Le Jongleur et Les Matines
The following adventure of Le Jongleur borrows our merry fool’s three interlocutors from Jane Scharl’s Mardi Gras murder mystery verse play, Sonnez les Matines, available from Wiseblood Books. The play was read at the Joie de Vivre Louisiana Arts and Culture Festival on May 17th at St. Joseph Abbey, with Ashley Brumfield as Ignatius, Justin Lacour as Calvin, and JDV editor Danny Fitzpatrick as Rabelais.
Le Jongleur et Les Matines
Paris, my friends! Paris—that minx, that courtesan, that crown laid lightly on the brow of Mother Church’s eldest, loveliest daughter. Once more I found myself pursuing her narrow alleys and her boulevards. Once more I wandered through her Tuileries, her Orangeries, her Gares, her Quais. Once more I dallied, hour on hour, in Le Polidor or Le Procope, Les Deux Magots and Le Bouillon Chartier. I could, I say, without the least moment’s remorse, spend a day on a bench in the Parc des Butte-Chaumonts, observing the crowds and watching the ghost of my own self at play. Ah, to be a saint, to let the bits of my earthly self be spread, lock and bone, across that city’s brilliant chapels.
To be a saint...but I must tell you, friends, I must, now the word has reminded me, whom I met as I leaned one evening at my ease against a lamp post on the Pont Neuf. It was none other than Ignatius of Loyola. No, friends, I was not deceived, nor do I deceive you. For God is not God of the dead but of the living, nor is Paris, afloat upon its catacombs, any stranger to those whose life proceeds beyond the veil of time. And this soldier, this saint who’d laid his sword below the Madonna at Montserrat, seemed now to have mislaid something. At any rate, he bent low, searching the pavement of the bridge with outthrust lamp for the gleam of some lost treasure. So intent was his search that for some minutes he took no notice of me until, ambling forth, I hailed him, calling “Ave, Pater, Ave!”
As he looked up, I felt the burning of those Spanish eyes and thought they were like the eyes of angels or like that coal placed on the tongue of the prophet who beheld the fiery throne raised up before him. “Who’s there?” he prayed.
“Only a son of yours,” I said, “and a long-lost one at that.” But already he had turned his gaze again to the ground. Glancing about, I was startled to find another leaning in the place I had left a moment before.
“You’ll not find it,” said this apparition, ranging forth into the light so that I saw his clothes were besmeared as if with clay or, horribile dictu, with blood.
“Thank you, Francois. And I’ll thank you again to leave, or at least to keep your musings to yourself,” said Ignatius.
“Ah,” I said to the newcomer, “are you then that font of the obscene, the bard of all bawdiness, Monsieur Rabelais?”
“At your service, and that of any grand, ungodly man, to say nothing of all women,” he said, bowing until he turned a somersault and landing before me with hand outstretched.
“Le Jongleur de Notre Dame,” I said, taking the hand in mine.
“Notre Dame!” he said. “Our Lady, ours, ours to cherish and to cling to.”
“Francois,” Ignatius growled.
“I mean nothing untoward, my honorable friend. But is it honor to search the ground by midnight like a thief in search of what could damn him?”
“You know well what I seek. As I recall, you held it last--yes, my patrimony, clutched to your befouled breast.”
“Friend,” said Rabelais, drawing himself up and touching one hand to his garments and the other to his brow as if in deepest offense, “You amaze me, and, like Gaul, your error is divided into three parts. Part one,” he continued, marching in slow circles about Ignatius, enumerating the points upon his fingers, “you ignore the Scriptures, which tell us very clearly—nay, very clearly, I say—that it is not that which comes from without but what comes from within that corrupts. And this, as you know, is another’s blood. And let it remind you how I hope to be covered in the blood of Another at the final sounding of all things. Part two! Nothing of your earthly self could be found here, as you well now, as this bridge, this lovely bridge, stood not across the Seine in our time. And three, that blade you seek, that knife upon whose tarnished blade our dreaming words once gourmandized, that very knife was cast—and by this hand, and what a hand!--into the Seine, the devouring Seine that in our day was known to blot all evidence. And this is your worst error, friend, that even now you forget how much we must be changed beyond the grave, letting honor, with all the rest, be burned away.”
“So much nonsense, Francois,” said another voice, deeper than the others and, I thought, colder. Turning, I saw this third advancing down the shadowy center of the bridge, and yet I thought that he himself loomed darker than the shadows. “And yet,” he went one, “in this last sentiment you’ve stumbled on a strain of truth too strange for most to bear. Is any to be found on earth who reckons how profoundly we must change, becoming what grace commands?”
The three stood together then, their heads inclined as if listening to some other to whose voice my ear had not yet been attuned. Through the gypsum darkness of the city came the quiet tolling of the matins, and, turning to the river that flowed below in silence, I seemed to see souls streaming toward the ocean of all being. Here the shade of a child, there a woman with an infant in her womb, the young in one another’s arms, the old testing shadowy limbs as if relieved at last of all the body’s cares. At every striking of the bells there seemed to follow wave on wave of grace, purifying, purging, changing them until all burned as if retaining but a memory of what they once, at their best, had been. And looking once again for the threefold company, I found that they had gone, leaving me alone with the last dying echo of the bells.
I looked around a moment more. The bridge stretched away to either bank, and the river resumed its invisible silence, and, thinking how late the hour was, how late the hour might be, I took myself away to confess.
