Université de Paris, Collège de Montaigu, February 20, 1534
AMAURY DE FAVERGES grasped the icy metal door handle and then leaned gently against the cracked, pitted wood. A squeal of rusted hinges could betray him as quickly as a sentry. Flogging and a month in isolation on prayer, bread, and water in a bleak, airless, unheated cell would follow. But God was with him and the door gave way. Slowly and silently, Amaury pushed it open just wide enough to squeeze through. He had been dubious when Bernard, by all appearances nothing more than an amiable half-wit, had been recommended as an utterly reliable accomplice. But Giles had been correct. If Bernard was paid to see that a lock was disengaged at two hours after midnight, disengaged it would be. Four months and Bernard had not failed him once.
Amaury stepped inside and peered about. No one. He swung the door shut, set the bolt, then padded to the archway that led to the sleeping quarters. Amaury opened the sixth door on the right, again unlocked, with hinges he had greased himself. Only when the door closed behind him did he breathe easy.
He surveyed the cubicle that had been his home for nine years, sighed, and flopped down on the straw bed, poked and prodded by errant shafts.
There would be scant time to sleep before he was required at morning prayers.
To put himself in such peril, he thought. Simply to read a book.
Two hours later, Amaury stood in the same dank archway. This time he held a hooded candle in front of him. His empty belly roiled and his eyelids throbbed. But there would be no food for seven hours and no sleep for fifteen. He would spend this day like every other day, in prayer and endless disputation. If his eyelids drooped, even for a few seconds, the leather straps would crack across his back.
The moon had vanished, replaced by a cold late-winter rain—pleut de Paris. Students abhorred the demi-saison—too warm for the ground to freeze, but sufficiently cold for the mud to feel like ice when it oozed over the soles of their sandals. The chapel was easily reached through the passageways, but the college doctors, the magisters, had decreed that inclement weather was God’s will. Students were therefore required to walk across the open courtyard. The magisters, of course, kept under shelter.
Amaury suddenly felt a wave of dizziness and grasped the wall for support. Oh, God. To be back outside these walls, in his tiny rented room, exploring the wonders of the heavens—Aristotle’s logical formulations and Ptolemy’s inspired description of the Lord’s astral creations moving around the Earth, embedded in imperceptible spheres. Or pondering the German physician Paracelsus’s notion that disease was caused not by imbalance in the humors but by outside agents. Perhaps even to be able to observe a dissection at the school of medicine, where a new theory of human anatomy seemed poised to overthrow a millennium of ignorance.
But instead, Amaury de Faverges languished at Collège de Montaigu. Where learning was beaten in. How could anyone suppose that true education was attained through pain, deprivation, and forced devotion? That intimidation and abuse brought one closer to God? Yet that was most certainly what the Church fathers did believe. For they had chosen Montaigu, one of the smallest of the forty-two colleges that comprised the University of Paris, to be perhaps the most important center of ecclesiastical education in the Christian world.
Amaury gazed about. The very setting doused illusions of learning. Montaigu was housed in a squalid, centuries-old, three-story stone quadrangle erected around a miasmic courtyard. Green moss covered the roof, giving the configuration the feel of some great bog. The entrance was on rue Saint-Symphorien, a narrow, refuse-strewn thoroughfare also called rue des Chiens—the Street of Dogs. When Amaury arrived to begin his studies nine years before, he had been forced to pick his way along this open sewer to reach the main gate. Once inside, the stink of rot and human waste that covered the college like a shroud hit him full on, but the students scurrying in their hooded robes between the chapel, their bare stone rooms, and the grim classrooms seemed impervious. Amaury had learned to wear the same mask, but was never unaware of his misery.
But while dismal sobriety was prerequisite within the walls, outside they snickered. The great wit and scholar Erasmus, who had fled after a single year as a student here, described Montaigu as a “filthy, bleak barrack, clotted with dirt and reeking of the foulest smells.” Rabelais called it Collège de pouillerie—college of filth. But for once, neither Erasmus nor Rabelais had been able to outdo ordinary Parisians. On the streets of the city, Montaigu was commonly known as “the very cleft between the buttocks of Mother Theology.”
