The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  There was no plaque telling which of the seven great waves of religious hysteria and tourism had picked the blunt-nosed man up and carried him all the way across Europe and set him down in Asia Minor, under the walls of Antioch or Jerusalem. But his dust was here, not in the desert of Lebanon; he had survived, in any case; the tourist had got home.

  “What I brought you here to see,” Mme Viénot said, “is the prieuré on the other side of the garden. I don’t know the word in English.”

  “Priory,” Barbara said.

  “The same word. How interesting!”

  While they were in the chapel, it had commenced to sprinkle. They hurried along a garden path. The garden still had a few flowers in it, self-sown, among the weeds and grass. Except for the vaulting of the porch roof, the priory looked from the outside like an ordinary farm building. The entrance was in the rear, down a flight of stone steps that M. Carrère did not attempt. He stood under the shelter of the porch, leaning on his cane, looking ill and gray. When they were around the corner of the building, Harold asked Mme Carrère if the expedition had been too much for him and she said curtly that it had not. Her manner made it as clear as words would have that, though he had the privilege of listening to M. Carrère’s conversation, he did not know him, and Mme Carrère did see that he had, therefore, any reason to be interested in the state of her husband’s health. He colored.

  The key that Mme Viénot had obtained from the gatekeeper they did not need after all. The padlock was hanging open. The two young men put their weight against the door and it gave way. When their eyes grew accustomed to the feeble light, they could make out a dirt floor, simple carving on the capitals of the thick stone pillars, and cross-vaulting.

  Barbara was enchanted.

  “It is considered a jewel of eleventh-century architecture,” Mme Viénot said. “There is a story— It seems that one of the dukes was ill and afraid he would die, and he made a vow that if he recovered from his sickness he would build a prieuré in honor of the Virgin. And he did recover. But he forgot all about the prieuré and thought of nothing but his hawks and his hounds and hunting, until the Virgin appeared in a dream to someone in the neighborhood and reminded him, and then he had to keep his promise.”

  The interior of the building was all one room, and not very large, and empty except for an object that Harold took for a medieval battering ram until Mme Viénot explained that it was a wine press.

  “In America,” he said, “this building would have been taken apart stone by stone and shipped to Detroit, for Henry Ford’s museum.”

  “Yes?” Mme Viénot said. “Over here, we have so many old buildings. The museums are crammed. And so things are left where they happen to be.”

  He examined the stone capitals and walked all around the wine press. “What became of the nuns?” he asked suddenly.

  “They went away,” Mme Viénot said. “The building hasn’t been lived in since the time of the Revolution.”

  What the nuns didn’t take away with them other hands had. If you are interested in those poor dead women, the dirt floor of the priory said—in their tapestries, tables, chairs, lectuaries, cooking utensils, altar images, authenticated and unauthenticated visions, their needlework, feuds, and forbidden pets, go to the public library and read about them. There’s nothing here, and hasn’t been, for a hundred and fifty years.

  ON THE WAY HOME the walking party was caught in a heavy shower and drenched to the skin.

  Dressing hurriedly for dinner, Barbara said: “It’s so like her: ‘Thérèse will bring you a can—what time would you like it?’ and then when seven o’clock comes, there isn’t a sign of hot water.”

  “Do you want me to go down and see about it?”

  “No, you’d better not.”

  “Maybe she does it on purpose,” he said.

  “No, she’s just terribly vague, I’ve decided. She only half listens to what people are saying. I wouldn’t mind if we were on a camping trip, but to be expected to dress for dinner, to have everything so formal, and not even be able to take a bath! Do you want to button me up in back?… I’ve never seen anyone look as vague as she does sometimes. As if her whole life had been passed in a dream. Her eyelids come down over her eyes and she looks at us as if she couldn’t imagine who we were or what we were doing here.”

  “M. Carrère likes Americans, but Mme Carrère doesn’t. I don’t think she likes much of anybody.”

