The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  It began to rain in earnest, and they turned up their coat collars and went on walking and talking.

  “Shall we go in?” the Frenchman asked, a moment later.

  As they went back through the gap in the hedge, Harold said to himself that it was a different house they were returning to. By the addition of a man of the family it had changed; it had stopped being matriarchal and formal and cold, and become solid and hospitable and human, like other houses.

  At the door of the petit salon, they separated. Harold took in the room at a glance. M. Carrère sat looking quite forlorn, the one man among so many women. And did he imagine it or was Mme Viénot put out with them? There was an empty chair beside Mme de Boisgaillard and he sat down in it and tried once more to follow the conversation. He learned that the woman he had taken for the children’s nurse or possibly M. de Boisgaillard’s mother was Mme de Boisgaillard’s mother instead; which meant that she was Mme Viénot’s sister and had a perfect right to be here. What he had failed to perceive, like the six blind men and the elephant, was that she was deaf and so could not take part in general conversation. During dinner she did not even try, but now if someone spoke directly to her she adjusted the pointer of the little black box that she held to her ear as if it were a miniature radio, and seemed to understand.

  When the others retired to their rooms at eleven o’clock, Eugène de Boisgaillard swept the Americans ahead of him, through a doorway and down a second-floor hall they had not been in before, and they found themselves in a bedroom with a dressing room off it. They stood looking down at the baby, who was fast asleep on her stomach but escaped entirely from the covers, at right angles to the crib, with her knees tucked under her, her feet crossed like hands, her rump in the air.

  Her mother straightened her around and covered her, and then they tiptoed back into the larger room and began to talk. Mme de Boisgaillard translated and summarized quickly and accurately, leaving them free to go on to the next thing they wanted to say.

  Unlike M. Carrère, Eugène de Boisgaillard did not hate all Germans. His political views were Liberal and democratic. He was also as curious as a cat. He wanted to know how long Harold and Barbara had been married, and how they had met one another, and what part of America they grew up in. He asked their first names and then what their friends called them. He asked them to call him by his first name. And then the questions began again, as if the first thing in the morning he and they were starting out for the opposite ends of the earth and there was only tonight for them to get to know each other. Once, when a question was so personal that Harold thought he must have misunderstood, he turned to Mme de Boisgaillard and she smiled and shook her head ruefully and said: “I hope you do not mind. That is the way he is. When I think he cannot possibly have said what I think I have heard him say, I know that is just what he did say.”

  At her husband’s suggestion, she left them and went downstairs to see what there was in the larder, and they were surprised to discover that without her they couldn’t talk to each other. They waited awkwardly until she came into the room carrying a tray with a big bowl of sour cream and four smaller bowls, a sugar bowl, and spoons.

  Eugène de Boisgaillard pointed to the empty fireplace and said: “No andirons. Does the one in your room work?”

  Harold explained that it had a shield over it.

  “During the Occupation the Germans let the forests be depleted—intentionally—and so one is allowed to cut only so much wood,” Mme de Boisgaillard said, “and if they used it now there would not be enough for the winter. Poor Tante! She drives herself so hard.… The thing I always forget is what a beautiful smell this house has. It may be the box hedge, though Mummy says it is the furniture polish, but it doesn’t smell like any other house in the world.”

  “Have your shoes begun to mildew?” Eugène de Boisgaillard said.

  Barbara shook her head.

  “They will,” he said.

  “You will drive them away,” Mme de Boisgaillard said, “and then we won’t have anyone our age to talk to.”

  “We will go after them,” Eugéne de Boisgaillard said, “talking every step of the way. The baby’s sugar ration,” he said, saluting the sugar bowl.

  Sweetened with sugar, the half-solidified sour cream was delicious.

  “Have you enjoyed knowing M. Carrère?” Eugène asked.

  Harold said that M. Carrère seemed to be a very kind man.

  “He’s also very rich,” Eugène said. “Everything he touches turns into more money, more gilt-edged stock certificates. He is a problem to the Bank of France. Toinette has a special tone of voice in speaking of him—have you noticed? Where does she place him, I wonder? On some secondary level. Not with Périclès, or Beethoven. Not with Louis XIV. With Saint-Simon, perhaps … In the past year I have learned how to interpret the public face. It has been very useful. The public face is much more ponderous and explicit than the private face and it asks only one question: ‘What is it you want?’ And whatever you want is unfortunately just the thing it isn’t convenient for you to be given.… Do you get on well with your parents, Harold?”

  He listened attentively to Alix’s translation of the answer to this question and then said: “My father is very conservative. He has never in his whole life gone to the polls and voted.”

  “Why not?” Barbara asked.

  “His not voting is an act of protest against the Revolution.”

  “You don’t mean the Revolution of 1789?”

  “Yes. He does not approve of it.”

  Tears of amusement ran down Harold’s cheeks and he reached for his handkerchief and wiped them away.

  “What does your father do?” Barbara asked.

  “He collects porcelain. That’s all he has done his whole life.”

  In a moment Harold had to get his handkerchief out again as Eugène launched forth on the official and unofficial behavior of his superior, the Minister of Planning and External Affairs.

