The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  “In the back part of the house, probably. Why?”

  “Or one of those dreary attic rooms,” he said. “It’s funny we never thought about it at the time. Do you think she minded our being in her room?”

  That evening while Barbara was dressing, he gave M. le Patron the number of the apartment in the rue Malène and waited beside the bed, with the telephone held to his ear. The phone rang and rang. But she’s too thin, he thought, watching her straighten the seam of her stockings. She isn’t getting enough rest.…

  Reaching into the armoire, she began pushing her dresses along the rod. She could hardly bear to put any of them on any more.

  “Mme Viénot’s affectionate manner with you I took at the time to be disingenuous,” he said. “Looking back, I think that it wasn’t.”

  The cotton print dress she had bought in Rome was out of season. The brown, should she wear, with a green corduroy jacket? Or the lavender-blue?

  “I think she really did like us. And that we totally misjudged her character,” he said.

  She chose the brown, which had a square neck and no sleeves, and so required the green jacket. “We didn’t misjudge her character.”

  “How do you know?”

  “From one or two remarks that Alix made.”

  “They do not answer,” M. le Patron said.

  In her letter Alix had said that she would be coming back to Paris soon, but a week passed, and then two, and there was still no answer when they called the apartment in the rue Malène. One morning they made a pilgrimage to the Place Redouté and stood looking affectionately around at the granite monument, the church, the tables piled on top of each other in front of the café, the barber shop. Standing in the rue Malène, they saw that all the windows of Mme Cestre’s apartment were closed, and the shutters as well. “Shall we go in and ask when they are coming back?” Barbara said.

  Mme Emile shook hands cordially but had no news. They were all away, she said. Monsieur also. She did not know when they were returning.

  “Do you think she wrote and the letter got lost in the mails?” Barbara asked as they were walking toward the bus corner.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. Perhaps their feelings were hurt that we didn’t accept the invitation to come down to the country.”

  “We should have gone,” Barbara said with conviction.

  “But then we would have had to leave Paris.”

  “What do you think really happened?”

  “You mean the ‘drame’? They lost their money.”

  “But how?” Barbara said.

  “There are only about half a dozen ways that a family that has money can lose it. They can run through it—”

  “I don’t think they did.”

  “Neither do I,” he said. “Or they can lose it through inflation—which could have happened, because the franc used to be twenty to the dollar before the war. But then what about the drama? Maybe they were swindled out of it.”

  “Not Mme Viénot, surely.”

  “Well, something,” he said.

  SUMMER DEPARTED without their noticing exactly when this happened. Fall was equally beautiful. It was still warm in the daytime. The leaves were turning yellow outside their window. He started wearing pajamas because the nights were cold. So was their room when they got up in the morning. Soon, even in the middle of the day it was cool in the shade, and they kept crossing the street to walk in the sun. They discovered the Marché St. Germain, and wandered up and down the aisles looking with surprise at the wild game and enjoying the color and fragrance and appetizingness of the fruit and vegetables. They walked all the way down the rue de Varennes, and saw the Rodin Museum and Napoleon’s tomb. They took a bus to the Jardin des Plantes and walked there. They took the Métro to the Bois de Vincennes. Walking along the Left Bank of the Seine in the late afternoon, they examined the bookstalls, but with less interest than they had shown in the shabby merchandise in the avenue de Grammont in Tours. The apparatus of rejection was fatigued; they only looked now at what there was some possibility of their wanting, and the bookstalls were too picked-over.

  Coming home on the top of a bus just as the lights were turned on in the shops along the Boulevard St. Germain, they saw a china shop, and got off the bus and went inside and bought two small ash trays of white porcelain, in the shape of an elm and a maple leaf.

  Barbara bought gloves in the rue de Rivoli, and in a little shop in the rue St. Honoré she found a moss-green velours hat with a white ostrich feather that curled charmingly against her cheek. It was too small, and after the clerk had stretched it Barbara knew suddenly that it was not right. It was too costumy. But the clerk and Harold both begged her to take it, and so, against her better judgment, she did.

