The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  Chapter 6

  THE VILLAGE OF BRENODVILLE was too small and unremarkable to be mentioned in guidebooks, and derived its identity from the fact that it was not some other village—not Onzain or Chouzy or Chailles or Chaumont. It had two principal streets, the Grande Rue and the avenue Gambetta, and they formed the letter T. The avenue Gambetta went from the Place de l’Eglise to the railway station. The post office, the church, the mairie, and the cemetery were all on the Grande Rue. So was the house of M. Fleury. It ought to have given some sign of recognition, but it didn’t; it was as silent, blank, secretive, and closed to strangers as every other house up and down the village street. While they stood looking at it, Mme Viénot came out of the post office and caught them red-handed.

  “You are about to pay a call on M. Fleury?”

  “We weren’t even sure this was where he lived,” Harold said, blushing. “The houses are all alike.”

  “That is the house of M. Fleury. You didn’t make a mistake,” Mme Viénot said. “I think it is unlikely that you will find him at home at this hour, but you can try.”

  After an awkward moment, during which they did not explain why they wanted to pay a call on M. Fleury, she got on her bicycle and pedaled off down the street. Watching the figure on the bicycle get smaller and smaller, he said: “She’s going to be soaked on the way home. Look at the sky.”

  “A hundred francs was probably enough,” Barbara said. “In a place as small as this.”

  “It would reflect on her, in any case,” he said.

  “And if he isn’t there, we’d have to explain to his wife.”

  “Let’s skip it.”

  They bought stamps at the post office, and wondered, too late, if the postmistress could read the postcards they had just mailed to America. The woman who sold them a sack of plums to eat in their room may have been, as Mme Viénot said, a great gossip, but she did not gossip with them. They tried unsuccessfully to see through, over, or around several garden gates. With the houses that were directly on the street, shutters or lace curtains discouraged curiosity. They stood in the vestibule of the little church and peered in. Here there was no barrier but their own Protestant ignorance.

  The Grande Rue was stopped by a little river that was a yard wide. Wild flags grew along the water’s edge. A footbridge connected an old house on this side with its orchard on the other. They decided that the wooden shelter on the river bank was where the women brought their linen to be washed in running water.

  “I don’t suppose you could have a washing machine if you wanted to,” he said.

  “No, but you’d have other things,” she said. “You’d live in a different way. You wouldn’t want a washing machine.”

  The sky had turned a greenish black while they were standing there, and now a wind sprang up. Out over the meadows a great abstract drama was taking place. In the direction of Pontlevoy and Montrichard and Aignan, the bodies and souls of the unsaved fell under the sway of the powers of darkness, the portions of light in them were lost, and the world became that much poorer. In the direction of Herbault and St. Amand and Selommes, all glorious spirits assembled, the God of Light himself appeared, accompanied by the aeons and the perfected just ones. The angels supporting the world let go of their burden and everything fell in ruins. A tremendous conflagration consumed meadows and orchard, and on the very brink of the little river, a perfect separation of the powers of light and darkness took place. The kingdom of light was brought into a condition of completeness, all the grass bent the same way. Darkness should, from this time on, have been powerless.

  “We’d better start home,” Barbara said.

  On the outskirts of the village they had to take shelter in a doorway. The rain came down in front of their faces like a curtain. At times they couldn’t even see through it. Then the sky began to grow lighter and the rain slackened.

  “If we had a car,” he said, “it would be entirely different. We wouldn’t feel cooped up. The house is damp and cold. The books accumulate on the table in our room and I read a few sentences and my mind gets tired of translating and having to look up words and begins to wander.”

  “A lot of it’s our fault,” she said, “for not speaking French.”

