inventive Dainville could be.
The next turning to the right, and the second to the left, brought them out in the long, Y-shaped Place Maubert. Its stone houses were well kept: some set back behind tall, solid wooden gates, others with doors opening onto the street. Some had been rebuilt in a more modern style, with brick and stone, but one still showed timbering, and another was old enough to have a corner finished with a small, round tower capped with blue slate. Most of the houses had ground-floor shops with garish signs. There was an enormous red-brown boot, a loaf of golden bread the size of a carriage wheel, and a towering candle with an orange flame as long as Charles’s arm. The painted tumble of chops and trotters and tongues on the butcher’s sign was so realistic, it made his stomach growl.
“I’ll be over there,” Richaud said, pointing to the candle.
“Can you wait there for me, if my business takes longer than yours?”
“Of course. The chandler loves to talk. Bon chance with your Monsieur Callot.”
“Good luck to you, too, with your chandler.”
Circling around servants and housewives gossiping and filling pots and jugs at the fountain in the middle of the cobbled Place, Charles angled south, looking for the rue Perdue. It turned out to be hardly wider than a footpath, and he wondered as he started along it if it was called Lost Street because of its size. Its houses, whose doors opened directly onto the street, were also smaller and looked less prosperous than those on the Place. He found three ducks carved in stone over a door just beyond the lane’s sharp turn. The door was opened by a gangling serving man tugging at the sleeves of his tight gray jacket, as if that would make them long enough.
“Bonjour,” Charles said, “I am Maitre du Luc. I would like to see Monsieur Callot, if I may.”
Still pulling at his sleeves, the servant nodded and stood back from the door. Charles walked into a small antechamber with a worn but handsomely patterned black-and-red stone floor. An oak staircase rose on the right, against dingy plastered walls. The manservant disappeared through a doorway opposite the street door, leaving Charles at the foot of the stairs, listening to violin music, thumps, and loud laughter from the floor above.
Minutes went by. In a pause in the music, Charles heard the manservant arguing heatedly with someone. The voices seemed to come from beyond the door the servant had gone through, and wondering how long he was going to be left waiting, Charles opened the door cautiously and looked in. The bed with faded green curtains, the ragged cushioned chair, and cooking utensils scattered around the cold hearth told him this was a lodger’s chamber-not surprising, since Parisians of all ranks rented out any extra foot of space, especially on ground floors or in attics. The voices came from beyond a door straight across the room.
“Oh, blessed saints,” a woman said impatiently, “he doesn’t care, so why should we?”
Quick light steps approached and Charles withdrew his head just in time. An exasperated maidservant walked through the lodger’s chamber, tucking stray black curls under her white coif. Her gray woolen skirt and bodice were old, but better fitting than the young footman’s jacket. Ignoring Charles, she hurried up the stairs and into the room the music was coming from. And almost immediately backed out of it, as a man burst onto the landing.
“Maitre du Luc!” M. Edme Callot, bent and brittle and in his seventies, leaned precariously over the wooden stair railing, his long, high dressed chestnut wig threatening to slip off his bald head and land at Charles’s feet. “Welcome, maitre! Come up, come up and be at home!”
The maid hovering behind Callot threw up her hands and bustled back down the stairs, this time rolling her eyes at Charles as she passed him.
Charles gave her a rueful smile and started up to the landing. “Bonjour, Monsieur Callot,” he said as he climbed. “I have come to wish you a blessed Christmas season. And to have perhaps some talk about the Congregation of the Sainte Vierge.”
“Good, excellent!”
Callot wove his way back toward the music. Charles sighed and followed. But he was hardly through the door of the small salon when a young woman leaped at him. Her full red lips were smiling and her lemon-colored skirt was bouncing on the small hoops supporting its inverted cone shape. He jumped backward. She pirouetted without missing a beat and struck out toward the salon windows in a series of simple but prettily done chassees. A young dancing master bowing a little pocket violin beside the fireplace nodded at her enthusiastically and redoubled his efforts.