  He was looking for the complete correspondence of Flaubert, in nine volumes, and this was not easy to find and gave him an excuse to stop in every bookstore they came to.

  In a little alley off the rue Jacob they saw a small house with a plaque on it: Ici est mort Racine. Across the door of a butcher shop in the rue Vaugirard they saw a deer hanging head down, with a sign pinned to its fur: Will be cut up on Thursday.

  They took the train to Versailles, and walked all the way around the palace and then a little way into the park, looking for the path to the Petit Trianon. They couldn’t find it, but came instead upon a fountain with a reclining goddess whose beautiful vacant face was turned to the sky. Leaves came drifting down and settled on the surface of the pool and sailed around the statue like little boats. For the few minutes that they stood looking at the fountain, they were released from the tyranny of his wristwatch and the calendar; there was no time but the time of statues, which seems to be eternity, though of course they age, too, and become pitted, lose a foot or a hand, lichen grows in the folds of their drapery, their features become blurred, and what they are a statue of nobody knows any longer.

  Finding themselves in the street where Jean Allégret lived, they stopped and rang his bell. There was no answer. Harold left a note for him, in the mailbox. There was no answer to that, either.

  Passing through the Place St. Sulpice on their way home, they raised their eyes to the lighted windows and wondered about the people who lived there. As far as they could see, nobody wondered about them.

  The woman who had helped Barbara write those two mildly misleading letters to Mme Viénot had also given Harold the name and telephone number of two old friends from the period when she and her husband were living in Paris. One was a banker. She had not heard anything from him for a long time and she was worried about him. The other was her doctor. Both men were cultivated and responsive and just the sort of people Harold and Barbara would enjoy knowing. Harold called the Hanover Bank and learned that the banker was dead. Then he telephoned the doctor, and the doctor thanked him for giving him news of his friends in America and hung up. Harold looked at the telephone oddly, as if it must in some way be to blame. As for their own French friends, he had been conscious for some time of how completely absent they were—Alix, Sabine, Eugène, Jean Allégret, Mme Straus. Not one word from any of them.

  Though they were very happy in Paris, they were aware that a shadow hung over the city. The words “crise” and “grève” appeared in the newspaper headlines day after day. The taxi strike had lasted two weeks. One day the Métro was closed, because of a strike. Two days later, to save coal, the electric utilities shut off all power for twelve hours, and as a result the elevator in their hotel did not run and their favorite restaurant was lit by acetylene lamps. Tension and uncertainty were reflected in the faces they saw in the streets.

  They made one more attempt to find the château with the green lawn in front of it—they went to Fontainebleau. They enjoyed seeing the apartment of Mme de Maintenon and Napoleon’s little bathtub, and from across the water the château did look like a fairy-tale palace, but not the right one. It was too large, and it was not white.

  When they got back to their hotel, M. le Patron han
ded them a letter. Mme Straus-Muguet’s handwriting dashed all the way across the face of the envelope, which was postmarked Sarthe:

  My dear little friends, what contretemps all along the line, since I miss you at every turn! Because of the beautiful weather I have not had the courage to remain in Paris, and here I am in paradise! Sun, flowers, and the dear nuns, who are so good to me! But let us put an end to this game of hide-and-seek. I must return to Paris on Thursday, the fourteenth, but if it is necessary I shall advance the date of my return in order to see you. What are the sorties, plays, operas that will be performed on these dates, and what would you like to see? Find this out in La Semaine or from the billboards, and write me at once if between the fifteenth and your departure there is to be a Wednesday soirée de ballet, for I will then write immediately to Paris to the Opéra. If I return on Sunday—the eleventh that would be—is that better for you? Have you still many things to do before the final departure? And from where do you sail? And on what boat? Behind all these questions, my dear children, is only the desire to please you and see you again before the complete separation that will be so hard for me to bear.… I will continue to write to your present hotel, and do not change without telling me. What have you done up to this moment that was delightful and interesting? I so much wanted to show you all the beautiful things—but you have already seen many of them!… Au revoir, dear little friends. I clasp you to my heart, both of you, and embrace you with all my tenderness—the tenderness of a friend and of a mother.