  “And part of it isn’t our fault. It wasn’t like this anywhere else. With time hanging heavy on our hands, we always seem to be hurrying, always about to be late to lunch or dinner. We ask for a double bed and nothing is done about it, and she says nothing can be done about it because of the lamp. What actually has the lamp got to do with it? We didn’t ask for a lamp. Nothing is done about anything we ask for in the way of comfort or convenience. And neither is it refused. The hot water arrives while we’re at dinner. The cook’s bicycle is too frail for us to borrow, and we can’t borrow hers because it has just been repaired. The buses and trains run at the wrong time, the taxi is expensive. George Ireland showed me a snapshot of the horse hitched up to a dog cart, but that was last summer. Now the horse is old and needed in the garden. When I try to find her to ask her about some arrangement, she’s never anywhere. I don’t even know where her room is.”

  “Did you hear her say ‘I like your American custom of not shaking hands in the morning’?”

  “They shake hands at breakfast?”

  “Apparently.”

  “The cozy atmosphere of the breakfast table is a fabrication that we are supposed to accept and even contribute to,” he went on, “as the other guests politely accept and support the fiction that Mme Viénot and her mother are the very cream of French society and lost nothing of importance when they lost their money.”

  “Perhaps they are the cream of French society,” Barbara said.

  “From the way Mme Viénot kowtows to Mme Carrère, I would say no. Mme Viénot is a social climber and a snob. And that’s another thing. Yesterday evening before dinner, Mme Carrère asked the Canadian to call on them. In Paris.”

  “And did he accept?”

  “He behaved like a spaniel that has just been petted on the head.”

  “Probably if you were French the Carrères would be very useful people to know.”

  “I found myself wondering whether—before they go on Monday—they would invite us to call on them,” he said.

  “Do you want to see the Carrères in Paris?”

  “I don’t care one way or the other.”

  “Our French isn’t good enough,” she said. “Besides, I don’t think they do that sort of thing over here. It isn’t reasonable to expect it of them.”

  “Who said anything about being reasonable? He gave Gagny his card, and I want him to do the same thing to us. And it isn’t enough that he should invite us to call on him at his office. I want us to be invited to their home.”

  “We have nothing to say to them here. What point is there in carrying it any farther?”

  “No point,” he said. “There’s no excuse for our ever seeing them again, except curiosity.”

  They saw that they were being stared at by a little boy in the open doorway of the house across the street.

  “If they did ask us, would you go?”

  “No,” he said.

  “It would be interesting to see their apartment,” she said, and so, incriminating herself, sharing in his dubious desires, made him feel better about having them.

  “They give me the creeps,” he said. “Mme Carrère especially.”

  “What did she say that hurt your feelings?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It isn’t raining so hard,” Barbara said.

  He stepped out of the shelter of the doorway with his palm extended to the rain.

  “We might as well be starting back or we’ll be late again,” he said.

  He took off his coat and put it around her shoulders. As they went off down the street, she tried not to listen to what he was saying. In the mood he was in, he exaggerated, and his exaggerations gave rise to further exaggerations, and helplessly, without wanting to, analyzing and explaining and comparin
g one thing with another that had no relation to it, he got farther and farther from the truth.

  They stopped to look at a pink oleander in a huge tub. The blossoms smelled like sugar and water.

  “As soon as we’re outside,” he said, “in the garden or stopping to pick wildflowers along the road or like now—the moment we’re off somewhere by ourselves, everything opens up like a fan. And as soon as we’re indoors with them, it closes.”

  “We could go to Paris,” she said.

  “With the Canadian?”

  “If you like.”

  “And be there for Bastille Day? That’s a wonderful idea. We could run up to Paris and come back after two or three days.”

  “Or not come back,” she said.

  AT LUNCH Mme Viénot said: “We should leave the house by two o’clock.”

  But when two o’clock came, they were on the terrace, leaning against the stone balustrade, and she had not appeared.

  “I’d go look for her,” he said, “if it weren’t so much like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “Don’t talk so loud,” Barbara said, glancing up at an open window directly above them.

  “I’m not talking loud. I’m practically whispering.”

  “Your voice carries.”

  He noticed that she was wearing a cotton dress and said: “Are you going to be warm enough?”

  “I meant to bring a sweater.”

  He jumped down and started across the terrace, and she called after him: “The cardigan.”

