Chapter Twenty The Sermon
Twenty
The Sermon
All the members of the High Council had been summoned to the cathedral to attend the sermon in which Marcel Delamare was to announce the forthcoming holy war.
It was made clear to them that this was not an invitation that could be refused.
Places were reserved for them at the front of the congregation, where the little parish priest from the eastern end of the lake found himself next to the professor of philology.
The other three rebels were seated further along the row, not close to them.
Professor Marianne Seidel greeted Parmentier with a quick guilty little smile, and he responded with a bland “Good morning.”
On his other side was a lean and ascetic-looking man who, Parmentier remembered, was an expert on classical ethics. He responded stiffly to the priest’s greeting, and glared firmly ahead without a word.
The sermon was an addition to the normal liturgy of Celebration, and was to follow the service, so they were in for a long wait, because the cathedral was crowded and every member of the congregation would need to come and receive the bread and wine—except that many of them, as far as Parmentier could see, were diplomatic or political guests, or journalists, or noted scholars; perhaps they would hold back from that part of the ceremonial.
Professor Seidel leaned towards him very slightly and whispered, “Have you spoken to any other Council members?”
“No,” Parmentier murmured back.
“There are four or five others who agree with us. But they’re afraid to become involved in any, you know, activity.”
He nodded. “I wonder if we’ll be able to speak afterwards. Better keep quiet now.”
As he spoke, there was a stir among the congregation and the first notes sounded on the great organ. Everyone got to their feet.
The service began. As usual when he was present at a service being conducted by someone else, Georges Parmentier found himself sinking, or possibly ascending, into a semi-hypnotic state where the words he knew so well, the rhythm of the changes between praying and singing, kneeling and standing up, listening and murmuring responses, all worked together to reassure him that the great virtues were as solid and true as they had been when he was a child.
There was a heaven, and its sublime truth was made manifest in these sounds and rhythms and colors and scents.
He was a prisoner of the love he felt for it.
Once or twice in the hour and a half during which the service unhurriedly extended itself, he noticed that Professor Seidel was trying to whisper something to him, but he couldn’t listen, and eventually she stopped.
As the final prayer closed, a new kind of stir became present in the congregation, like the first breeze of the day moving stalks of wheat in a wide field.
Wisps of somnolence were carried away; people sat up; an air of expectation, like an anbaric current, seemed to be generated as the figure of Marcel Delamare, elegant in his faultless dark blue suit and snowy shirt with a sober tie, stood up and climbed the steps to the pulpit.
“In the name of the Authority, from whom all grace, truth, and goodness proceed,” he said.
Not many of those present had actually heard him speak before.
His face was familiar now from the newspaper photograms, but he seldom preached.
The eyes that looked up at him were bright with curiosity.
His voice was perfectly pitched, perfectly modulated; like an experienced actor in a familiar auditorium, he knew exactly how to make himself heard without distortion, without shouting, without being muffled or blurred by distance or echo.
Parmentier listened with wary admiration.
Delamare grasped the pulpit rail with both hands and leaned slightly forward.
“I had a sister,” he began, “a sister whom I loved with boundless devotion from the day of my birth. She was three years older than I was, and all through my childhood she played with me, and guided me, and taught me the stories and rhymes that our mother had taught to her. She was the blessed companion of my joys, the kindly consolation in my childish sorrows, the wise teacher and the brave inspiration of my youth and young manhood. If we are very lucky, my friends, we do find someone like that when we are young; it may be a sibling, it may be a more distant relation, it may be a friend or a teacher. We look up to them, we are always glad to see them, we know that our hearts and our minds depend on their truth, their steadfastness, their kindness. So it was with me and my darling sister, Marisa.”
No one had been expecting anything like that.
The President was a man of intellectual force, no doubt, and of moral probity, of course, but stern and distant, perhaps a little cold and over-formal.
But now he was talking not as if to a large and anonymous audience but as if to a small group of close friends, and his voice, so clear and resonant, was warm with emotion.
“I thought that she was the guiding star of my life. I was proud when she had her academic triumphs, because no one was as clever or diligent as my Marisa; I rejoiced when she married a good man, Edward Coulter, and I looked forward to many happy days as a beloved guest in their household in the years to come. Everyone who knew them said what a happy marriage, what a blessed home they’d make, what a perfect illustration of the union between a man and a woman, both equal in goodness and kindness and swiftness of mind.
“But it did not last. Into her life, from some cruel corner of the darkness, came a temptation I had been sure her nature would hurl aside in contempt.
“A man, an Englishman, a scientist and explorer, a heretic and a sinner who had set himself against the Authority and the agents of his holy doctrine, set out to seduce her.
She must have presented a new challenge to this sexual marauder.
She was too pure for him to resist. In her mind, so ready to believe in the goodness of anyone who was interested in her, he probably represented something new and intriguing, something radically unlike anything she had experienced before.
Something heady and intoxicating. She was a brilliant woman, trained as an experimental theologian; she had written important papers on fundamental physics; she was wise as well as learned; she knew human nature; she was well aware of the lesson of Holy Scripture, the story of the serpent and the woman in the garden; she knew what temptation was, what it looked like and sounded like; but she gave in.
“Yes, she gave in. My sister was no different from innumerable others who have listened to the gentle voice of the serpent, who have felt the gleaming coils encircling them and stroked those jeweled shining scales, that pretty head that wound itself gently along her cheek and under her chin and around her neck. She did not resist, my friends; it was the sorrow of my life that she did not resist. And as is the way of nature, before long she gave birth to a child that was not her husband’s. ”
He paused a moment and looked around at the wide eyes, the still heads, the silent faces.
“The child was a girl to whom she and the Englishman gave the pagan name Lyra.
Conceived in flagrant sin, born with evil joy, this fruit of the serpent and his intoxicated victim was concealed by the wicked pair from the good man who had married Marisa.
How could he not know, you may ask: How can a man not know that his wife has borne a child, whether his own or not?
Edward Coulter was a diplomat, a diligent and honest man sent abroad to represent his country.
His life was one of high politics and grand foreign policy; he was rightly trusted by the King and the government of his nation to travel abroad, to undertake important discussions with national leaders and ministers about great questions of war and peace.
“Imagine a man in such a position, working in a foreign land, trusting in the love of his wife.
Imagine him coming home from a diplomatic mission of great delicacy and consequence.
Imagine him hearing—perhaps from a servant, perhaps from a friend, perhaps from some scurrilous rumor in the press—imagine him learning about how he has been betrayed.
“This good man did what any man would have done: he rushed to confront the man who had seduced his wife and fathered her illegitimate child.
But all his diplomatic skill, all his experience of politics and statecraft, went for nothing when the two of them met.
He was betrayed again, this time by his own honor.
He could not believe, simply found it impossible to conceive that the villain would wait till his back was turned and then plunge a sword into his heart.
Stabbed from behind by a seducer and a coward.
“The law proceeded, but the law found—astonishingly, you might think—in favor of the child’s father. A corrupt man saved by a corrupt law. My sister, my dear Marisa, whose brilliant nature had been so cruelly duped, was left alone with the burden of her sin.
“And what of the child? A baby not six months old. A babe in arms. She might—she should—have been put in the care of some good and holy Sisters of Obedience, but the villain snatched her away and placed her instead in the hands of a college of scholars—old men—dusty antiquaries with nothing in their minds but Greek verbs and arcane philosophy—who couldn’t possibly know what a child needed or how to care for her, how to bring her up in the ways of virtue and faith, to give her the benefit of a true moral education.
“The father vanished. He ran away, disgraced and out of favor with the society around him. A coward and a renegade.