scripts. Labors cast, speakers as well as dancers, mark your stage there against the windows.”
The students exploded in a whirlwind of movement. Benches were stacked and pushed against walls, tragedy scripts flew from piles on a side table, and the students sorted themselves into their places. The shabby condition of the hats explained itself as Charles counted fifteen ballet cast members, including Yellow Shirt, scattering the hats along invisible lines to mark out a stage with the long open windows as its back wall. Jouvancy thrust a ballet livret into Charles’s hands.
“Make the speakers say their lines, and the dancers walk their floor patterns.”
Charles nodded. Floor pattern, the path a dancer traced on the stage, was as much part of a dance as the steps. And that it be accurate was doubly important, given all the singers, speakers, scenery, and machines with whom dancers usually shared the stage.
“No steps,” Jouvancy said, “floor patterns only. Their spacing needs work. And see that they come readily on their cues. M. Beauchamps will rehearse the steps and music when he comes. Those waiting for a cue,” he said, raising his voice, “stand in your correct place and no talking. Anyone playing the fool, Maitre du Luc will bring to me for flaying.”
He flashed Charles a smile and hurried away to the actors at the other end of the room, obviously in his element. Clutching his livret, Charles advanced on the ballet cast, thinking that Louis’s court was probably a more forgiving audience than this wary huddle of teenaged boys. He remembered only too well how it felt to face a new professor, an unknown quantity who could make life miserable if he chose. He stopped in front of them.
“You began rehearsing this ballet in May, I understand, messieurs. And I have only this morning read the livret. May I rely on you to help me catch up?”
To his relief, most of them nodded. The irrepressible boy with the thatched head stepped forward.
“Yes, Monsieur Beauclaire?”
“Is it true, maitre, that you were a soldier?” Beauclaire glanced toward Jouvancy at the front of the room and lowered his voice. “A real one, I mean. Not just a church soldier.”
Charles balanced for a moment on the horns of that dilemma and, in the interests of getting on with the rehearsal, took the easy way out.
“I fought in the Spanish Netherlands, yes.”
Enthralled, the boys crowded closer and questions poured out.
“Were you a mousquetaire? Did you have a sword? Were you wounded?”
“Yes to all three. But I am a truer soldier now, you know.” He said it because he was expected to say it, and because thinking of himself like that had been part of wanting to be a Jesuit. The soldier image had always hovered over the Society of Jesus, founded as it had been by an ex-soldier. But that image was irreparably tarnished for Charles now, and the word “soldier” coupled with religion made him cringe.
“How were you wounded?” someone said. “Didn’t you have armor?”
“Mousquetaires don’t wear armor,” Beauclaire said loftily. “My brother is a mousquetaire.” He frowned consideringly. “Maitre du Luc, I see a fault of logic. Weapons are forbidden in the college, of course, but the church kills heretics. So why should you not be able to still carry your musket and sword when you go outside the college?”
Remembering tales of the armed and armored processions of Paris clerics during the Wars of Religion, Charles mentally awarded Beauclaire an “alpha” for logic. But he held up a restraining hand, glad for once for the rule that only questions relevant to the class should be discussed.
“You pose an interesting and important question, Monsieur Beauclaire. Our task, though, is to rehearse this ballet. You might not mind being flayed alive by Pere Jouvancy, but I would, especially on my first day. So let us turn to Hercules and his labors. We will start with the prologue. Who speaks it?”
A gangling boy with fine reddish hair stepped forward, stumbled over his feet, and was saved by another boy grabbing the back of his shirt.
“I’m clumsy, me,” the stumbler said equably over the chorus of laughter. He pushed his white linen shirt back into his breeches. “That’s why I only get to talk, maitre.”
His voice was a beautiful light tenor. Past cracking, Charles hoped.
“And your name?”
“Jacques Doute, maitre.” He bowed too low and Charles put out an arm to keep him on his feet.
“Let us hear you then, Monsieur Doute. The rest of you, take your places, wherever you are when the ballet begins. Who is Hercules?”
