the gated side altar bright with wax candles and covered with cloth of gold.
The twinkling box had almost reached its temporary resting place among the side altar’s blazing candles when a man reared, bellowing, out of the shadows. He launched himself at Pinette, the singing shattered into chaos, and the box went bouncing end over end into the darkness, clanging on the stone floor like an out-of-tune bell.
Charles lunged for the attacker, saw that Damiot and others were already grabbing him, and instead changed course to go after the box. He prayed that it hadn’t broken open. Or, if it had, that he wouldn’t step on its contents. His first prayer went unanswered. A faint whiff of death overlaid with spices led him toward the side wall. A fast- thinking novice brought a torch, whose light showed them the box lying open on its side. A little way beyond the gleam of its sapphires and rubies lay a misshapen thing the size of a large apple, tightly wrapped in dull gold silk. As Charles bent to pick it up, the attacker broke partly free of his captors and limped a few steps toward the box. He was old, wild haired, and dirty, and his seamed face was twisted with hatred.
“Your box is full of nothing!” he screamed, pointing a shaking finger at the lump in Charles’s hand. “That’s no human heart! That’s a cold clod of filth; the thrice-damned Prince of Conde had no heart!”
In the stunned silence that closed around the words, a dark, slender young man-almost a boy still-threw himself to his knees in front of the Professed House rector. His brown breeches and coat were worn, and his hands were blue with cold as he clutched at Pinette’s cassock.
“Mon pere, I beg you, forgive him, let him go! He is old and his brains are weak, he does not know what he does!”
“He does violence and blasphemy!” Pinette jerked his cassock skirt out of the youth’s fingers. His hard stare shifted from the young man to the old one. “Who is he? What are the two of you doing here?”
“He is no one, I swear it!”The boy was shaking with fear. “We only-we only came inside because we were cold, mon pere.”
The stone walls caught and magnified the frightened whisper. “Cold, cold, cold…” Pinette seemed to be choking on what he wanted to say. A muscle jumped in his jaw and his lips were a thin bloodless line. Charles hoped he would remember that Jesus’ mother had also been poor and sought refuge from the cold one Christmas Eve…
“Get out,” Pinette said through his teeth. “Stay out. If I find either of you here again, I will turn you over to the commissaire. Go!”
The youth scrambled to his feet, and Damiot and another Jesuit escorted him and the muttering old man to the nearest door. The old man twisted in their hands and looked back, his eyes glittering with rage.
“Hypocrite!” He spat at Pinette, barely missing Damiot. “You’re like him, priest, coldhearted as the devils in hell! You’ll be dead and rot like him, too!”
Pinette turned a deaf ear, drew himself up, and faced his men. “Arrange yourselves!”
The lines re-formed. Charles put the swaddled heart back into its lead-lined nest, closed the lid on it, and bore it as decorously as he could to Pinette. Pinette took it, they bowed to each other, and someone started the Te Deum again. Exchanging silent, sidelong looks, the singing Jesuits paced the rest of the short distance. Reverently, Pinette carried the silver gilt box through the open gate of the candlelit side altar and placed it on the glowing cloth of gold. After prayers of thanksgiving and a dismissal blessing, the Jesuits bowed and went silently out of the church to the duties and joys of Christmas. But when they reached the walkway to the Professed House and the steps of St. Louis, the air grew sibilant with outraged whispers about the disrupted ceremony. Inside the church, the sacristan locked the altar gate, pocketed the key, and hurried to contribute his own morsel to the indignant talk, leaving the heart of the Great Conde, Prince of the Blood, to await the spring and its final resting place.
Chapter 2
ST. STEPHEN’S DAY, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26
The Feast of Christmas passed in Masses, a modest but welcome feast, and equally welcome rest. When the five o’clock rising bell clanged through the winter darkness the next morning, it pulled Charles from dreams of home and warmth. He forced himself out of bed, shivering in his long white linen shirt and the black knee-length underpants and stockings he’d taken to wearing night and day in the cold. He felt his way into his shoes, easy to do in the dark since they had no right and left, and twitched his woolen cassock down from its old-fashioned hanging rail. Thrusting his arms into its narrow sleeves, he pulled it on over his underclothes and tied the black cloth belt around his waist in the regulation knot. By feel, he pulled a narrow edge of shirt cuff and neckband to show white at neck and sleeve against the cassock’s black, retrieved his cloak from its night duty as an extra blanket, and draped it around his shoulders. Then he knelt at his prie-dieu for the required hour of meditation.
He said the Hours of Our Lady, added prayers for particular people, and finished, as always, with fervent prayers for the safety and well-being of his Huguenot cousin Pernelle and her little girl Lucie, living now in Geneva. Some of his brother Jesuits might have censored his prayers for Protestants-called Huguenots in France-unless he was praying for their conversion. But St. Ignatius had founded the Society of Jesus “to help souls,” and Charles sheltered his prayers under that wide rubric. When he reached his “amen,” he rose resolutely from the prie-dieu, refusing to stay there with the images of Pernelle that rose in his mind. It being still too dark to see the little painting of the Virgin and Child on the wall in front of him, he took his candle into the passageway. Listening to the faint morning sounds from other chambers, he lit the candle from the night lantern on the stair landing and hurried back to his own door, shielding the spark of warmth with his hand.
His chamber and tiny adjoining study were on the third floor of Louis le Grand’s main building, whose tall double doors were the college’s public entrance. The ground floor, which also housed the most important administrative offices, offered a few traces of elegance with its carpets and paintings, but Charles’s rooms were anything but stylish. The white walls were roughly plastered and the low ceiling was crossed with massive beams. Besides the prie-dieu and his little painting of the Virgin and Child, Charles’s sleeping chamber held a narrow uncurtained bed with a painted crucifix at its foot, a single chair without a cushion, and an old-fashioned, age- blackened wooden chest. Everything in the chest, except for his two extra shirts, was black: an extra pair of underpants, two extra pairs of stockings, a skullcap, and a pair of breeches for wearing under his cassock when activities like riding or directing ballet rehearsals threatened modesty.
The work of scholastics differed, and Charles spent more time as assistant rhetoric teacher than he did studying. Rhetoric was the art of communication, and because Jesuits believed that the body should be as eloquent in the service of God and virtue as the voice, rhetoric teachers produced plays and ballets in which their students acted and danced.
The only other things in Charles’s sleeping chamber were two hooks beside the hanging rail, and two niches in the thick plaster walls. The hooks held his two black hats. The flat-crowned, wide-brimmed one was his outdoor hat, and the brimless bonnet with its three corners, or points, was usually worn only indoors, on ceremonial occasions like the one for the Conde on Christmas Eve. The niche over the clothing chest held several books, and
