The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  When they were on the outskirts of the village, they saw Mme Viénot’s gardener coming toward them in the cart and assumed he had business in the village. He stopped when he was abreast of them, and waited. They stood looking up at him and he told them to get in. Mme Viénot had sent him, thinking that they would be tired after their long day’s excursion. They were tired, and grateful that she had thought of them.

  In the beautiful calm evening light, driving so slowly between fields that had just been cut, they learned that the white horse was named Pompon, and that he was thirty years old. The gardener explained that it was his little boy who had taken Harold by the hand and led him to the house of M. Fleury. They found it easy to talk to him. He was simple and direct, and so were the words he used, and so was the look in his eyes. They felt he liked them, and they wished they could know him better.

  On the table in their room, propped against the vase of flowers, was a letter from Mme Straus-Muguet. The handwriting was so eccentric and the syntax so full of flourishes that Harold took it downstairs and asked Alix to translate it for them. Mme Straus was inviting them to take tea with her at the house of her friends, who would be happy to meet two such charming Americans.

  He watched Alix’s face as she read the protestations of affection at the close of the letter.

  “Why do you smile?”

  She refused to explain. “You would only think me uncharitable,” she said. “As in fact I am.”

  He was quite sure that she wasn’t uncharitable, so there must be something about Mme Straus that gave rise to that doubtful smile. But what? Though he again urged her to tell him, she would not. The most she would say was that Mme Straus was “roulante.”

  He went back upstairs and consulted the dictionary. “Roulante” meant “rolling.” It also meant a “side-splitting, killing (sight, joke).”

  Reluctantly, he admitted to himself, for the first time, that there was something theatrical and exaggerated about Mme Straus’s manner and conversation. But there was still a great gap between that and “side-splitting.” Did Alix see something he didn’t see? Probably she felt that as Americans they had a right to their own feelings about people, and did not want to spoil their friendship with Mme Straus. But in a way she had spoiled it, since it is always upsetting to discover that people you like do not think very much of each other.

  When he showed Barbara the page of the dictionary, it turned out that she too had reservations about Mme Straus. “The thing is, she might become something of a burden if she attached herself to us while we’re in Paris. We’ll only be there for ten days. And I wouldn’t like to hurt her feelings.”

  Though they did not speak of it, they themselves were suffering from hurt feelings; they did not understand why Alix would not spend more time with them. For reasons they could not make out, she was simply inaccessible. They knew that she slept late, and she was, of course, occupied with the baby, and perhaps with her sister’s children. But on the other hand, she had brought a nursemaid with her, so perhaps it wasn’t the children who were keeping her from them. Perhaps she didn’t want to see any more of them.… But if that were true, they would have felt it in her manner. When they met at mealtime, she was always pleased to see them, always acted as if their friendship was real and permanent, and she made the lunch and dinner table conversation much more enjoyable by the care she took of them. But why didn’t she want to go anywhere with them? Why did she never seek out their company at odd times of the day?

  She was uneasy about Eugène—that much she did share with them. She had hoped that he would write and there had been no letter. Harold suggested that he might be too busy to write, since the government had jumped after all, without waiting this time for the August vacation to be over. He asked if the crisis would affect Eugène’s position, and she said that, actually, Eugène had two positions in the Ministry of Planning and External Affairs, neither of which would suffer any change under a different cabinet, since they were not that important.

  The dining-room table was now the smallest the Americans had seen it and, raising her hearing aid to her ear, Mme Cestre took part in the conversation.

  Alix explained that her mother’s health was delicate; she was a prey to mysterious diseases that the doctors could neither cure nor account for. There would be an outbreak of blisters on the ends of her fingers, and then it would go away as suddenly as it had come. She had attacks of dizziness, when the floor seemed to come up and strike her foot. She could not stand to be in the sun for more than a few minutes. Alix herself thought sometimes that it was because her mother was so good and kind—really much kinder than anybody else. Beggars, old women selling limp, tarnished roses, old men with a handful of pencils had only to look at her and she would open her purse. She could not bear the sight of human misery.

  Leaning toward her mother, Alix said: “I have been telling Barbara and Harold how selfish you are.”

  Mme Cestre raised the hearing aid to her ear and adjusted the little pointer. The jovial remark was repeated and she smiled benignly at her daughter.

  When she entered the conversation, it was always abruptly, on a new note, since she had no idea what they were talking about. She broke in upon Mme Bonenfant’s observation that there was no one in Rome in August—that it was quite deserted, that the season there had always been from November through Lent—with the observation that cats are indifferent to their own reflection in a mirror.

  “Dogs often fail to recognize themselves,” she said, as they all stared at her in surprise. “Children are pleased. The wicked see what other people see … and the mirror sees nothing at all.”

  Or when Alix was talking about the end of the war, and how she and Sabine suddenly decided that they wanted to be in Paris for the Liberation and so got on their bicycles and rode there, only to be sent back to the country because there wasn’t enough food, Mme Cestre remarked to Barbara: “My husband used to do the packing always. I did it once when we were first married, but he had been a bachelor too long, and no one could fold coatsleeves properly but him.… It is quite true that when I did it they were wrinkled.”

