The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (79 page)

Now the Priest, far from objecting to this interruption, worked it into his solemn hymnody, albeit with a jarring change of rhythm:

And the irrepressible
galériens
seemed to pop their heads into the middle of this scene and take it over with the continuation of their song:

        
Now the Priest again:

And then the
galériens,
obviously wanting to stay and continue the debate, but driven southward, ever southward, by the guards:

They were now pulled “offstage,” as it were, in the following comical way: a guard rode to the front of the column, hitched the end of their chain to the pommel of his saddle, and spurred his horse forward. The tightening chain ran free through the neck-loops of the
galériens
until it jerked the last man in the queue violently forward so that he crashed into the back of the slave in front of him, who likewise was driven forward into the next,
et cetera
in a
chain reaction
as it were, until the whole column had accordioned together and was dragged off toward the Mediterranean Sea.

Now at the same time the rest of the procession burst through the city-gates into lovely Paris. The skeletons, who’d been exceptionally gloomy until this point, suddenly began disassembling themselves and bonking themselves and their neighbors with thigh-bones to produce melodious xylophony. The priest jumped up on the corpse-wain and began to belt out a new melody in a comely, glass-shattering counter-tenor.

And so on; but then here there was a little pause in the music, occasioned by a small and perfectly adorable French girl in a white dress, which Jack recognized as the sort of get-up that young Papists wore to their first communion. Radiant—but gloomy. The priest reined in the mules and vaulted down off the corpse-wain and squatted down next to her.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned!” said the little girl.

Awww,
gushed all of the skeletons, corpses, grave-diggers, fishwives,
et cetera,
gathered round in vast circle as if to watch an Irish brawl.

“Believe me, girl, you ain’t alone!” hollered a fishwife through cupped hands; the others grinned and nodded supportively.

The priest hitched up his muddy cassock and scooted even closer to the girl, then turned his ear toward her lips; she whispered something into it; he shook his head in sincere, but extremely short-lived dismay; then stood, drawing himself up to his full height, and said something back to her. She put her hands together, and closed her eyes. All of Paris went silent, and every ear strained to listen as she in her high piping voice said a little Papist prayer in Latin. Then she opened her baby blues and looked up in trepidation at the priest—whose stony face suddenly opened up in a big grin as he made the sign of the cross over her. With a great big squeal of delight, the girl jumped up and turned a cartwheel in the street, petticoats a-flying’, and suddenly the whole procession came alive again: the priest walking along behind the handspringing girl and the dancers, the wrapped corpses up in the cart swinging their hips in time to the music and uttering pre-verbal
woo! woo!
noises to fill in the chinks in the tune. The grave-diggers and fishwives, plus a number of flower-girls and rat-catchers who joined in along the way, were now dancing to the priest’s song in a medley of different dance steps, viz. high-stepping whorehouse moves, Irish stomping, and Mediterranean tarantellas.

And so on at considerable length, as they had the whole University to parade through, and then the Roman baths at Cluny. As they came over the Petit Pont, about a thousand wretches emerged from the gates of the Hôtel-Dieu—that colossal poorhouse just by Notre Dame, which was where the priest, grave-diggers, and dead persons had all originated—and, accompanied by Notre Dame’s organ, boomed out a mighty chorus to ring down the curtain on this entire pageant.

This song developed into a sort of round, meant (Jack supposed) to emphasize the cyclical nature of the procedure: some of the wretches, fishwives,
et cetera,
engaging in carnal acts right there in the middle of the street, others rushing, in organized infantry-squares, toward the priest to confess, then turning away to genuflect in the direction of the Cathedral, then charging pall-mall back into fornication. In any case, every skeleton, corpse, wretch, grave-digger, fishwife, street-vendor, and priest now had a specific role to play, and part to sing, except for Jack; and so, one by one, all of Jack’s harbingers and outriders peeled away from him, or evaporated
into thin air, so that he rode alone (albeit, watched and cheered on by the thousands) into the great Place before the Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was as fine and gorgeous a vision as had ever been seen. For all of King Looie’s Regiments were having their colors blessed by some sort of extremely resplendent mitre-wearing Papist authority figure, one or two notches shy of the Pope himself, who stood beneath a canopy of brilliant fleur-de-lis-embroidered cloth that burnt in the sun. The regiments
themselves
were not present—there wouldn’t’ve been room—but their noble commanders were, and their heralds and color-bearers, carrying giant banners of silk and satin and cloth-of-gold: banners meant to be seen from a mile away through squalls of gunpowder-smoke, designed to look resplendent when planted atop the walls of Dutch or German or English cities and to overawe the populace with the glory, might, and, above all, good taste of Leroy. Each one had its own kind of magickal power over the troops of its regiment, and so to see them drawn up here in rows, all together, was like seeing all Twelve of the Apostles sitting round the same table, or something.

As much as Jack hated Leroy, he had to admit it was a hell of a thing to look at—so much so, that he regretted he hadn’t arrived sooner, for he only caught the terminal quarter-hour of the ceremony. Then it all broke up. The color-bearers rode off toward their regimental headquarters in the territory outside of the city walls, and the nobility generally rode north over the Pont d’Arcole to the Right Bank where some went down in the direction of the Louvre and others went round back of the Hôtel de Ville toward the Place Royale and the Marais. One of the latter group was wearing an Admiral’s hat and riding a white horse with pink eyes—a big one—apparently meant to be some sort of a war-horse.

Jack was not set on what he should do next, but as he (for lack of any other purpose in life) followed this admiral into the narrow streets he began to hear fidgety noises from the walls all around him, like the gnawing of mice, and noticed a lot of radiant dust in the air: on a closer look, he formed the impression that all of the tiny animals trapped in the stones of the city were coming alive and squirming about in their prisons, kicking up dust, as if some invisible tide of quicksilver had seeped up through the walls and brought them back to life; and construing this as an omen, Jack spurred Turk forward with the heels of his wooden
sabots
and, by taking certain back-streets, ducking beneath those jutting balconies, overtook the Admiral on the pink-eyed horse, and rode out into the street in front of him, just short of the entrance to the
Place Royale—in the very street where he’d once been knocked into the shit by (he guessed) the same fellow’s servants.

Those servants were now clearing the way for the Admiral and the large contingent of friends and hangers-on riding with him, and so when Jack rode out into the middle of the street, it was empty. A footman in blue livery came toward him, eyeing Jack’s wooden shoes and his crutch, and probably sizing him up as a peasant who’d stolen a plowhorse—but Jack gave Turk a little twitch of the reins that meant
I give you leave
and Turk surged toward this man and crushed him straight into the gutter where he ended up stopping turd-rafts. Then Jack drew up to face the Admiral from perhaps half a dozen lengths. Several other footmen were situated in the space between them, but having seen what Turk knew how to do, they were now shrinking back against walls.