the one at the foot of his bed held his mother’s New Year’s gift, a small Pieta-the Virgin cradling her dead Son- carved in black stone. Eventually, it would be put where others could see it, but for now, he was allowed to keep it in his chamber.
In the study, another painted crucifix hung over a large scarred table that served as Charles’s desk. The chair had a hard red seat cushion, and a small frayed piece of brown rug kept his feet off the cold wood floor. Like most rooms in the college, chamber and study were unheated. The rector and a few others sometimes had a brazier in chamber or office, but only the kitchens, the infirmary, the fathers’ small refectory, and the common warming room-the calefactory-had fireplaces. There were also fireplaces in a few large chambers in the student court, but those were strictly reserved for noble or very wealthy boys. Otherwise, the assumption was that a cold and solitary body made for warm devotions, and that in large gathering places, so many bodies crowded together made heat enough.
Shivering in spite of his cloak, Charles broke the skim of ice on the water that had stood overnight in a tall copper jug. One of his eccentricities was that he liked to be clean. To most people, “clean” meant wearing a clean white linen shirt or chemise. But to Charles, it meant using water-even soap. Though he had to admit that he was washing less in this winter weather. Last summer, when he’d first come here, lay brothers had brought water to his chambers most mornings, sometimes even warm water, but this autumn, the rector had stopped that small luxury. Money was unexpectedly short, and the lay brothers-who cleaned, cooked, marketed, ran the infirmary, and also took care of many of the college’s mundane interactions with the outside world-were spread thinner because no new brothers could be accepted until college finances improved.
Charles wiped his teeth with a linen rag dipped in the little pot of tooth cleaner he kept. He didn’t shave, because his confessor had taken his shaving mirror and ordered him to go to the college barber like everyone else. Charles missed the mirror. Not from vanity-he didn’t mind going stubble-jawed half the time, nor did he want to look at himself. But the little mirror’s greenish glass had made everything look mysteriously under water, and he’d found that being reminded of mystery, even in the mundane act of shaving, had been a good part of the day’s beginning.
He started toward the window to open the wooden shutters, then wondered if leaving them closed might keep his rooms warmer. Telling himself that was exactly as likely as the miracle of loaves and fishes happening in the refectory and replacing the omnipresent bean pottage, he opened them in case the sun shone, put on the skullcap he’d gotten permission to wear for warmth, and went to Mass.
Unlike Benedictines, members of the Society of Jesus were not cloistered and did not pray the canonical hours together. Besides each day’s solitary hour of meditation, they gathered for Mass before scattering to the day’s duties, and twice during the day took time for an examen, the examination of conscience.
After five months in the college, Charles no longer got lost on his way to the chapel, or tripped over the way’s odd steps and sudden turnings, even in the early-morning dark. The original college buildings had been part of a private hotel, or townhouse. But in the century and a quarter since the Society of Jesus acquired the property, the old buildings had been reconfigured again and again to accommodate the growing number of students and teachers, and these upper floors were haphazard mazes of small chambers, studies, an occasional cramped salon, dead-end passages, and low doorways. He hurried through narrow passageways, around corners, up and down inconsequential steps waiting like traps, and finally down a last steep flight of stairs to a small door set into a corner.
The door opened into Louis le Grand’s main chapel, long and high ceilinged. Charles stopped for a moment, as he always did, under the small false dome where the aisles crossed, and looked up at the well-fed angels in their blue sky, reaching down to struggling mortals. He could barely see them as yet in the dim light, but knowing they were there was enough. The side altars, too, were swathed in shadow, and the gallery and its colored glass windows were black. He went to his usual place on one of the backless wooden benches, knelt on the stone floor, and bowed his head onto his clasped hands. All around him, heels tapped over stone, and cassocks, cloaks, and coats rustled as Jesuits, students, and a scattering of people from the neighborhood, especially men who belonged to the college confraternities, arrived and settled. Then the Mass began and Charles gave himself up to the mystery of God.