  “She likes the Canadian.”

  “Does she?”

  “She laughs at his jokes.”

  “I don’t think Gagny’s French is as good as he thinks it is. It’s an exaggeration of the way the others speak. Almost a parody.”

  “M. Carrère speaks beautiful French.”

  “He speaks French the way an American speaks English. It just comes out of him easily and naturally. Gagny shrugs his shoulders and draws down the corners of his mouth and says ‘mais oui’ all the time, and it’s as if he had picked up the mannerisms of half a dozen different people—which I guess you can’t help doing if the language isn’t your own. At least, I find myself beginning to do it.”

  “But it is his language. He’s bilingual.”

  “French-Canadian isn’t the same as French.” He pulled his tie through and drew the knot snugly against his collar. “While you are trying to make the proper sounds and remember which nouns are masculine and which feminine, the imitation somehow unconsciously— M. Carrère’s English is something else again. His pronunciation is so wide of the mark that sometimes I can’t figure out what on earth he’s talking about. “ ’ut doaks, ’ut doaks!” And so impatient with us for not understanding.”

  “I shouldn’t have laughed at him,” Barbara said sadly. “I was sorry afterward. Because our pronunciation must sound just as comic to the French, and they never laugh at us.”

  AT DINNER, Mme Viénot’s navy-blue silk dress was held together at the throat by a diamond pin, which M. Carrère admired. He had a passion for the jewelry of the Second Empire, he said. And Mme Carrère remarked dryly that there was only one thing she would do differently if she had her life to live over again. She let her husband explain. In the spring of 1940, as they were preparing to escape from Paris by car, she had entrusted her jewel case to a friend, and the friend had handed it over to the Nazis. The few pieces that she had now were in no way comparable to what had been lost forever. Even so, Barbara had to make an effort to keep from looking at the emerald solitaire that Mme Carrère wore next to her plain gold wedding ring, and she was sorry that she had listened to Harold when he suggested that she leave everything but a string of cultured pearls in the bank at home.

  Having established a precedent, the Americans were concerned to live it down. They remained in the petit salon with the others, after dinner. The company sat, the women with sweaters and coats thrown over their shoulders, facing the empty Franklin stove. Observing that Gagny smoked one cigarette and then no more, the Americans, not wanting to be responsible for filling the room with smoke, denied the impulse each time it recurred, and sometimes found to their surprise that they had a lighted cigarette in their hand.

  While Hector Gagny and M. Carrère were solemnly discussing the underlying causes of the defeat of 1940, the present weakened condition of France, and the dangers that a reawakened Germany would present to Europe and the rest of the world, a quite different conversation was taking place in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Harold Rhodes’s reflection, leaning forward in his chair, said to Mme Viénot’s reflection: “I am not accustomed to bargaining. It makes me uneasy. But we have a friend who lived in France for years, and she said—”

  “Where in France?” Mme Viénot’s reflection interrupted.

  “In Paris. They had an apartment overlooking the Parc Monceau.”

  “The Monceau quarter is charming. Gounod lived there. And Chopin.”

  “She said it was a matter of principle, and that in traveling we must keep our eyes open and not be above bargaining or people
would take advantage of us … of our inexperience. It was she who told us to ask you to figure the price by the week instead of by the day, but if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t listen to her. I’d just pay you what you asked for, and let it go at that.”

  Instead of giving him the reassurance he wanted, Mme Viénot’s reflection leaned back among the sofa pillows, with her hand to her cheek. It would have been better, he realized, not to have brought the matter up at all. It was not necessary to bring it up. It had been settled before they ever left America. In his embarrassment he turned for help to the photograph of the schoolboy on the piano. “What I am trying to say, I guess, is that it’s one thing to live up to your principles, and quite another thing to live up to somebody else’s idea of what those principles should be.”

  “My likeness is here among the others,” the boy in the photograph said, “but in their minds I am dead. They have let me die.”

