Book of Souls

His father rose from his seat and as he stalked out of the Great Hall he declared, “This college will tame you, by God, and it will make of you a proper God-fearing Cantwell! You are bound for Paris, boy! That wretched city will be your home.”

Archibald smirked and piled onto the miserable young man. “There are only three things you need to know about Montaigu, cuz: bad food, hard beds, and harsh blows. I advise you to finish your wine, for what little you will get there is mostly water.”

Edgar pushed himself to his feet. He would not let his damnable relations see him cry.

“A toast to my departing brother,” William said, his head happily swimming in supper wine. “May the good ladies of Paris respect and honor his newly found purity and piety.”

1527 PARIS

EDGAR CANTWELL AWOKE shortly before four in the morning in a miserable state. It was just as well that the incessantly clanging college bells were rousing him from his fitful sleep. He had never been so cold in all his life. His window had ice on the inside, and he could see his own breath when he emerged from under his thin coverlet to light a candle. He had retired wearing all his clothes, even his cloak and his soft leather shoes, but he was still frigid as an icicle. In self-pity, he looked around his tiny room, as basic as a monk’s cell, and wondered what his friends at Merton would think if they could see his wretched circumstances.

Montaigu was living up to its reputation as hell on earth. Better if he were in prison, he thought. At least then he would not have to read Aristotle in Latin and suffer the whip if he failed to memorize a passage.

It was a bleak existence, and he was only weeks into it. The term would run until July, which seemed a lifetime away.

The mission of Montaigu College was to prepare young men to become priests or ordained lawyers. Under the absolute rule of Principal Tempête, a conservative Parisian theologian of the most venomous ilk, Montaigu strictly controlled its pupils’ moral lives. They were forced to search their consciences in regular public confessions of their sins and to denounce the behavior of fellow students. To keep them in the proper repentant state of mind, Tempête kept them in a perpetual fast, with coarse food and small portions, and in the winter made them suffer the cold without succor. Then there were the merciless beatings at the hands of ruthless tutors and, at his pleasure, Tempête himself.

Edgar had to be up at four o’clock to attend the morning office in the chapel before stumbling off to his first lecture in a near-dark classroom. The lectures were in French, which Edgar had learned at Oxford, but now, painfully, he was forced to use it as his primary language. Mass was at six o’clock, followed by communal breakfast, its brevity assured by the fact that all they were served was a slice of bread with a dot of butter. Then came the grande classe

on the topic of the day-philosophy, arithmetic, the scriptures, done in a format that Edgar dreaded.

The quaestio was a one-man disputation a member of his class had to endure each day. Tutors with whipping rods ready posed questions based on a passage of reading. The student would answer, eliciting in turn, another question et cetera, back and forth, back and forth, until the underlying meaning of the text was thoroughly explored. For the keen student, the process meant a continually stimulating creative involvement. For Edgar, it meant blistering beatings on the shoulders and back, insults and belittlement.

Dinner followed, accompanied by readings from the Bible or the life of a saint. Edgar had the advantage over some of his less fortunate classmates of being one of the rich pensionnaires, who were fed at a common table where there was a minimum standard of daily rations. Les pauvres had to fend for themselves in their rooms, and some were close to starvation. As it was, Edgar’s daily fare barely kept him going-bread, a little boiled fruit, a herring, an egg, and a piece of cheese, washed down with a jar of the cheapest wine, a third of a pint topped off with water.

At twelve o’clock, the students had an assembly, where they were questioned about their morning’s work. This was followed by a rest period or a public reading, depending on the day. From three to five o’clock, they were back in the classroom for afternoon classes, then off to the chapel for Vespers, immediately followed by a discussion of their afternoon work. Supper consisted of some more bread, another egg or a chunk of cheese, and perhaps a piece of fruit eaten to the accompaniment of droning Bible readings. The tutors had one more opportunity to interrogate their charges before final chapel, and at eight o’clock it was bedtime.