After a breakfast of bread, a little cheese, and leftover soup, eaten standing in the fathers’ refectory and as near the fireplace as possible, Charles walked back through the archway between the fathers’ courtyard and the students’ court, thinking about the day before him. His first task was calling on Monsieur Edme Callot, an elderly member of Louis le Grand’s bourgeois Congregation of the Ste. Vierge. These Congregations of the Holy Virgin, based in Jesuit houses and colleges all over Europe, were social groups promoting spiritual formation and charity among men and boys. Besides Louis le Grand’s four student Congregations, two for pensionnaires, boarders, and two for externes, nonboarders, there were also two Congregations for men, one for bourgeois and another for artisans. Charles was in charge of almsgiving in the older pensionnaires’ Congregation, and he also helped with the bourgeois group, which his friend Pere Thomas Damiot served as priest. This morning’s call was a courtesy offering of Christmas greetings, accompanied by a plea to M. Callot for a contribution to the bourgeois Congregation’s alms budget.
Charles’s spirits rose as he emerged from the students’ court into the Cour d’honneur and crunched across its gravel to the street passage. The air was sharp in the nose, but through the bare branches of trees scattered along the court’s edges, the sky showed a thin blue in the growing light. The surprising promise of sunshine made the short walk to the Place Maubert a pleasant assignment. Scholastics were not supposed to leave the college alone without special permission, and his companion this morning was Maitre Louis Richaud, whom he knew slightly and who was visiting a member of the artisans’ Congregation.
Richaud was waiting in the passage. A scholastic like Charles, he was lean and quick moving, with perpetually watchful black eyes. Unlike Charles, he was not a teacher, but a cubiculaire, who helped provision the private student chambers and the small dormitories for the less well-born and wealthy boys, and also supervised students. Students in Jesuit colleges were rarely left alone, especially boarding students, most of whom were the scions of rich and influential families.
Charles and Richaud greeted each other, and the porter let them out into the shadowed street.
“My man lives just off the Place Maubert,” Charles said, as they started down the hill. “In the rue Perdue, I’m told, at the Sign of Three Ducks. And yours?”
“He’s a tallow chandler, well off for his kind, I think. His shop is on the west side of the Place. Where the gallows used to stand, he says.”
Richaud sounded almost regretful that the gibbet was gone, but Charles shuddered. He’d seen too many corpses in the army, including too many poor souls left hanging for the birds.
Though the Christmas festival lasted until the Feast of the Epiphany on January sixth, working people couldn’t afford to stop work for so many holidays in a row, and the street was fairly busy. A carter bawled encouragement to his horse pulling a load of cured skins up the hill for the bookbinders along the rue St. Jacques. Cheaply cured skins, Charles thought, as the smell from the cart hit his nose. Farther along, at the corner of the Benedictine Hotel de Cluny’s property, a clutch of tonsured, black-robed monks argued with three fishwives who had blocked most of the small side street with a temporary stall. The oldest woman was giving as good as she got, and swinging a large fish by its tail in wider and wider arcs. Charles grinned at Richaud.
“Looks to me like she’s warming up her arm to use that fish on someone,” he said, surprising Richaud into what Charles sensed was rare laughter. On impulse, Charles said, “Are you coming to our Christmas farce tonight?”
Richaud’s mouth tightened angrily and he walked a little faster.
Charles eyed him. “A Farce of Monks, I mean. By Pere Damiot. It’s good, very funny, you’ll like it.”
“I doubt it. But I have to go.”
“Have to? What do you mean? Every group of Jesuits puts on an in-house farce of some kind at Christmas! Surely you go every year?”
“No.” The negative fell like a stone at Charles’s feet. “But this year my confessor, Pere Dainville, has ordered me to go. He thinks I dwell too much on sin.” Richaud sniffed disdainfully, making his disagreement clear.
How like Pere Dainville, Charles thought, smiling to himself. The old man was his confessor, too. Though he seemed frail, he was as implacable as a wall in demanding truth from his penitents. But once he had it, he was compassion itself in setting penances. He was also inventive at finding ways to puncture the self-absorption that guilt so easily bred. During these last months, Charles had had the hard but comforting experience of just how