  Madame Minou

  Straus-Muguet

  October 4

  THERE WAS NO BALLET between the twelfth and the nineteenth, and so Harold got seats for le Roi d’Ys instead. He wrote to Mme Straus that they had seats for the opera for the fourteenth of October and were looking forward to her return. Also that they were enjoying Paris very much, and that on Sunday they were going to Chartres for the day.

  Chartres was wonderful; it was one of the high points of their whole trip. There was no streetcar line, just as Mme Viénot had said, and so no little church at the end of it, but they got off the train and found that it was only a short walk to the cathedral from the station. To their surprise, in the whole immense interior there was no one. The greatest architectural monument of the Middle Ages seemed to be there just for them. The church was as quiet as the thoughts it gave rise to. They stood and looked at the stained-glass prophets, at the two great rose windows, at the forest of stone pillars, at the dim, vaulted ceiling, at a little side altar with lighted candles on it. They felt in the presence of some vast act of understanding. When they spoke, it was in whispers. Their breathing, their heartbeat, seemed to be affected.

  They climbed one of the towers, and saw what everybody in Chartres was doing. Then they went down and had a very good lunch in a little upstairs restaurant, where they were the only patrons, and walked through the old part of town until dusk. They went back to the cathedral, and walked all the way around it, and came upon the little vegetable garden in the rear; like every other house in Chartres, it had its own potager. This time, when they went inside, there was no light at all in the sky, and it was a gray evening, besides. The stained-glass windows were still glorious, still blazing with their own color and their own light.

  “NOTHING FROM ALIX?”

  “Nothing,” he said, and sat down on the edge of the bed, ripped open an envelope, and commenced reading a long letter from Mme Straus-Muguet.

  “What does she say?” Barbara asked when he turned the first page.

  “I’ll start at the beginning: ‘Sunday … Mes petits enfants chéris, I am sad at heart at the thought that you are going to leave France without my being able to find you again—’ ”

  “No! She’s not coming?”

  “ ‘—and embrace you with all my heart. But it is impossible’—underlined—‘for me to return the fourteenth donc pas d’opéra le R.’—whatever that means.”

  “Let me see,” she said, looking over his shoulder. “ ‘Therefore not of the opera le Roi d’Ys’ … But she said for you to get tickets. What will we do with the extra one?”

  “Take Sabine,” he said, “if she’s here by then. ‘… but there is at Mans a charity fête for “the work of the prisons” of my dear Dominicans, of which I occupy myself so much. It takes place Sunday the seventeenth and Monday the eighteenth, and it will be only after the twentieth that I will be returning!… And to say that during eight days in August I was alone in Paris! Then my poor dears, understand my true chagrin at not seeing you again, and just see how all the events are against us! Of more I was’— Is that right?”

  “Let me see … ‘de plus j’étais à une heure de Chartres … all the more since I was only one hour from Chartres and it was there that I would have been able to join you …’ ”

  He continued: “ ‘And you would have passed the’ … or ‘we’ would. Her handwriting is really terrible. ‘… passed the day together. You would even have been able to come to Mans, city so interesting, superb cathedral! That all that is lacking, my God, and to say that in this moment (nine o’clock in the morning) when I am writing you, you are perhaps at Chartres. But where to find you?… Little friends, it is necessary to combler mon chagrin’—what’s ‘combler’?”

  “You’ll have to look it up,” Barbara said. “The dictionary is in my purse.”

  The dictionary was not in the purse but in the desk drawer.

  “ ‘Combler’ means ‘to fill up,’ ‘to overload,’ ‘to heap,’ ” he said. “ ‘… it is necessary to try to heap my sorrows by a kindness on your part. It is of yourselves to make photographs, tous les deux ensemble, and to send me your photo with dédicace—dedication—underneath. 19 rue de la Source, that will be a great joy for me, and at Paris there are such good photographers. Make inquiries about them and’—it could be ‘épanchez.’ ”

  “Exaucez,” Barbara said, and read from the dictionary.