Crushed in that cleft, Amaury toiled, enduring beatings, feculence, lice, deprivation of sleep, terrible food, and trivial disputations. All to attain a position of “honor.” To become one of the doctors himself, a magister in theologia. To wipe away the stain of his birth.
And there were still six years to go.
Amaury could put the moment off no longer. He was about to step out into the muck when he felt fingers digging into his shoulder. He flinched, then spun about. Magister Ravenau stood before him, expressionless and forbidding.
Had Amaury’s absence been noticed after all? Perhaps it was nothing more than the few seconds of idleness in the archway. Ravenau reveled in dispensing discipline, either in God’s name or his own. So severe were his ministrations that, during his last beating, Amaury had almost cried out. The first time in five years. He had bit down on the side of his cheek, determined to deny Ravenau the satisfaction. When Ravenau had finished, Amaury swallowed the blood that filled his mouth.
Amaury stood stolidly in the cold and awaited the sentence. He hated the beatings. Not so much for the pain but for the humiliation of submitting to abominations like Ravenau. Of abdicating his will.
But there was to be no sentence. At least not yet. Ravenau had come with a summons. Amaury was to report to the syndic’s rooms immediately. Le Clerc. The head of the college.
Amaury slogged across the courtyard, the frigid droplets stinging his skin. The syndic’s chambers were on the top floor. Hunger and lack of sleep made the exertion of two flights of stairs near exhausting. He paused at the top, his temples pulsing in a dull, regular drumbeat. To the left of the hallway, a series of open vaults overlooked the courtyard. The entrances to the living quarters of the doctors were on the street side to the right. Three candles set in sconces along the right wall crackled, burned to their last bits of tallow, providing only bursts of illumination as they sizzled to extinction in the coming dawn.
At least this summons had not come three months earlier. If it had, Amaury would not be facing the ineffectual Le Clerc, but rather Noël Beda. Ascetic, unyielding, ever-righteous, soul-flaying Beda. A law unto himself. Beda, who had ordered men burned at the stake without consulting pope or king. But Beda, thank the Lord, had derided François’ authority once too often. After more than a decade of devout autocracy, Beda was finally gone. Probably dead. Le Clerc was mean and vindictive, it was true, but also pompous, vain, and fat. No half-herring, rotting-egg, stale-bread dinners for him. The new syndic was a man on whom no student feared foisting a whispered jibe. No one had ever made light of Beda.
Amaury blew out his own candle to preserve the remaining tallow. The sound of his breathing echoed softly off the stone. Even with one side open, the smell of mildew hung in the walkway. The heavy door was closed when Amaury arrived. He placed his candle on the small table next to the door, then rapped on the thick, darkened oak, as austere as the magisters whose privacy it ensured. His knuckles felt the scrape of hewn wood. He heard a metallic grate as the catch bolt was disengaged, then the door swung open to reveal Guillaume, Beda’s—now Le Clerc’s—ancient servant. Guillaume had likely been tall as a younger man but was now stooped and haggard, unshaven, virtually toothless, but with quick rat’s eyes and, it was suspected among the students, ears to match. More than once during Amaury’s tenure, the masters had acquired knowledge of whispered conversations held in the deepest secrecy.
Guillaume shuffled to one side. Amaury had never before entered these rooms. Inside were polished stone floors unadorned by carpets, and unpainted vaulted roof beams, oak like the door. The stone walls were largely bare, save for a case of books on the right. The books were old, folios, penned by scribes. No printed works here. The syndics lived for the past. A lectern for reading stood at the far end of the room under two small, plain windows. A pair of hard wooden chairs without cushions was set opposite the fireplace on the right, and a doorway on the left led to the master’s private chambers. Two candles, one on each wall, these freshly changed, provided muted light.
The room was empty aside from Guillaume. Amaury took two steps in and waited. No fire burned in the grate. A chill even more penetrating than that in the courtyard had settled in the room. He heard the door close behind him. Guillaume, who ordinarily was privy to every confidence, had not remained. Amaury waited. Finally, he heard shuffling in the other room, and then the sound of sandals on stone. Seconds later, the door creaked open and a figure emerged.
Passing through the doorway was not the fleshy Le Clerc, but rather, his face frozen in piety and perpetual accusation, the glowering figure of Noël Beda.