  At one o’clock the Americans stood up to go, and, still talking, Eugène and Alix accompanied them down the upstairs hall until they were in their own part of the house. Whispering and tittering like naughty children, they said good night. Was Mme Viénot awake, Harold wondered. Could she hear them? Did she disapprove of such goings on?

  Eugène said that he had one last question to ask.

  “Don’t,” Alix whispered.

  “Why not? Why shouldn’t I ask them?… Is there a double bed in your room?”

  Harold shook his head.

  “I knew it!” Eugène said. “I told Alix that there wouldn’t be. Don’t you find it strange—don’t you think it is extraordinary that all the double beds in the house are occupied by single women?”

  They said good night all over again, and the Americans crept up the stairs, which, even so, creaked frightfully. When Barbara fell asleep, Harold wrapped the covers around her snugly and moved over into his own damp bed and lay awake for some time, thinking. What had happened this evening was so different from anything else that had happened to them so far on their trip, and he felt that a part of him that had been left behind in America, without his realizing it, had now caught up with him. He thought with wonder how far off he could be about people. For Eugène was totally unlike what he had seemed at first to be. He was not cold and insincere but amusing and unpredictable, and masculine, and direct, and intelligent, and like a wonderful older brother. Knowing him was reason enough for them to come back time after time, through the years, to France.…

  Chapter 9

  AT BREAKFAST the next morning, Mme Viénot’s manner with the Americans did not convey approval or disapproval. She urged on them a specialty of the countryside—bread with meat drippings poured over it—and then, folding her napkin, excused herself to go and dress for church. Harold asked if they could go to church also, and she said: “Certainly.”

  At ten thirty the dog cart appeared in front of the house, with the gardener in the driver’s seat and his white plow hors
e hitched to the traces. It had been arranged that Barbara should go to church in the cart with Mme Straus-Muguet and Alix and Eugène; that Mme Bonenfant should ride in the Bentley with M. and Mme Carrère; that Harold and Mme Viénot should bicycle. She rode her own, he was given the cook’s, which got out of his control, in spite of Mme Viénot’s repeated warnings. Unaccustomed to bicycles without brakes, he came sailing into the village a good two minutes ahead of her.

  They were in plenty of time for Mass, but instead of going directly to the little church she went to Mme Michot’s, where she stood gazing at the fruit and vegetables, her expression a mixture of disdain and disbelief, as if Mme Michot were trying to introduce her to persons whose social status was not at all what they pretended. Madame Michot’s tomatoes were inferior and her plums were too dear. In the end she bought two lemons, half a pound of dried figs, and some white raisins that were unaccountably cheap.

  As they came out of the little shop, she explained that she had one more errand; her seamstress was making her a green silk dress that was to have the New Look, and it had been promised for today.

  At the seamstress’s house, Mme Viénot knocked and waited. She knocked again. She stood in the street and called. She stopped and questioned a little girl, who told her reluctantly where the seamstress had said she could be found. Mme Viénot looked at her wrist watch. “I really don’t see why she couldn’t have been home!” she exclaimed. “We are already quite late for church, and it means going clear to the other side of the village.”

  Once more they got on their bicycles. As they were riding side by side over the bumpy cobblestones, she remarked that the village was older than it looked. “There is a legend—whether it is true I cannot say—that Jeanne d’Arc, traveling toward Chinon with her escort of three or four soldiers, arrived at Brenodville at nightfall and was denied a lodging by the monks.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of her sex, no doubt.”

  “Where did she go?” Harold asked. “She slept in a farmhouse, I believe.”

  He looked around for Gothic stonework and found, here and there, high up out of harm’s way, a small gargoyle at the end of a waterspout, a weathered stone pinnacle, a carved lintel, or some other piece of medieval decoration, proving that the story was at least possible. The houses themselves—sour, secretive, commonplace-looking—said that if Jeanne d’Arc were to come again in the middle of the twentieth century, she would get the same inhospitable reception, and not merely from the monks but from everybody.

  The house where the little girl had said the seamstress said she could be found was locked and shuttered, and no one came to the door. At five minutes of twelve, they arrived at the vestibule of the church. Mme Viénot genuflected in the aisle outside the family pew and then moved in and knelt beside her mother. Harold followed her. Half kneeling and half sitting, he tried not to look so much like a Protestant. The drama on the altar was reaching its climax. A little silver bell tinkled. The congregation spoke. (Was it Latin? Was it French?) Mme Viénot struck her flat chest three times and seemed to be asking for something from the depths of her heart, but though he listened intently, he could not hear what it was; it was lost in the asking of other low voices all around them. The bell tinkled again and again, insistently. There was a moment of hushed expectation and then the congregation rose from their knees with a roaring sound that nobody paid any attention to, filled the aisle, streamed out of the chill of the little church into the more surprising chill of a cold gray July day, and, pleased that an essential act was done, broke out into smiles and conversation.

