Father Le Moyne awoke with a start, his composure shattered
by shards of a terrifying dream. Choking black smoke.... flames gnawing
at an Onondaga longhouse.... whirling firebrands.... a headless corpse
with the head of Jean de Brébeuf... a gold cross... the seven dead Amiskou
flu victims thudding alive onto the back of a monstrous sea turtle...
The thudding startled him awake. He gazed out into the dark gasping
for breath, frantic to get his bearings. He was in a tiny cell in the
chapel of the fort.... Claude had urged him to get some rest before
the wedding feast... he'd fallen asleep, not heard the Compline bell.
Nothing but blackness could be seen through the slit of window glass.
The feast was over, the guests gone, and the miserable prickling sensations
were back in his legs.
The Jesuit lurched to his feet, threw on his cloak and broad-brimmed
hat, and made his way out of the chapel into the damp night air. Bad
smells and fog wafted up from the swamp, the only sound the roar of
the great river. Getting out his rosary, he strode up and down the parade
ground saying his Hail Marys. Then he reviewed his arrangements for
the trip to Onnontagé.
Afterwards, noticing the prickling had abated somewhat, he sat down
at one of the makeshift wedding tables. Almost at once a panic set in.
Another shard of dream... the headless corpse with the head of Jean
de Brébeuf... a gold cross. A nervous giggle escaped his lips. Surely
the glorious martyr was not the long-awaited last world emperor!
This unseemly thought gave rise to a welter of guilt. As a penance,
he began a contemplation of Father Brébeuf's mutilated corpse lying
in the Huron village of Saint-Ignace. A light rain fell on him as he
began this visualization exercise; by the time he completed it he was
soaked through to the skin. Such discomfort, he told himself, was nothing
compared to the sufferings of the glorious martyr, and only a mild foretaste
of what he himself could expect on the trip to Onnontagé.
He began to stride up and down again. His thoughts returned to the
headless corpse. His own idea had been absurd, of him being the Parisian
beggar Maillard. All the new recruits were young. Not one could have
begged for years outside the Saint-Eustache cathedral. Emigration to
distant parts displayed an adventurous spirit not associated with pauperism.
It was the ridiculous rumour of a gold cross on Maillard's shoulder
that had led him that absurd idea.
The new recruits remained in his thoughts. It was hardly Paul Maisonneuve's
fault that a Huguenot like La Jarrie had been aboard the Saint Nicolas.
Half the youths he'd recruited from the La Flèche region had reneged
on their promises to sail. He'd had to fill his quota on the eve of
his departure with men hired on the waterfronts of Aunis. Aunis province
was full of Huguenots.
The Jesuit's overwrought mind went off on a tangent, seizing on the
high-ranking French Jesuit Pierre Jarrige who in 1647 caused a huge
scandal by abjuring Catholicism before the consistory of La Rochelle.
Anticipating the wrath of his superiors, and knowing their influence,
he took refuge in Holland where he pronounced himself a Huguenot. Condemned
in his absence to hang, Jarrige took his revenge by publishing a scurrilous
pamphlet full of shocking sexual innuendo against Jesuits in the province
of Guienne.
Father Le Moyne stopped short and smacked rain off the shoulders of
his cloak. Wretched traitor! That filthy pamphlet will live on forever....
Clouds of mist and fog enveloped the Jesuit as he renewed his pacing.
He thought again of La Jarrie. Ville-Marie's citizens had long suspected
that the headless corpse buried at Sillery was their missing recruit.
Now Shalinka had given them proof with his wretched bits of string!
And to think that La Jarrie was not only a Huguenot but a carpenter!
Our enemies will have sport with that titbit when the story reaches
France. La Flèche had obviously lied about seeing a black cross on Jarrie's
shoulder. Another heretic stirring up trouble.
Father Le Mercier's gambit of describing the gold cross as an old
scar glittering in the sunlight had accomplished nothing! Nor had his
injunction against any Jesuit or donné speaking a word about the headless
corpse. The story was blabbed far and wide by workmen and settlers at
Sillery and by Savages, both Christian and pagan.
What had Jean de Quen yammered hysterically the day Shalinka carried
in the headless corpse? "No paint or dye in the world could produce
such radiance!" What does it matter if the Chonnonton chief blabs about
a last emperor chosen by the Christian god losing his head to a Mohawk
warrior? The Iroquois know the story! He himself was certain to get
questions about the gold cross in Onnontagé.