“Ha! She almost had you, maitre!” M. Callot was convulsed with mirth. In a parody of the girl’s chassees, he sidled to Charles and smote him on the shoulder. “Christmas, maitre, make the most of it!”
From the fumes accompanying Callot’s words, and the glass and bottle on a table near the fire, Charles gathered that the old man had already been making the most of it, with the help of the distilled spirits called eau de vie. This was definitely a new view of the quiet, pious elder whom Charles had glimpsed at gatherings of the bourgeois Congregation.
“May we talk somewhere a little quieter, monsieur?” Charles said, raising his voice to be heard over the music. “About the Congregation.”
“No, no, stay and dance! I know you can dance, I saw your Louis le Grand show in August! That Labors of Hercules was a good ballet, though why you bother with those godforsaken Latin tragedies, the sweet Virgin only knows. Ah, me, I would dearly like to dance Hercules
…” He posed unsteadily in fourth position, his right arm straight out as though he held a sword. As the girl danced past him, her feet flickering in swift pas de bourrees, he lunged, swiping the imaginary sword left and right, overbalanced, and fell into her arms. Laughing, she stopped and pushed him back onto his feet. The dancing master stopped playing and glowered.
“Oh, no you don’t, uncle,” the girl admonished, one capable-looking hand spread on Callot’s chest to hold him at arm’s length. “No more Christmas kisses.” She glanced at Charles, shrugged a wry shoulder, and dipped the best curtsy she could in the circumstances. She was perhaps nineteen or twenty, Charles thought, robust and auburn haired, a little too broad-faced for conventional beauty, but her tip-tilted nose and slightly down-slanting brown eyes were appealing. Her mouth, which Charles saw now was naturally red, looked as though it nearly always smiled. And her body-Charles lowered his eyes and firmly refused to consider her body.
“She calls me uncle to make me feel younger, but in fact she is my all-too-lovely great-niece,” Callot was saying. He waved his hand airily between the girl and Charles. “Maitre du Luc, Mademoiselle Isabel Brion.”Then he stepped back from her and grinned at the scowling dancing master. “And that is her very devoted maitre de danse, Monsieur Germain Morel.”
Monsieur, Charles noted, which meant that the dancing master was just beginning in his profession and had not been at it long enough to be called by the more honorable title of maitre, given not only to Jesuit scholastics but to many positions in French society. With a visible effort, Morel composed his face and managed a civil bow to Charles.
“Come now, mon cher Monsieur Morel,” Callot laughed, “it’s Christmas, we must make the most of it!”
“Hush, uncle, I fear you have already made the most of it,” Mlle Brion chided. “I think today you put eau de vie even in your morning chocolate!” She turned to the red-faced dancing master. “Do forgive us, monsieur,” she said sweetly. “Shall I try it once more?”
“Of course! By all means!” The young man’s face cleared and he set his violin on a chest against the tapestry-covered wall. “But first, mademoiselle, allow me to correct your pas de bourree.”
With a dazzling smile, Isabel Brion presented herself in front of him. Morel began to demonstrate, dancing in a circle around her so that she could see the step from every angle. Charles, only half listening to Callot rambling on about Hercules, watched with pleasure. The young teacher might be a beginner, but he was good, very good. Slender and supple, of middle height, wearing his own chestnut hair cut several inches above his shoulders, he had grace and speed, and his technique was perfect. Morel stopped beside Mlle Brion and resumed the pose from which the step began. She studied his well-muscled, stockinged legs, his tautly poised torso, his graceful arms, as though they were Holy Writ, and copied his stance almost exactly. But somehow, her right arm, in its ruffled sleeve that showed her round, firm forearm was just enough wrong that he had to stretch his own arm around her to make the correction. Color flooded their faces and they gazed earnestly at each other. Somehow, Morel forgot to withdraw his arm from around her shoulders.
Charles turned to Callot to hide his smile, wondering what the girl’s father would do if he walked into the salon and hoping he wouldn’t. Callot was still practicing unsteady sword thrusts and mumbling a running commentary on his own performance.
