Master Raymond

Master Raymond keeps a cluttered apothecary shop in Paris, all jars and dried herbs and things unnamed, and it is here Claire comes seeking ingredients and conversation. Small, strange-eyed, unhurried, he speaks in riddles half-serious, half-teasing, and seems to know more about medicine, and about Claire herself, than a shopkeeper should.

Dominique Pinon gives him a stillness that reads as either harmless eccentricity or something more, and the show never rushes to settle which. He functions as Claire's confidant in a foreign, hostile court, but the pleasure is in his manner — dry, watchful, faintly amused — a man who seems to be in on a joke no one else can hear.