  Harold waited beside the two bicycles while Mme Viénot went into the stationer’s for her mother’s Figaro. He looked around for Mme Straus-Muguet, not sure whether she had meant them to meet her here in the village after church or where. And if he saw her beckoning to him, how would he escape from Mme Viénot? Mme Straus was nowhere in sight now, and he had made two trips downstairs after breakfast without encountering her.

  When Mme Viénot took a long, thin, empty wine bottle out of her saddlebag and went into still another shop, he followed her out of curiosity and was introduced to M. Canourgue, whose stock was entirely out of sight, under a wooden counter or in the adjoining room. She counted out more ration coupons, and explained that Harold was American and a friend of M. Georges who was so fond of chocolates. The wine bottle went into the back room and came back full of olive oil. Mme Viénot bought sardines, and this and that. When they were outside in the street again, Harold saw that the canvas saddlebag of her bicycle was crammed, and so he took the bottle from her and placed it carefully on its side in his saddle bag, which was empty.

  As they rode home, he asked where she had learned English and she said: “From my governess … And in England.”

  Her education had been rounded off with a year in London, during which she had lived with a private family. She admired the British, she said, but did not particularly like them. “They dress so badly, in those ill-fitting suits,” she said. He waited, hoping that she would say that she liked Americans, but she didn’t.

  They dismounted in the courtyard and wheeled their bicycles into the kitchen entry, where Mme Viénot let out a cry of distress. He saw that she was looking at his saddlebag, and said: “What’s the matter?” She pointed to the wine bottle lying on its side. “The cork has come out,” she said, in the voice of doom.

  He started to apologize, and then realized that she wasn’t paying any attention to what he said. She had picked up the bottle and was examining the outside, turning it around slowly. It was dry. They examined the saddlebag. Not a drop of oil had been spilled! He learned a new French phrase—“une espèce de miracle”—and used it frequently in conversation from that time on.

  Mme Straus-Muguet was in the drawing room, with M. and Mme Carrère and Mme Bonenfant and Barbara and Alix and Eugène. They had all been invited to take an apéritif with her on Sunday morning. An unopened bottle of Martinique rum stood on the little round table. Thérèse brought liqueur glasses and the corkscrew. The rum loosened tongues, smoothed away differences of background, of age, of temperament, of nationality. The conversation became animated; their eyes grew bright. Thérèse removed the screen, and they all rose and, still talking, floated on a wave of intense cordiality through the hall and into the dining room, where the long-promised poulet awaited them. As Harold unfolded his clean napkin, he decided that life in the country was not so bad, after all.

  The gaiety did not quite last out the meal. The nine people around the table sank back, one after another, into their ordinary selves. There had been no real, or at least no lasting, change but merely a sleight-of-hand demonstration. As some people know how to make three balls appear and disappear and a whole flock of doves fly out of an opera hat, Mme Straus-Muguet knew how to lift a dead social weight. Out of the most unpromising elements she had just now constructed an edifice of gaiety, an atmosphere of concert pitch. Shreds of her triumph lasted until teatime, when Mme Viénot surrendered the silver teapot to her, and she presided—modestly, but also as if she were accustomed to having this compliment paid her.

  Sitting with the others, in the circle of chairs at one end of the drawing room, Barbara listened to what Alix and Eugène were saying to each other. His train left at six, and there were last-minute instructions and reminders, of a kind that she was familiar with, and that made her feel she knew them intimately merely because the French girl was saying just what she herself might have said in these circumstances.

  “You know where the bread coupons are?”

  “You put them in the desk, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. You’ll have to go and get new ones when they expire. Do you think you will remember to?”

  “If I don’t, my stomach will remind me.”

  “I have arranged with Mme Emile to buy ice for you, and butter once a week. And if you want to ask someone to dinner, Françoise will come and cook it for you. She will be there Fridays, to clean the apartment and chan
ge the linen on your bed. Can you remember to leave a note for the laundress? I meant to do it and forgot. She is to wash your dressing gown. Is it late?”

  “There is plenty of time,” Eugène said, glancing at his wrist watch.

  “If it should turn hot, leave the awning down at our window and close the shutters, and it will be cool when you come home at night. It might be better to leave all the shutters closed—but then it will be gloomy. Whatever you think best. And if you are too tired after work to write to me, it will be all right. I will write to you every day.… ”

  A few minutes more passed, and then he stood up and started around the circle, shaking hands and saying good-by. His manner with M. and Mme Carrère was simply that of a man of breeding. And yet beneath the confident surface there was something a little queer, Harold thought, watching them. Was Eugène trying to convey to them that his father would not have permitted them to be introduced to him?

  When he arrived at Harold and Barbara, he smiled, and Harold said as they shook hands: “We’ll see you on Friday.”

  Eugène nodded, turned away, and then turned back to them and said: “You are coming up to Paris—”

  “Next Sunday.”

  “Good. We will all be taking the train together. That is what I had hoped. And where will you stay?”

  Harold told him.

  “Why do you spend money for a hotel,” Eugène said, “when there is room in my mother-in-law’s apartment?”

  Harold hesitated, and Eugène went on: “I won’t be able to spend as much time with you as I’d like, but it will be a pleasure for me, having you and Barbara there when I come home at night.”