sanity. And when he says no, they come to me!” He waved Charles to the only other chair in the room. “And you, I suppose, will want more ballet costumes.”
“But yes, mon pere,” Charles said, ingenuously wide-eyed. “And all cloth of gold, please.”
“Don’t even think it.” Montville laughed. “Well, Maitre du Luc, you are welcome to Louis le Grand! This morning we will see to the details of your life with us and get you settled in. A Jesuit college is, of course, a Jesuit college, but all have their differences, too. First, though, I must write you into my ledger of our scholastics.” He thumped the enormous leather-bound book lying on his desk. “Then you will see our rector, Pere Le Picart. I know you met him last night with Pere Jouvancy, but he wishes to talk with you further. I think you will find that we are fortunate in our rector-though his ability to see straight into our souls and out the other side can be a touch disconcerting.”
Montville laughed, but his description of the rector’s perspicacity made Charles’s stomach tighten, in light of his recent activities.
“After that,” Montville went on, “you must go to the clothing master. Your cassock, if I may say so, is showing the effects of your journey. Do you need anything else?”
“Perhaps another shirt, mon pere, if he has one to spare. Other than that, I think I am well supplied.”
“Good. When the clothing master has finished with you, he will take you to the prefect of studies, who will work out your teaching schedule. And if, after all that, you are still standing, I will give you a tour of the school, which will end at the refectory and dinner. After dinner, you will go to Pere Jouvancy.” He shook his head, laughing. “Pere Jouvancy is excused from dinner the last two weeks before a show, because no matter how often anyone reprimands him, he simply forgets to come to eat.” Montville eyed Charles speculatively. “They have been rehearsing the tragedy and ballet since late May, you know. It’s quite unusual to get a new rhetoric assistant this far into summer show preparations.” He raised an inquisitive eyebrow, but Charles refused the bait. “Well, well, far be it from us to question the will of our superiors, especially when it brings us such a good gift. So. Your father’s name?” He picked up a quill and opened the ledger.
Chapter 2
The warning bell was ringing for dinner and Charles’s head was spinning as Montville led him back to the main courtyard after the promised tour. It had already been spinning when the tour started. Pere Le Picart, a lean man in his forties with eyes as gray as the North Sea, had been less formidable than Montville had painted him, smiling gently and nodding approval as Charles answered questions about his studies and his teaching experience. But there had been unspoken questions in his cool gray eyes, and Charles had gone to his next appointment with some sense of escape. The clothing master Frere Dupont had scuttled around his dark room, searching through the piles of black cassocks as he measured Charles with his eye and shook his head at how much of him there was to clothe. When a cassock with enough hem to let down had been found, and a new linen shirt to go under it, Dupont had dismissed him to the prefect of studies, assuring him that the new garments would be taken to his chamber. Pere Joly, the prefect of studies, eagle-beaked and ascetic-looking, had told Charles in the fewest possible words that he would be assisting in a morning grammar class and spending his afternoons working with Pere Jouvancy to ready the ballet and tragedy. Joly had added austerely that such a light schedule was only for now, and that after the performance, Charles could expect more classes added to his day.
Then Montville had appeared at Joly’s door and swept Charles away to tour the college. They’d started at the opulent chapel on the south side of the Cour d’honneur, as the main court was called, and from there Montville had chivied him over the entire property, explaining who taught what to whom and where, and where they all lived, ate, and studied. A secondary school, like all the Jesuit colleges, Louis le Grand’s students ranged from about ten to twenty years old. Its syllabus of studies followed the plan laid down by St. Ignatius and was based on Latin and Greek writers of the ancient world. The general shape of the Paris college’s life would be familiar to any Jesuit, but as Montville had said, each college also had its uniqueness. Louis le Grand was known as the nursery of France’s great men. The college’s day students outnumbered its pensionnaires, or boarding students, by nearly four to one. But the pensionnaires, the five hundred or so boys from noble and wealthy upper-bourgeois families, were its heart. It was these boys who acted and danced in the elaborate schedule of plays and ballets for a large and influential audience.
