We saw a girl of seven on her back, shod only in one stocking, her head bare, some of her spread hair pulled out and lying at her feet. We saw a five-year-old with beautiful eyes and a filthy face whom I at first held and then released at Tiffauges’s gates, watching her disappear like a bolt from a crossbow. We witnessed our lord beheading poppies with a rod and heard him remark that the world had been empty since the Romans. He spoke also of Joan, and how she entered Orleans armored in white at all points and carrying a standard depicting two angels holding a fleur-de-lis over an Annunciation. We heard him marvel at the magical world in which she lived, and the way, just like that, English resistance collapsed before her. As the months went on, he took an increased interest in selecting boys himself. He came to favor kneeling on the torso after the head had been removed but while some warmth still remained in the body. Henriet said that I developed so gloomy, wrought, and unforthcoming an aspect that passersby sometimes drew him aside and wondered if I was his lord’s imbecile. I asked what I should do and he said that he hauled his necessities about with him, like someone shipwrecked. The world had abandoned him and he had returned the favor. His claim frightened me. I took to closing my throat with my hand as I lay beside him in the darkness, experimenting with various pressures. One night he took my hand from my neck and reminded me that insanity was a master’s privilege. Later he emptied three full basins trying to clean his eyes after a boy’s brains had bespattered them. Afterwards he lay on his pallet unmoving, and I was sorry for someone so young and so far from his father and mother and brothers, and for whom all comfort was a bed of stones when compared with his home.
Chasms opened beneath me, as if the earth would swallow my sin. I wept. I fell to the ground. I regained my feet. One morning I lay in a wheat field and some farmers saw me and were astonished, but said nothing. We were bound to our lord from the crowns of our heads to the soles of our feet. While he looked down from his heights of Pandemonium. And we fell under the spell of the slaughter with its reddish-brown eyes: ushers kept the doors, clerks added the accounts, squires dressed the dishes, and serving maids swept the halls and beat the coverlets, all while our souls, at their own bidding, flew headlong into dreadful extremity.
Our lord announced he was going to take a hand in our education. For two straight nights he appeared in our chambers and read to us from Suetonius. Then without explanation he stopped, growing increasingly agitated and impatient. Henriet in our more private moments explained why: he was spending over fifteen hundred livres per day. His family’s wealth consisted of land and property, but what was needed, perpetually, was accessible money. For him wealth no longer counted as such unless it had wings and admitted of rapid exchange. In Machecoul he had founded his own chapel, the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, with a Collégiale of the finest voices and most beautiful faces he could find. Of the chapel itself it was said that even visitors from Paris had never seen the like: great glittering cascades of ornament engraved and set with precious stones and gold and silver, with all deacons, archdeacons, curates, and choirboys robed in vermilion and white silk with tawny furs and surplices of black satin and hooded capes. One wall was a towering organ, and he additionally commissioned a portable one it took six men to carry so he should not be deprived of music when obliged to travel. When the chapel was completed he had himself named Canon of Saint-Hilaire de Poitiers so he might wear the multihued ecclesiastical robes he himself had designed. He found a boy who resembled him so powerfully that the boy was designated Rais le Héraut, and dressed more magnificently than anyone, and given a place of honor in the cortége whenever the household rode out. So that everywhere our lord went, he could see himself preceding himself: our lord in white, Rais le Héraut in the deepest black.
When we traveled, our procession might take two days to fully pass through a town. When we halted we filled every tavern and lodging house. When we moved on, local innkeepers and tradesmen displayed the stunned and dull-eyed satisfaction of overfed cattle. And in addition to all this he was preparing to mount the mystery play he had commissioned, which at its climax depicted him at his moment of greatest glory. The Mystery of the Siege of Orleans was to be presented in that city upon the tenth anniversary of the raising of the siege, and featured twenty thousand lines of verse, one hundred and forty speaking parts, six hundred extras, and three specially built revolving stages. Each costume was to be made from new material. Even beggars’ rags were to be created by slashing and defacing fine cloth. No costume could be worn twice. And unlimited supplies of food and drink were to be available to all spectators.
It seemed inconceivable that our household would find itself short of gold, but any number of estates and properties were mortgaged. And Henriet and I would be sent to retrieve bodies from our lord’s bedchambers. He mortgaged properties twice and then refused to abandon them. He ransomed merchants and travelers. And finally he had to sell off estates. He sold two great crucifixes of pure silver. He sold his manuscript of Valerius Maximus and his Latin City of God and his parchment Metamorphoses of Ovid bound in emerald leather and secured with a golden lock. He sold the silver reliquary enclosing the head of Saint-Honoré, his most precious relic.
He sold so much that finally his brother and his extended family wrote to the Pope asking His Holiness to disavow the foundation of the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, and to the King requesting an edict forbidding the sale of any further family property. Both petitions were granted. Soon after, word came from his brother that his nephews had discovered a pipe full of dead children in the keep at Chemillé. Nothing came of it. In his family’s eyes, once their property was safe, whatever else our lord did was his affair.
It was logical, then, that our lord would employ someone to manufacture more wealth. Joan had had secret knowledge and had put it, while he watched, to kingdom-shaking use. And now he, too, needed to appeal to secret powers. The world was an epistle and every scholar’s dream was to unlock its hidden instructions. Most did so by searching for the philosopher’s stone, which would transmute base metals to gold. Cold water could when heated be turned to hot air. In the same way other bodies could be similarly transformed. It was a matter of discovering the correct agent of change.
This was explained to us in a meeting convened in the secret room at Tiffauges. While our lord addressed us I looked over at the bed where he first held the jeweled dagger to my throat.
We were being taken into this confidence because we would all be a part of the great search about to begin. The sibyl foretold the future, but the conjurer made it, by recruiting Nature itself to fulfill his designs. There was an old saying in war that our lord had never forgotten: “Is there a chance? Where Prudence says no, the devil says yes.” There were demons who had the power to reveal hidden treasure, teach philosophy, and guide those boldest of men who sought to make their way in the world. Years ago he’d received from a knight imprisoned in Anjou for heresy a book on the arts of alchemy and the evocation of devils. Gerbert, later to be Pope, was said to have studied astrology and other arts in Spain under the Saracens and to have summoned ghostly figures from the lower world, some of whom abetted his ascension to the papacy. Sylvester II was said to have been taught to make clocks and other infernal devices by wraiths he had summoned. We would each now put our energies into locating alchemists. I would accompany Gilles de Sillé, as Henriet would Roger de Briqueville. The latter pair would travel to Italy, the center of alchemic knowledge, accompanied by a priest from Saint-Malo whose presence would make such inquiries less dangerous.