  He pushed the door open and saw a small elderly woman standing in an attitude of dramatic indecision beside the white columns that divided the drawing room in half. She was wearing a tailored suit with a high-necked silk blouse. A lorgnette hung by a black ribbon from her collar. Her hair was mouse-colored. Like the old ladies of his childhood she wore no rouge or lipstick. She saw him at the same moment that he saw her, and advanced to meet him, as if his sudden appearance had resolved the question that was troubling her.

  “Straus-Muguet,” she said.

  He put out his hand and she took it. To his surprise, she knew his name. She had heard that he was staying in the house, and she had been hoping to meet him. “J’adore la jeunesse,” she said.

  He was not all that young; he was thirty-four; but there was no one else in the room that this remark could apply to, and so he was forced to conclude that she meant him. He looked into her eyes and found himself in another climate, the one he had been searching for, where the sun shines the whole day long, the prevailing wind is from the South, and the natives are friendly.

  She was not from the village, he decided on the way upstairs. She was a lady, but a lady whose life had been lived in the country; a character out of Chekhov or Turgenev. Probably she belonged in one of the big country houses in the neighborhood and was a family friend—a lifelong friend of old Mme Bonenfant, who had come to call, to spend the afternoon in quiet reminiscences over their embroidery or their knitting, with tea and cake at the proper time, and, at parting, the brief exchange of confidences, the words of reassurance and continuing affection that would make it seem worth while, for both of them, to go on a little longer.

  When he came back with the sweater, the drawing room was empty and Mme Viénot and the Canadian were standing on the terrace with Barbara. Walking at a good pace they covered the two kilometers to the concrete highway that followed the river all the way into Blois. The bus came almost immediately and was crammed with people.

  “I’m afraid we won’t get seats,” Mme Viénot said. “But it’s only a ten-minute ride.”

  There was hardly room to breathe inside the bus, and all the windows were closed. Harold stood with his arm around Barbara’s waist, and craned his neck. His efforts to see out were defeated everywhere by heads, necks, and shoulders. It took him some time to determine which of the passengers was responsible for the suffocating animal odor that filled the whole bus. It was twenty-five minutes before they saw the outskirts of Blois.

  Threading her way boldly between cyclists, Mme Viénot led them down the rue Denis Papin (inventor of the principle of the steam engine), through the Place Victor Hugo, up a long ramp, and then through a stone archway into the courtyard of the château, the glory of Blois. They saw the octagonal staircase, the chapel, and a splendid view, all without having to purchase tickets of admission. Then they followed her back down the ramp, through the crowded narrow streets, to a charcuterie, where she bought blood sausage, and then into the bicycle shop next door, where they saw a number of bicycles, none of which were for rent. They saw the courtyard of the ancient Hôtel d’Alluye, built by the treasurer of François premier, but did not quite manage to escape out onto the sidewalk before the concierge appeared. While Harold stood wondering if they should be there at all and if the concierge would be as unpleasant as she looked, Hector Gagny extracted fifty francs from his wallet and the threat was disposed of. Climbing a street of stairs, they saw the cathedral. There they separated. Gagny went off in search of a parfumerie, and Mme Viénot took the Americans to the door of the ration bureau and then departed herself to do some more shopping. They stood in line under a sign—Personnes Isolées—that had for them a poignancy it didn’t have for those who were more at home in the French language. They could not get ration coupons because Harold had not thought to bring their passports.

  When they emerged from the building, they saw that it was at one end of a long terrace planted in flower beds, with a view over the lower part of the city. Leaning against a stone balustrade, with his guidebook open in front of him, he started to read about the terrace where they now were.

  “What’s that?” Barbara asked.

  He looked up. At the far end of the terrace a crowd had gathered. The singing came from that direction. They listened intently. It sounded like children’s voices.

  “It’s probably something to do with Bastille Day,” he said, and stuffed the guidebook in his raincoat pocket, and they hurried off down the gravel paths.