  “ ‘Exaucer: to grant, give ear to, answer the prayer of someone.’ ”

  “ ‘ … grant the prayer that I make of you. You will be thus with me, in my chamber that you know, and I will look at you each day, and that will be to me a great happiness.… Thank you in advance!… I am enchanted that you are going to the Opéra to hear Le Roi d’Ys—so beautiful, so well sung, such beautiful music. But to avoid making the queue at the location’—the box office, I guess she means—‘do this: go take your two places at the Opéra at the office of the disection—’ ”

  “That can’t be right,” Barbara interrupted.

  “ ‘ … direction,’ then. ‘Boulevard Haussman. Enter by the large door which is in back of the Opéra. On entering, at right you will see the concierge, M. Ferari. He will point out the office of M. Decerf or his secretary Nelle’—no, Mile.—‘Simone cela de ma part. Both are my friends, and you will have immediately two good places à la corbeille’—But we have the seats already, and it took exactly ten minutes in line at the box office, and they’re the best seats in the opera house … ‘where it is necessary to be to see all, salle et scène. I’m writing to M. Decerf by this same courier to reserve you two places, and it is Wednesday morning at eleven o’clock that it is necessary to go there to take them. In this fashion all will go well and I will be tranquil about you. Servez-vous de mon nom dans tout l’Opéra et à tout le monde.… In mounting to the premier étage, to the office of M. Decerf (they speak English, both of them) speak to M. Georges, on arriving, de ma part. He will lead you to M. Decerf. I hope I have explained sufficiently the march to follow to arrive à bien, and to all make my good compliments.… On your arrival in New York I pray you to write me immediately to tell me your voyage is well passed. Such is my hope, and above all do not leave alone in France your Maman Minou, who loves you so much and has so many regrets. But “noblesse oblige” says the proverb, and to the title of president I owe to be at my post. I will send you tomorrow the book of Bethanie Fontanelle’s work of the prisons. Perhaps they will go one day to America. I know the Ma
uretania, splendid boat, and I am going to make the crossing with you—in my thoughts. Et voilà, mes petits amis … a long letter that you are going to find too long, perhaps, but I was desirous of writing to you. An idea comes to me: if you have the time Saturday or Sunday to come to Le Mans, a train toward eight o’clock in the morning brings you here at eleven. We will lunch together, and that evening a train takes you to Paris, arriving at nine o’clock.’ That makes seven hours on the train. ‘Mais c’est peut-être grosse fatigue pour vous. Anyway, at need you may telegraph me at Arnage, Straus, Sarthe. Au revoir, au revoir, mes chéris, je vous embrasse de tout mon cour et vous aime tendrement.… Madame Minou.’ ”

  He closed the window, and the cries from the school yard became remote.

  “Chartres isn’t a very big place,” Barbara said thoughtfully. “And there is only one thing that people go there to see. She could probably have found us all right, if she had come. But anyway, I’m not going to Le Mans.”

  “The trains may not even be running,” he said. “There is a railroad strike about to begin at any minute. We might get there and not be able to get back. Also, I never wanted to hear Le Roi d’Ys. I wanted to hear Louise and they aren’t giving it this week. Le Roi d’Ys was entirely Mme Straus’s idea.”

  “I can’t bear it!” Barbara exclaimed. “It’s so sad. ‘Use my name all through the Opéra, and to everybody.… ’ ”

  THE BOOK on the prison work of the Dominican nuns did not arrive, and neither did Harold search out the office of M. Decerf and tell him they already had three tickets for Le Roi d’Ys. He could not believe that Mme Straus had written to the manager of the Paris Opéra, any more than he could believe that after a stay of three weeks in Arnage she was in charge of a charity bazaar in Le Mans; or that it is possible for it to rain on the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris and not on the eighth. As the gypsy fortuneteller could have told him, this was perhaps not wise. The only safe thing, if you have an ingenuous nature, is to believe everything that anybody says.