Yellow Shirt, staring out a window as though Charles were not there, held up a languid hand.
“Step forward, please, monsieur,” Charles said crisply. “You are?”
Charles had deduced the boy’s name. But he wasn’t about to ignore more rudeness, Jouvancy’s nephew or not. With an elaborate sigh, Yellow Shirt turned from the window.
“I am Philippe Doute.”
Charles locked eyes with the boy and raised an eyebrow, waiting for the expected and courteous “maitre.” When it was grudgingly given, he said, “You and Monsieur Jacques Doute are brothers?”
“Cousins, maitre,” Jacques said brightly, when Philippe didn’t answer. “But Pere Jouvancy is only Philippe’s uncle, not mine. His mother was Pere Jouvancy’s sister, you see, and so-”
“Thank you.” Charles held up a hand to stem the tide of family history. “We will hope that Monsieur Philippe Doute dances more generously than he speaks. If Monsieur Jacques Doute gets through his speech without mistakes, we will continue with the first entree, but without steps or music. You will enter promptly on your cue, walk the floor pattern of your dance briskly, paying particular attention to your spacing with regard to your fellow dancers, and exit. Entendu?”
The boys nodded that they understood and withdrew from the hat-defined stage. Jacques Doute took his place in what would eventually be a wing, downstage of the curtain. When the cast had made a pocket of stillness and silence in the noise of the tragedy rehearsal, Charles banged the end of a bench on the floor three times, signaling the beginning in the best Moliere tradition. Jacques Doute tripped twice on his way to the center of the stage’s width, but when he began to speak, it was with the ease and confidence of the great Moliere himself. As Charles listened, he wondered if Moliere, who had been a day student at Louis le Grand when he was still only little Jean Poquelin, had shown his talent even then and been allowed to act and dance. And if he had gone through a clumsy period, and what his teacher had done to train him out of it. Jacques got through his prologue faultlessly, gestured magnificently to open the invisible curtain, and was nearly run over as the Nemean lion and his suite, Hercules’s first challenge, galloped onstage. The six boys paced at speed through their puzzlelike floor pattern and rushed off. Philippe Doute entered and stalked through his solo’s pattern. The lion ensemble returned and wove energetically around him. Philippe barely looked at them. But whenever he faced upstage, he gazed intently out of the long windows.
Entree by entree and floor pattern by floor pattern, the ballet’s first part ground on. The sullen Hercules/Louis was bearing down on the mythological Hesperides and its golden apples-a political allegory for coveted and prosperous Holland-when Jouvancy clapped his hands and shouted for silence. An elegant man in his fifties, in shoes with red heels and a sky blue coat and breeches, stood in the doorway. With a flourish of his be-ribboned, silver- headed walking stick, he swept off his wide-brimmed beaver hat and bowed. Charles caught his breath as the boys murmured “Bonjour, Maitre Beauchamps,” and bowed in return. Jouvancy led the dancing master to Charles and introduced them, Charles managed some awestruck words of greeting and admiration, and there were more bows. Then Pierre Beauchamps surveyed the ballet cast and glanced at Charles’s livret.
“So we have arrived at the enchanting Hesperides,” he muttered under his breath. “Would that we had, Maitre du Luc. Would that we may by the seventh day of August.” He turned to the students. “Very well. The approach to the Hesperides again, messieurs, if you please. Take your places. We begin with Hercules’s solo. With music and steps. Perfect steps.”
The dancers melted into position. Beauchamps’s thin, stooped manservant, whose long bony face was creased in what looked like a permanent mask of worry, flipped his greasy tail of brown hair over his shoulder and opened a wooden box. He took out a small fiddle, a violon du poche, and dusted it with the skirt of his jacket. Beauchamps took the fiddle, tucked it under his chin, nodded sharply at the dancers, and began to play. All dancing masters were, of necessity, musicians, but Beauchamps was nearly as accomplished a musician as he was a dancer. But the stage remained empty and the music stopped.
“Philippe Doute!” Beauchamps thundered, looking furiously around the room.
