Human Nature

Headmaster La Rivière was also looking at the young king. He was eleven this year, at an age like fresh leaves beginning to sprout. Noble blood and God's blessing had granted him a face as delicate and beautiful as an angel's. He sat in an armchair, his legs clad in white stockings and his feet in sapphire-blue shoes that matched his luxurious indigo coat embroidered with silver flowers. Since Louis XIII, the court had ceased to favor puffed ruffs, replacing them with elegant, natural wide collars. The king was no exception today; three layers of openwork lace trimmed his collar, exquisite and refined.

Louis smiled the moment he saw La Rivière, for no other reason than that the headmaster strongly resembled a venerable saint who, some three hundred years later, would drive a reindeer-drawn sleigh every Christmas night, hurrying to deliver gifts to every good child. Headmaster La Rivière had the same fluffy white beard, a shaved crown, and a little black cap. Today, he had deliberately dressed in a formal Dutch wool robe and worn a pair of scented gloves—lambskin gloves perfumed with incense. He had not come to bring the king gifts, but he could still ease Louis's increasingly gloomy mood, if only a little.

The king graciously allowed the headmaster to kiss his hand. "Please sit," he said. "Monsieur La Rivière."

Bontemps brought the headmaster a footstool. After all, his present status did not entitle him to use a chair before the king. Naturally, La Rivière did not mind. He lifted his robe as elegantly as he could and slowly sat down. Bontemps served hot tea. With remarkable restraint, he added about three spoonfuls of sugar before taking a sip. "This is the finest tea I have ever tasted," he praised. "There is no drink more warming or more invigorating."

Louis merely smiled. "You may add more sugar, sir." People of this era adored sweetness to an extraordinary degree; there was no food that did not require sugar. Cakes and bread naturally contained it, but wine could not do without it either. Sugar went into stewed meat, honey was indispensable for roasted fish, and even boiled eggs had to be dipped in sugar. When drinking a cup of plain water, one still had to keep the sugar bowl at hand... Fortunately, toothbrushes already existed, as did tooth powder made from rock salt, dried iris flowers, mint, and pepper. Louis had them add rose oil, producing the simplest kind of toothpaste.

After all, kings before him had died of tooth decay. Louis was not particularly satisfied with his present life, but neither did he wish to meet the glorious God so soon. And at the current level of medicine—though the first shoots of science had already emerged, methods such as bloodletting and enemas still stubbornly held first place in medical books—not to mention that certain exceedingly heretical practices had become popular at this time, such as using parts of the human body as medicine. From brain matter to fresh blood, from Charles I, whose head had only just been cut off, to Egyptian pharaohs from a thousand years ago, there was everything under the sun. They were said to be very effective, but Louis would rather die than sample a ghoul's cookbook.

Upon hearing this, Headmaster La Rivière immediately added another three spoonfuls of sugar to his cup. This satisfied not only him, but even the king. After he had finished his tea, Louis showed him the book in his hands. It was a book about rumors of werewolves. Louis had once read it as a fantasy novel; only now did he realize it was nonfiction.

"The Church acknowledged werewolves in 1414, at the Council of Constance, when Sigismund, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, forced them to do so," Headmaster La Rivière said bluntly. It seemed Mazarin had already warned him beforehand. He also understood perfectly well that boys Louis's age hated nothing more than being treated as children who could be deceived at will. Therefore, from the very beginning, he had decided that so long as the king wished to inquire, he would answer everything.

"But it was not until twenty years later," La Rivière said, "that the Church acknowledged the existence of vampires."

"In truth, the legends of both werewolves and vampires have endured for nearly a thousand years," the king asked. "Why was the Church so unwilling to acknowledge them?"

"Because," La Rivière said, "because... Your Majesty, the Church had no real means of dealing with these dark creatures and the apostles of the Devil."

This startled Louis. "But I have seen priests and monks fighting werewolves."

"Not only werewolves, but vampires and Wizards as well," La Rivière said. "But they were not the Church. They were another force that possessed supernatural power. Before 1231, they had remained hidden in the inner world, as part of it. It was only in 1231, when Holy Father Pope Gregory IX insisted on establishing the Inquisition in the name of the Dominican Order, that they gradually moved from behind the scenes into the light."

"So they had existed long before that."

"Indeed they had, Your Majesty. Of the saints whose names are familiar to you, three out of ten were once their members. It is simply that they... they are people with strange ideas. At times, even the most enlightened Pope could not fully trust them. To put it simply, most of them were ascetics, and so they had many grievances against the former..." La Rivière made a gesture everyone understood. "The Church of Rome had many failings, while Rome had no need for such a group to come and point fingers at it. In any case, those people always regarded the extermination of dark creatures and Wizards as their duty. Even if the Church deliberately ignored and slighted them, they would not care overmuch. They... Your Majesty, if you ask me, they are an arrogant group. Other than God, they hold no one in their eyes. And if I were to speak from my heart, I would say they are not so very different from those werewolves and vampires."

"Then who made them decide to step forward?"

"You know Pope Honorius III, do you not? This venerable Holy Father did quite a great deal for the Church. In 1220, he crowned Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire, allowing him to unite Sicily and the Holy Roman Empire. To repay Pope Honorius III, Frederick II issued the edict On the Powers of the Clerical Princes, granting the clergy all manner of privileges, exempting the Church from taxes, relinquishing secular authority over the Church, and promising to suppress heresy. The Church's power swelled at once to an unprecedented degree. Though this could only be called the final weight on the scales, to the... monks who had long hesitated over whether to move from the inner world into the outer world, it was God's will. Though they had always considered themselves a head taller than others in virtue and steadfastness, there were still times when they could no longer endure."

"Could no longer endure... what?" the king asked with a smile.

"What else could it be?" Headmaster La Rivière answered, smiling as well. "Power, money, and pleasure! Think of it: they fought dark creatures without rest day after day, yet the praise and accolades went to priests who were not even so proficient at reciting scripture. And though monks ought to sever themselves from the secular world and cast aside distracting thoughts, how many could truly do so? Such a life could be endured for one or two years—but ten or twenty years, a hundred years? Thoughts change, and saints are not so numerous. They had to give some thought to themselves, too."