Enough of this claptrap, the Jesuit thundered, halting in his tracks.
Peering through the gloom, he spotted a lean-to at the rear of the governor's
house. He hurried over and ducked into the shelter and after vigorously
shaking the rain from his hat and cloak hung both items on a nail.
A few moments later, he was struck by a memory of something Jean de
Quen had said about Joachim of Fiore. This got him thinking of the inspiration
he himself had once drawn from the writings of the saintly 12th century
Calabrian abbot.
As a young philosophy student at the Jesuit College in Rouen, he'd
been thrown into a state of despair by the Church's policy on time and
history. Following Augustine, the Church insisted that the culminating
Seventh Age existed outside of time, and that the climax of history
already had taken place with the advent of Christ. All that remained
for mankind was a period of repentance, of life under the shadow of
impending judgement. The world was doomed to an age of deterioration,
to a mounting crescendo of evil. Love would grow cold. The final tribulations
would come suddenly. Soon after, the Son of Man would appear again,
to judge the human races and make an end to history. To the young Le
Moyne, set on becoming a New World missioner, Augustine's worldview
seemed far too pessimistic.
The spurious writings of Joachim he'd eschewed. Those wild ravings
by radical Franciscans and Dominicans had caused the Church enormous
trouble and led to Joachim's own theories being declared heretical.
It had been easy to get hold of the famous biblical commentator's genuine
works. He had many admirers among the faculty at Rouen.
What was so appealing about Joachim's Three Statuses theory was that
its model of spiritual progression led to a new and everlasting Gospel
after the tribulations and eventual defeat of the Antichrist.
Furthermore, his third Status, the Status of the Holy Spirit, promised
a glorious renewal of ascetic contemplation. New spiritual orders would
appear at the end of the Sixth Age.
To the young Le Moyne, Benito Pereyra's 1594 commentary on the prophet
Daniel had seemed a godsend. Pereyra saw the Jesuit Society as the embodiment
of the true spiritual life of the Seventh Age. And, although he didn't
commit himself to a belief in an earthly millennium after Antichrist,
he saw in the silence at the opening of the seventh seal a period of
quietness and peace between the death of Antichrist and the Second Advent
which would be given to the Church for the conversion of all peoples
and the edification of the saints.
Many Jesuits over the years regarded their vocation as that of Joachim's
spiritual men. St. Vincent Ferrer's prophecy of new evangelical men
seemed especially apt. Vincent predicted that these new men, "succeeding
to the place forfeited by the Franciscans and Dominicans for their sins,"
would proclaim the Gospel throughout the world before the Second
Advent. An early Jesuit historian stated that St. Vincent's prophecy
was quite obviously fulfilled in their Society, "for who were more simple
in their zeal for poverty or more world-wide in their missionary calling."
Jesuits also had turned to the Apocalypse for symbols adequate to the
life of their founder. In 1602, the Society of Jesuits officially identified
St. Ignatius with the Fifth Angel of the Apocalypse, at the sound of
whose trumpet a great star falls from heaven. To the Jesuits, the star
was Luther and the army of locusts which fights for him the whole pestilent
sect of Protestant heretics.
The elderly Father Le Moyne gazed out at the grey dawn breaking across
the Ville-Marie fort. He thought of the play that he and his cousin
André had seen in Avranches. The whole action of the Fifth Angel had
been set forth on stage. In the first scene, the Angel sounded his trumpet,
the star fell, and the abyss breathed forth locusts. The rest of the
scenes recreated the life of St. Ignatius.
He thought again of what Father de Quen had said about Joachim of
Fiore. His lips pursed in disapproval. It was one thing to accept Joachim
as the prophet of one's order, quite another to accept his view of history.
It was blasphemy to see oneself as belonging to the order of those who
know the secret of life in the third Status, and are the divine agents
to usher the Church into it. He'd been absolutely right not to forsake
Augustine.
The Matins bell rang at the chapel door. A shard of dream - of the
Amiskou thudding alive onto the back of a monstrous sea turtle - came
back, along with the prickling in his legs.
He stepped out of the lean-to and saw Shalinka coming towards him.
After prayers, the two would walk to Lachine to meet Jean-Baptiste and
the Onondaga guides. The Chonnonton chief was dressed in the French
style. In his right hand he carried a new flintlock musket, at his side
hung his worn satchel.
>>>>>>>