  It was hard not to feel that this note of irrelevance must be part of her character, but once she was oriented in the conversation, Mme Cestre’s remarks were always pertinent to it, and interesting. Her English was better than Alix’s or than Mme Viénot’s, and without any trace of a French accent.

  Sometimes she would sit with her hearing aid on her lap, content with her own thoughts and the perpetual silence that her deafness created around her. But then she would raise the hearing aid to her ear and prepare to re-enter the conversation.

  “Did Alix tell you that I am writing a book?” she said to her sister as they were waiting for Thérèse and the boy to clear the table for the next course.

  “I didn’t know you were, Maman,” Alix said.

  “I thought I had told you. It is in the form of a diary, and it consists largely of aphorisms.”

  “You are taking La Rochefoucauld as your model,” Mme Bonenfant said approvingly.

  “Yes and no,” Mme Cestre said. “I have a title for it: ‘How to Be a Successful Mother-in-Law.’ … The relationship is never an easy one, and a treatise on the subject would be useful, and perhaps sell thousands of copies. I shall ask Eugène to criticize it when I am finished, and perhaps do a short preface, if he has the time. I find I have a good deal to say.… ”

  “My sister also has a talent for drawing,” Mme Viénot said. “She does faces that are really quite good likenesses, and at the same time there is an element of caricature that is rather cruel. I do not understand it. It is utterly at variance with her nature. Once she showed me a drawing she had done of me and I burst into tears.”

  THURSDAY WAS A NICE DAY. The sun shone, it was warm, and Harold and Barbara spent the entire afternoon on the bank of the river, in their bathing suits. When they got home they found a scene out of Anna Karenina. Mme Bonenfant, Mme Viénot, Mme Cestre, and Thérèse were sitti
ng under the Lebanon cedar, to the right of the terrace, with their chairs facing an enormous burlap bag, which they kept reaching into. They were shelling peas for canning.

  Alix was in the courtyard, making some repairs on her bicycle. She had had a letter from Eugène. “He sends affectionate greetings to you both,” she said. “He is coming down to the country tomorrow night. And Mummy asked me to tell you, for her, that it would give her great pleasure if you would stay in the apartment while you are in Paris.”

  This time the invitation was accepted.

  After dinner, Mme Viénot opened the desk in the petit salon and took out a packet of letters, written to her mother at the château. She translated passages from them and read other passages in French, with the pride of a conscientious historian. Most of the letters were about the last week before the liberation of the city. The inhabitants of Paris, forbidden to leave their houses, had kept in active communication with one another by telephone.

  “But couldn’t the Germans prevent it?” Harold asked.

  “Not without shutting off the service entirely, which they didn’t dare to do. We knew everything that was happening,” Mme Viénot said. “When the American forces reached the southwestern limits of the city, the church bells began to toll, one after another, on the Left Bank, as each section of the city was delivered from the Germans, and finally the deep bell of Notre Dame. In the midst of the street fighting I left the apartment, to perform an errand, and found myself stranded in a doorway of a house, with bullets whistling through the air around me.” In the letter describing this, she neither minimized the danger nor pretended that she had been involved in an act of heroism. The errand was a visit, quite essential, to her dressmaker in the rue du Mont-Thabor.

  ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, Mme Viénot rode with Harold and Barbara in their taxi to Blois, where they parted. She went off down the street with an armful of clothes for the cleaner’s, and they got on a sight-seeing bus. They chose the tour that consisted of Chambord, Cheverny, and Chaumont instead of the tour of Azay-le-Rideau, Ussé, and Chinon, because Barbara, looking through the prospectus, thought she recognized in Cheverny the white château with the green lawn in front of it. Cheverny did have a green lawn in front of it but it was not at all like a fairy-tale castle, and Chambord was too big. It reminded them of Grand Central Station. Since they had already seen Chaumont, they got the driver to let them out at the castle gates, and stood looking around for a taxi that would take them to the house of Mme Straus-Muguet’s friends. It turned out that there were no taxis. The proprietor of the restaurant across the road did not know where the house was, and it was rather late to be having tea, so instead they sat for a whole hour on the river bank, feeling as if they had broken through into some other existence. They watched the sun’s red reflection on the water, the bathers, the children building sand castles, the goats cropping and straying, and the next two trips of the ferryboat; and then it was time for them to cross over, themselves, and take the train home.

  Though they were very late, dinner was later still. They sat in the drawing room waiting for Eugène and Sabine to arrive.

  When they met again at the château, Harold’s manner with Mme Viénot’s daughter was cautious. He was not at all sure she liked him. He and Eugène shook hands, and there was a flicker of recognition in the Frenchman’s eyes that had in it also a slight suggestion of apology: at the end of a long day and a long journey, Harold must not expect too much of him. Tomorrow they would talk.

  As Sabine started toward the stairs with her light suitcase, Mme Viénot said: “The Allégrets are giving a large dinner party tomorrow night. I accepted for you.” Then, turning to Harold and Barbara: “My daughter is very popular. Whenever she is expected, the telephone rings incessantly.… You are included in the invitation, but you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

  “Are Alix and Eugène going?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He and Barbara looked at each other, and then Barbara said: “Are you sure it is all right for us to go?”