  “The house is cold and damp and depressing,” Barbara Rhodes’s reflection said to the reflection of M. Carrère. “Why must we all sit with sweaters and coats over our shoulders? Why isn’t there a fire in that stove? I don’t see why we all don’t get pneumonia.”

  “People born to great wealth—”

  All the other reflections stopped talking in order to hear what M. Carrère’s reflection was about to say.

  “—are also born to a certain kind of human deprivation, and soon learn to accept it. For example, those letters that arrive daily, even in this remote country house—letters from my lawyer, from my financial advisors, from bankers and brokers and churchmen and politicians and the heads of charitable organizations, all read and acknowledged by Mme Carrère, lest they tire me (which indeed they would). The expressions of personal attachment, of concern for my health, are judged according to their sincerity, in most instances not great, and a few are read aloud to me, lest I think that no one cares. I am accustomed to the fact that in every Jetter, sooner of later, self-interest shows through. I do not really mind, any more. Music is my delight. When I want companionship, I go to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and look at the porcelains and the period furniture.”

  “I used to have a friend—” Mme Bonenfant’s reflection said. “She has been dead for twenty years: Mme Noë—”

  “Mme Noë?” M. Carrère interrupted. “I knew her also. That is, I was taken to see her as a young man.”

  “Mme Noë was fond of saying, and of writing in letters and on the flyleaf of books: ‘Life is something more than we believe it to be.’ ”

  “Since my illness,” M. Carrère said, “I have become aware for the first time of innumerable—reconciliations, I suppose one would call them, that go on around us all the time without our noticing it. Again and again, Mme Carrère hands me something just as I am on the point of asking for it. And in her dreams she is sometimes a party to financial transactions that I am positive I have not told her about.… But it is strange that you should speak of Mme Noë. I was thinking about her this very afternoon as I stood looking at that grass-choked garden and that house gutted by fire. She was quite old when I was taken to see her. And she asked me all sorts of questions about myself that no one had ever asked me before, and that I went on answering for days afterward.”

  “She had that effect on everyone,” Mme Bonenfant said.

  “I remember that she led me to a vase of flowers and we talked.”

  “And what did you say?” Barbara Rhodes asked.

  “I said something that pleased her,” M. Carrère said, “but what it was I can no longer remember. All I know is that it was not at all like the sort of thing I usually said. And when she left me to speak to someone else, I did not have the feeling that I was being abandoned. Or that she would ever confuse me afterward with anyone else.… She is an important figure in the memoirs of a dozen great men, and reading about her the same question always occurs to me. What manner of woman she was really, if you made no claim on her, if you asked for nothing (as she asked for nothing) but merely sat, silent, content merely to be there beside her, and let her talk or not talk, as she felt like doing, all through a summer afternoon, none of them seem to know.”

  “She was frail,” Mme Bonenfant said. “She was worn out by ill-health, by the demands, the endless claims upon her time and energy—”

  “Which she must have encouraged,” M. Carrère said.

  “No doubt,” Mme Bonenfant said. “By temperament she was not merely kind, she was angelic, but there was also irony. Once or twice, toward the end of her life, she talked to me about herself. It seems she suffered always from the fear that, wanting only to help people, she nevertheless unwittingly brought serious harm to them. This may have been true but I do not know a single instance of it. For my own part, I am quite content to believe that life is nothing more than our vision of it—of what we believe it to be. Tacitus says that the phoenix appears from time to time in Egypt, that it is a fact well verified. Herodotus tells the same story, but skeptically.”

  “At the Council of Nicaea,” M. Carrère said, “three hundred and eighteen bishops took their places on their thrones. But when they rose as their names were called, it appeared that they were three hundred and nineteen. They were never able to make the number come out right; whenever they approached the last one, he immediately turned into the likeness of his neighbor.”

