glittering audiences and wealthy patrons for the college.
Charles stumbled nervously as he and Montville started up a staircase toward a half-open door. Last night, as Jouvancy and Le Picart had kept him company while he ate a late supper, Jouvancy had been cordial and warm, telling hilarious stories of crises in rehearsals and performances over the years. But Charles had quickly seen that the little man was impatient and exacting, with the tireless energy of a squirrel. Now, as he reached the top of the stairs, a murmuring stream of exasperation, punctuated by thumps and the crackle of paper, poured from the half- open door to meet him. Montville knocked lightly, the murmuring broke off, and a high tenor voice called, “Come, come!”
Putting his head around the door, Montville said, “Here he is, mon pere,” clapped Charles on the shoulder and clattered away down the stairs.
Charles went in and found Jouvancy bent over a desk, scrabbling through an ill-assorted drift of books, loose sheets of paper, quills, a long curly dark wig, a cone-shaped sugar loaf wrapped in blue paper on a pewter plate, glass bottles of red and black ink, a sugar sifter, and a thick roll of wide blue ribbon uncoiling itself over the desk’s edge. Even in the gray light from the tall, many-paned window, Charles could see the cloud of dust rising from his efforts.
“Yes, yes, good morning to you, too,” the handsome little priest gabbled without looking up and before Charles had said anything. “I am sorry to trouble you with this nonsense, but I am sure that we are of one mind.”
The sugar sifter slid off the desk and Charles caught it in midair, wondering what nonsense he was being troubled with.
“Here it is. Sit, sit. You are a sensible young man, I could see that last night, look at what he wants-it is impossible, it is an offense, just look!”
The rhetoric master thrust a sheaf of sketches at Charles and went back to his frenzied search. Charles put the sugar sifter back on the desk, removed a papier-mache Roman soldier’s helmet from a straight-backed chair, and sat down.
“Ah, here it is!” Jouvancy disappeared below the desk and straightened, holding a blond wig. “Well?” He subsided into his chair, glaring at the sketches in Charles’s hand. “Well?”
“These are beautiful,” Charles said sincerely, riffling through the big, flopping pages filled with drawings of ballet characters.
Jouvancy’s fine-boned face darkened ominously.
“Though, of course…” Charles fanned the sketches like limp cards and frowned at them, praying that the tirade obviously about to burst forth would tell him what he was frowning at.
“Look-there!” Jouvancy bounced up again and leaned across the desk, flattening the wigs as he stabbed a finger at the drawing of a dancer wearing a clock on his head. “A messenger delivered these sketches to me at dawn. Barely dawn, I wasn’t even dressed. A clock! I ask you, a monstrous black and gold clock! Are my boys tables? How is anyone to dance wearing that? And apparently it chimes-he expects poor Time to tilt his head as he dances and make the cursed thing chime!”
The harried producer fell back into his chair, shoulders around his ears, hands flung up in a gesture of utter desperation.
“Um-Monsieur Beauchamps sent these?” Charles hazarded.
Jouvancy’s nostrils pinched. “Who else?”
Every Jesuit college that staged ballets hired a layman as dancing master and the great Pierre Beauchamps was Louis le Grand’s. Beauchamps was to the world of dance what the pope was to Holy Church and Charles could hardly believe his luck in getting to work with him. The greatest dancing master in France, probably in all of Europe, Beauchamps had danced with the king in court ballets and had gone from strength to strength, first as Louis’s dancing master, then as director of the King’s Twenty-Four Violins, director of the Royal Academy of Dancing, and now dancing master for the Royal Academy of Opera. But Charles did see what the problem was. All dancers, amateur and professional, were used to unwieldy headdresses as part of their costumes. In his student days at Carpentras, Charles had danced the role of Spring with a small cage full of live birds on his head. That had been bad enough, but this clock was three feet tall. Though it would be anchored to a leather cap and tied on, it would be the rare student who could keep the thing from tipping over while making it chime in time to his steps and the music.
Jouvancy shifted in his chair, tapping a finger on the desk and scowling as though Charles were a promising pupil failing to live up to his promise.
“Mon pere,” Charles said quickly, “Maitre Beauchamps sometimes brings his Opera professionals in to dance for you, does he not? Perhaps-one of them could wear the clock?”
“I am sorry to see that you miss the point, Maitre du Luc. Pierre Beauchamps is trying to alter my ballet livret. Mine! Again. Do I change the steps he sets the dancers? No, I do not. In my livret, there is no Time character. Instead, there is a beautiful minuet for the four seasons, wearing simple garlands-flowers, fruit, leaves, bare twigs-to show time’s passage.”
Charles smiled politely. He and everyone else had seen those same dancing seasons a hundred times. Aside from the technical problems, his artistic sympathies were with Beauchamps.
“You say Maitre Beauchamps has done this before? Tried to change your livret, I mean?”
Charles knew perfectly well that this duel of wills between professor-librettist and hired dancing master was a fixture of every ballet production in every college, even without formidable personalities like Jouvancy and Beauchamps involved. But the more he knew about the lay of the land here, the better.
Jouvancy put a trembling hand to his forehead. “He does it every ballet,” he said in a resonant whisper, and became before Charles’s eyes every persecuted, aging monarch in the history of drama. “It is why I am as you see me, a man old before my time.”
Charles bit his tongue to keep from laughing, thinking that Jouvancy, who was probably in his middle forties, could have made a fine career in Moliere’s company. With the sense of delivering his next line, Charles said what he suspected the rhetoric master was waiting to hear.
“With your permission, mon pere…” Wickedly, he hesitated, and Jouvancy shot him an impatient look. “Perhaps-if it would be of use-I could convey your judgment to M. Beauchamps and free you for other things?” Charles finished brightly.
Jouvancy let his hand fall from his face. His large gray eyes were luminous with a finely judged opening of hope.
“You?”
“Yes, mon pere,” Charles said gravely. “I would be honored to be of service.” And just stopped himself from adding, “Your Majesty.”
“Very well.” Jouvancy’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction. “It is all one to me,” he added mendaciously. “Speak to him-no, inform him-this afternoon. I cannot be bothered, the whole thing is beneath me. The man must be taught that he cannot dictate in this manner to a learned theoretician. Telling him so will be good practice for you.” Jouvancy grinned suddenly and came offstage. “And whether it will or not, none of these boys would be upright at the end of a pirouette with that thing on his head. But don’t tell him that.”
“But surely he knows?”
“Hmph. He thinks he has only to show them, shake his stick at them, yell at them, and they become gods of the dance. No matter if he is demanding that they dance on their hands in a sack. No theory, that’s the trouble with Beauchamps. But he is just a practitioner, so what can one expect? A great one, I grant you that-but a practitioner all the same. The man cares nothing for theory.”
Charles kept his mouth shut. He was all too familiar with the age-old theoretician vs. practitioner argument, but calling Beauchamps just a practitioner was like calling the pope just a priest.
“A chiming clock!” Jouvancy snorted. “The ancients would never think of anything so absurd!”
“Well, they didn’t have clocks,” Charles said reasonably.
“True. But never forget, the arts are for imitating nature, Maitre du Luc. ‘The monkeys of nature,’ as our dear Pere Menestrier says so well in his learned treatise on ballets. Are there clocks in nature? No, there are not clocks in nature.”
“But there is time,” Charles murmured, admiring a sketch for the Horizon’s shimmering costume, half black, half white.