“An astronomy class?” Charles had said, peering through a window at perhaps a hundred half-grown, black- gowned boys crowded cheek by jowl on benches, windowsills and floor, listening to a small bespectacled Jesuit turning a large, wood-mounted globe of the heavens as he lectured. “Are all the classes so large?”
“No, not at all, those are day boys.” Montville had shrugged. “We try not to turn any qualified boy away, whether or not he can pay. We also have a handful of scholarship boys, who live together in a dortoir and are counted with the pensionnaires. Most of the day students are Parisians. They sleep and eat at home, or in cheap student lodgings. If we hadn’t been able to expand our property as much as we have, we’d have to sit them on bales of hay in the street and teach them there, like the university did a few hundred years ago. Fortunately, we’ve bought, stolen, won-depending on who tells the tale-a number of neighboring college properties, most of them defunct or derelict. Mans, Marmoutier, most of les Cholets. But it’s taken decades, and without our Pere La Chaise- the king’s confessor-speaking for us at court, we’d still be arguing over the loot, so to speak. Some of it, I may say, cost us a good deal to repair. Ceilings coming down, rooms you couldn’t swing a cat in, rats fighting the fleas for floor space. But on the whole good bargains, and our classes are spread over all of them. The University of Paris, our less than good neighbor across the rue St. Jacques, is sick with envying our property. And our popularity. But what do they expect? The lackwits still teach as though it were eleven hundred-something and poor Peter Abelard were on the faculty!”
The acquisitions had turned Louis le Grand into a minotaur’s maze of largely old and ill-matched buildings, most built of weather-blackened stone, a few half-timbered in the old fashion, some five stories high, some only two. Blue slate roofs pitched at clashing angles sprouted a mushroom growth of chimneys and dormer windows, an exuberant roofline further punctuated with towers as ill assorted as the buildings. The largest tower, on the south side of the Cour d’honneur, had bells and its own windows. A smaller tower at the southeast corner had a bell and a clock, and a windowed hexagonal tower on the north side looked to Charles like it might be an observatory. Though what anyone hoped to see through the clouds of this northern sky, he couldn’t imagine.
The melange of buildings was honeycombed with courtyards. The vast Cour d’honneur, which opened from the street passage leading from the postern door and the rue St. Jacques, was graveled, with a few old trees around its edges shading a half dozen stone benches. The other courts were smaller, some invitingly green with turf and big plane trees, like the fathers’ garden near the rue de Rheims, enclosed now on two sides by the sparkling new stone of the main college library. Montville and Charles had passed a chattering group of Englishmen leaving the garden, and Montville had explained that visitors came from all over to marvel at Louis le Grand’s enormous collection of books. Then he’d walked Charles through the quiet, shady court where the pensionnaires lived with their tutors in private rooms and small dortoirs, then under a classical archway and back into the Cour d’honneur.
Now, as they crunched across the grayish gravel, Montville pointed to the range of windows reaching nearly to the ground floor on the main court’s east side.
“Your senior rhetoric classroom, maitre.”
“How many are in the class?”
“Only thirty or so. We try to keep the boarders’ classes smaller. And you wouldn’t want a hundred boys in your ballet! The lay brothers and workmen from the Opera will build your stage out from the classroom windows. Your performers change costumes in the classroom and the windows let them come and go from the stage. We cover the whole courtyard with a canvas awning; do they do that at Carpentras? I suppose the sun is the problem there, but here it’s rain. If it rains enough, though, the canvas collects puddles and sags and-well, you can imagine what happens then! You might start praying now for the miracle of a dry performance day!” Montville cocked an eye at the clouds. “Early summer was stifling,” he said, as a fine rain began to spatter on their hats. “Though you’d never think it now!”
“I hope this cold and wet won’t hurt the harvest,” Charles said. “At home, it promised well, after too many years of drought.”