  “Before Harold and I were married,” Barbara said, “a woman in a nightclub read our palms, and she said Leo and Virgo should never marry. Their horoscopes are in conflict. If they love each other and are happy it is a mistake.… That’s why he doesn’t like fortunetellers. I don’t think our marriage is a mistake, but on the other hand, sometimes I lie awake between three and four in the morning, planning dinner parties and solving riddles and worrying about curtains that don’t hang straight in the dark, and about my clothes and my hair, and about whether I have been unintentionally the cause of hurt feelings. And about Harold, sound asleep beside me and sharing not only the same bed but some of my worst faults.… Does anybody know the answer to the riddle that begins: ‘If three people are in a room and two of them have a white mark on their forehead—’ ”

  “The answer to the riddle of why I am not married,” Hector Gagny said, “is that I am. And my wife hates me.”

  “So did the woman I gave my jewel case to,” Mme Carrère said. “But I didn’t know it.”

  “She has all but ruined my career,” Gagny said. “She is beautiful and willful and perverse, and in her own way quite wonderful. But she makes no concessions to the company she finds herself in, and I sit frozen with fear of what may come out of her mouth.”

  “Do not despair,” Mme Bonenfant said. “Be patient. Your wife, M. Gagny, may only be acting the way she does out of the fear that you do not love her.”

  “In the beginning we seemed to be happy, and only after a while did it become apparent that there were things that were not right. And that they were not ever going to be right. I began to see that behind the fascination of her mind, her temperament, there was some force at work that was not on my side, and bent on destroying both of us. But what is it? Why is she like that?”

  “Though there was only two years difference in our ages,” Mme Viénot said, “my mother held me responsible for my brother’s safety when we were children. I used to have nightmares in which something happened to him or was about to happen to him. When we played together, I never let go of his hand.”

  “Maurice was delicate,” Mme Bonenfant said.

  “He cried easily,” Mme Viénot said. “He was always getting his feelings hurt. My daughter Sabine is very like him in appearance. I only hope that her life is not as unhappy as his.”

  “I see that you haven’t forgiven me,” the boy in the photograph said. “I failed to distinguish myself in my studies but I made three friendships that were a credit to me, and I died bravely. It took me almost an hour to kill myself.… Now I am an effect of memory. When you have completely forgotten me, I assume that I will pass on to
other places.”

  “They say that people who talk about committing suicide never actually do it,” Mme Viénot said. “Maurice was the exception. When his body was brought home for burial we were warned that it would be better not to open the coffin.”

  “It was an accident,” Mme Bonenfant said.

  “And M. Viénot?” Harold Rhodes asked the boy in the photograph. “Why does nobody speak of him? His name is never mentioned.”

  “Do not interrupt,” the boy in the photograph said. “They are speaking of me—of what happened to me.”

  AT QUARTER OF ELEVEN, when the Americans went upstairs, they found a large copper can in their bathroom. The temperature of the water in the can was just barely warm to the touch.

  Lying awake in the dark, she heard the other bed creak.

  “Are you awake?” she whispered, when he turned again.

  He was awake.

  “We don’t have to stay,” she said, in a small, sad voice.

  “If it’s no good I think we could tell her that we’re not happy and just leave.” He sat up and rearranged the too-fat pillows and then said: “It’s funny how it comes and goes. I have periods of clarity and then absolute blankness. And my mind gets so tired I don’t care any more what they’re saying.” The bed creaked as he turned over again. He tried to go to sleep but he had talked himself wide awake. “Good night. I love you,” he said. But it didn’t work. This declaration, which on innumerable occasions had put his mind at rest, had no effect because she was not in his arms.

  “It isn’t simply the language,” he said, after several minutes of absolute silence. “Though that’s part of it. There’s a kind of constraint over the conversation, over everything. I think they all feel it. I think it’s the house.”

  “I know it’s the house,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

  Five minutes later, the bed creaked one last time. “Do I imagine it,” he asked, “or is it true that when they speak of the Nazis—downstairs, I mean—the very next sentence is invariably some quite disconnected remark about Americans?”