  “Quite sure,” Mme Viénot said. “The Allégrets are a very old family. They are half Scottish. They are descended from the Duke of Berwick, who was a natural son of the English King James II, and followed him into exile, and became a marshal of France under Louis XIV.”

  During dinner, Eugène entertained them with a full account of the fall of the Schumann government. Day after day the party leaders met behind closed doors, and afterward they posed for the photographers on the steps of the Palais Bourbon, knowing that the photographers knew there was nothing of the slightest importance in the brief cases they held so importantly. What made this crisis different from the preceding ones was that no party was willing to accept the portfolios of Finance and Economics, and so it was quite impossible to form a government.

  “But won’t they have to do something?” Harold asked.

  “Eventually,” Mme Vienot said, “but not right away. For a while, the administrative branches of the government can and will go right on functioning.”

  “In my office,” Eugène said, “letters are opened and read, and copies of the letters are circulated, but the letters are not answered, because an answer would involve a decision, and all decisions, even those of no consequence, are postponed, or better still, referred to the proper authority, who, unfortunately, has no authority. I have been working until ten or eleven o’clock every night on a report that will never be looked at, since the man who ordered it is now out of office.”

  At that moment, as if the house wanted to point out that there is no crisis that cannot give way to an even worse situation, the lights went off. They sat in total darkness until the pantry door opened and Thérèse’s sullen peasant face appeared, lighted from below by two candles, which she placed on the dining-room table. She then lit the candles in the wall sconces and in a moment the room was ablaze with soft light. Looking at one face after another, Harold thought: This is the way it must have been in the old days, when Mme Viénot and Mme Cestre were still young, and they gave dinner parties, and the money wasn’t gone, and the pond had water in it, and everybody agreed that France had the strongest army in Europe.… In the light of the still candle flames, everyone was beautiful, even Mme Viénot. As her upper eyelids descended, he saw that that characteristic blind look was almost (though not quite) the look of someone who is looking into the face of love.

  At the end of dinner she pushed her chair back and, with a silver candlestick in her hand, she led them across the hall and into the petit salon, where they went on talking about the Occupation. It was the one subject they never came to the end of. They only put it aside temporarily at eleven o’clock, when, each person having been provided with his own candle, they went up the stairs, throwing long shadows before and behind them.

  Chapter 11

  AVEZ-VOUS BIEN DORMI?” Harold asked, and Eugene held up his hand as if, right there at the breakfast table, with his hair uncombed and his eyes puffy with sleep, he intended to perform a parlor trick for them. Looking at Barbara, he said: “You don’t lahv your hus-band, do you?” and to Harold’s astonishment she said: “No.”

  He blushed.

  “I mean yes, I do love him,” Barbara said.” I didn’t understand your question. Why, you’re speaking English!”

  Delighted with the success of his firecracker, Eugène sat down and began to eat his breakfast. He had enrolled at the Berlitz. He had had five lessons. His teacher was pleased with his progress. Still in a good humor, he went upstairs to shave and dress.

  Thérèse brought the two heaviest of the Americans’ suitcases down from the third floor, and then the dufflebag, and put them in the dog cart. Mme Viénot had pointed out that the trip up to Paris would be less strenuous if they checked some of their luggage instead of taking it all in the compartment with them. Harold and the gardener waited until Eugène came out of the house and climbed up on the seat beside them. Then the gardener spoke to his horse gently, in a coaxing voice, as if to a c
hild, and they drove off to the village. At the station, Eugène took care of the forms that had to be filled out, and bought the railroad tickets with the money Harold handed him, but he was withdrawn and silent. Either his mood had changed since breakfast or he did not feel like talking in front of the gardener. When they got back to the château, Harold went upstairs first, and then, finding that Barbara was washing out stockings in the bathroom and didn’t need him for anything, he went back downstairs and settled himself in the drawing room with a book. No one ever used the front door—they always came and went by the doors that opened onto the terrace—and so he would see anybody who passed through the downstairs. When Eugène did not reappear, Harold concluded that he was with Alix and the baby in the back wing of the house, where it did not seem proper to go in search of him, since he had been separated from his family for five days.

  It was not a very pleasant day and there was some perverse influence at work. The village electrician could not find the short circuit, which must be somewhere inside the walls, and he said that the whole house needed rewiring. And Alix, who was never angry at anyone, was angry at her aunt. She wanted to have a picnic with Sabine and the Americans on the bank of the river, and Mme Viénot said that it wasn’t convenient, that it would make extra work in the kitchen. This was clearly not true. They ate lunch in the dining room as usual, and at two thirty they set out on their bicycles, with their bathing suits and towels and four big, thick ham sandwiches that they did not want and that Mme Viénot had made, herself.

  The sunshine was pale and watery and without warmth. They hid the bicycles in a little grove between the highway and the river, and then withdrew farther into the trees and changed into their bathing suits. When Barbara and Harold came out, they saw Alix and Sabine down by the water. Eugène was standing some distance away from them, fully dressed, and looking as if he were not part of this expedition.