  FOR TOURISTS who fall in love with the country they are traveling in, charms of great potency are always at work. If there is a gala performance at the Opéra, they get the last two tickets. Someone runs calling and gesturing the whole length of the train to find them and return the purse that was left on a bench on the station platform. And again and again they are drawn, as if by wires, to the scene that they will never be able to forget as long as they live.

  At first the Americans stood politely on the outskirts of the crowd, thinking that they had no right to be here. But then they worked their way in gradually, until at last they were clear inside.

  The children, dressed all in white, had no leader, and did not need one. They had been preparing for this occasion for years. Their voices were very high, pure, on pitch, thoroughly drilled, and happy. Music heard in the open air is not like music in a concert hall. It was as if the singing came from one’s own heart.

  Remember what the lark sounds like, said the stones of the Bishop’s Palace. Try for perfection.…

  Try for joy, said the moss-stained fountain.

  Do not be afraid to mark the contrasts if it is necessary, said the faded tricolor. But do not let one voice dominate.… Remember that you are French. Remember that in no other country in the world do children have songs that are as beautiful and gay and unfading as these.…

  The exact sound of joy is what you must aim for.…

  … of a pure conscience …

  … of an enthusiastic heart …

  “Oh, oh, oh,” Harold exclaimed under his breath, as if he had just received a fatal wound.

  Full of delight but still exact and careful and like one proud voice the children sang: “Qui n’avait jam-jam-jamais naviGUÉ!”

  He looked at Barbara. They shook their heads in wonder.

  “They must be very old songs,” he whispered.

  Turning, he studied the adults, dressed in somber colors and shabby suits, but attentive, critical, some of them probably with
ears only for the singing of a particular child. They appeared to take the songs for granted. This is what it means to be French, he thought. It belongs with the red-white-and-blue flags and the careful enunciation and the look of intelligence in every eye and the red poppies growing in the wheat. These songs are their birthright, instead of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.…”

  The children finished singing and marched off two by two, and the crowd parted to let in some little boys, who performed a ferocious staff dance in which nobody got hurt; and then six miniature couples, who marched into the open space and formed a circle. The boys had on straw hats, blue smocks, and trousers that were too large for them. The little girls wore white caps and skirts that dragged the ground and in some instances had to be held up with a safety pin. At a signal from an emaciated man with a violin, the gavotte began. In the patterns of movement, and quite apart from the grave self-conscious children who danced, there was a gallantry that was explicitly sexual, an invitation now mocked, now welcomed openly. But because they were only eight-year-olds, the invitation to love was like a melody transposed from its original key and only half recognizable. Suddenly he turned and worked his way blindly toward the outer edge of the crowd. Barbara followed him out into the open, where a group of fifteen-year-old girls in diaphanous costumes waited to go on. If the sight of a foreigner wiping his eyes with his handkerchief interested them, they did not show it. They stretched and bent over, practicing, or examined the blackened soles of their feet, or walked about in twos and threes. He saw that Barbara was looking at him anxiously and tried to explain and found he could not speak. Again he had to take his handkerchief out.

  “There’s Mme Viénot,” Barbara said.

  Turning, he saw her hurrying toward them between the flower beds. Ignoring his condition, she said: “M. and Mme Carrère are waiting in the pâtisserie,” and hurried them off down the gravel path.

  The pastry shop was down below, in the rue de Commerce, and it was crowded and noisy. Cutting her way through clots of people, squeezing between tables, frustrating waitresses with trays, Mme Viénot arrived at the large round table in the rear of the establishment where M. and Mme Carrère and Mme Bonenfant were waiting, their serenity in marked contrast to the general noise and confusion. Mme Carrère invited Harold and Barbara to sit down, and then she allowed her eyes to roam over the room, as if something were about to happen of so important a nature that talk was not necessary. Mme Bonenfant asked if they had found Blois a beautiful city and was pleased when he said that they preferred Brenodville. The village was charming, she agreed; very old, and just the way a village should be; she herself had great affection for it. Mme Viénot went off in search of M. Gagny, and for the next ten minutes M. Carrère devoted himself to the task of capturing a busboy and ordering a carafe of “fresh” water. Human chatter hung in the air like mist over a pond.