The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  “No, you are thinking of the rue Boissière,” the waiter said. “I used to help my cousin deliver packages for a shop in the sixteenth arrondissement, and I know the quarter well. There is no Hôtel Vouillemont.”

  The three men left their drinks and came over and started thumbing through the telephone directories. The waiter joined them. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “Here it is. The Hôtel Vouillemont … It’s in the rue Boissy d’Anglas.”

  “And where is that?” Harold asked.

  The waiter peered at the directory and said: “The eighth arrondissement. You got off too soon. You should have descended at Concorde.”

  “Is that far from here?”

  They all five assured him that he could walk there.

  “But with suitcases?”

  “In that case,” Madame said, “you would do well to return to the Métro station.”

  He shook hands all around, hesitated, and then took a chance. It didn’t work; they thanked him politely but declined the invitation to have a glass of wine with him. So his instinct must have been wrong.

  “Is there any way that one can call a taxi?” he asked.

  The waiter went to the door with him and showed him which direction they must go to find a taxi stand. Harold shook hands with him again, and then turned to Barbara. “We should have descended at Concorde,” he said, and picked up the suitcases. “It’s miles from here.”

  The taxi driver knew exactly where the Hôtel Vouillemont was, and so they could sit back and not worry. They peered through the dirty windows at Paris. The unfamiliar streets had familiar names—the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the rue Marengo. They caught a glimpse down a long avenue of the familiar façade of the Opéra. The arcades of the rue de Rivoli were deserted, and so were the public gardens on the other side of the street. So was the Place de la Concorde. The sky over the fountains and the Egyptian obelisk was cold and gray. The driver pointed out the American Embassy to them, and then they were in a dark, narrow street. The taxi stopped.

  “He’s made a mistake,” Barbara said. “This isn’t it.”

  “It says ‘Hôtel Vouillemont’ on the brass plate,” Harold said, reaching for his wallet. And then, though he disliked arguments, he got into one with the taxi driver. Mme Viénot had said he must refuse to pay more than the amount on the meter. The driver showed him a chart and explained that it was the amount on the chart he must pay, not the amount on the meter. Harold suggested that they go inside and settle the matter there. The driver got out and followed him into the hotel, but declined to help with the suitcases. To Harold’s surprise, the concierge sided with the driver, against Mme Viénot.

  Still not sure they hadn’t cheated him, he paid the driver what it said on the chart and turned back to the concierge’s desk. If it turned out that the concierge was dishonest, he was not going to like staying at the Hôtel Vouillemont. He studied the man’s face, and the face declined to say whether the person it belonged to was honest or dishonest.

  While he was registering, Barbara stood looking around her at the lobby. She could not even say, as people so often do of some place they knew as a child, that it was much smaller than she remembered, because she didn’t remember a thing she saw. She wondered if, all these years, she could have misremembered the name of the hotel they stayed in. It was not until they were in the elevator, with their suitcases, that she knew suddenly that they were in the right hotel after all. She remembered the glass elevator. No other hotel in the world had one like it. It was right out in the center of the lobby, and it had a red plush sofa you could sit down on. As they rose through the ceiling, the past was for a moment superimposed on the present, and she had a wonderful feeling of lightness—as if she were rising through water up to the surface and sunshine and air.

  Their room was warm, and when they turned on the faucets in the bathroom, hot water came gushing out of the faucet marked chaud. They filled the tub to the brim and had a bath, and dressed, and went off down the street to have lunch at a restaurant that Barbara remembered the name of: Tante Louise. Like the glass elevator, the restaurant hadn’t changed. After lunch they strolled. Harold stopped at a kiosk and bought a map-book of Paris by arrondissements, so that he wouldn’t ever again be caught not knowing where he was and how to get to where he wanted to go. They looked in the windows of the shops in the rue St. Honoré, full of beautiful gloves and scarves, and purses that probably cost a fortune.

  They were in Paris at last, and aware that they should have been happy, but there was no indication anywhere that Paris was happy. No dancing in the streets, no singing, no decorations, no flags, even. They discovered the Madeleine and the American Express and Maxim’s, none of which gave off any effervescence of gaiety, and finally, toward the end of the afternoon, they gave up searching for Paris on Bastille Day, since it appeared to be only an idea in their minds, and went back to their hotel.

  That evening, before it was quite dark, they set off to see the illuminations. They were encouraged when they saw that the streets had begun to fill up with people. They went first to the Place de la Concorde, and admired the light-soaked fountains and the flood-lighted twin buildings. With lights trained on it, the Madeleine, at the end of the rue Royale, no longer looked quite so gloomy and Roman. They were about to start off on the route that Mme Carrère had recommended, when a skyrocket exploded and long yellow ribbons of light fell down the sky. So, instead, they joined the throngs of people hurrying toward the river. For half an hour they stood in the middle of the Pont de la Concorde, looking now at the fireworks and now at the upraised, expectant French faces all around them. Bouquet after bouquet of colored lights exploded in the sky and in the black water. They decided that, rather than retrace their steps, they would reverse the directions Mme Carrère had given them. This turned out to be a mistake. They rushed here and there, got lost, doubled back on their route, and wasted a good deal of time changing trains in the Métro. And they never did see the lighted lamps of the Comédie Française.

  At one o’clock, exhaustion claimed them. They were lost again, and a long way from home. They asked directions of a gendarme, who hurried them into a Métro station just in time to catch the last train back to Concorde.

  THE ADDRESS of the editorial officers of La Femme Elégante turned out to be a courtyard, and the entrance was up a short flight of steps. They gave the receptionist their name and, as they waited for Sabine Viénot to appear, Harold’s eyes roamed around the small foyer, trying to make out something, anything, from the little he saw—nobly proportioned doors with heavy molding painted dove gray, nondescript lighting fixtures, and dove-gray carpet. When Mme Viénot spoke of her daughter’s career, her tone of voice suggested that she was at the forefront of her profession. But then she had showed them some of her daughter’s work—thumbnail sketches of dress patterns buried in the back of the magazine. The girl who came through the doorway and shook hands with them was very slight and pale and young, with observant blue eyes and brown hair and a high, domed forehead, like the French queens in the Petit Larousse.

  Harold started to explain who they were and she said that she knew; her mother had written to her about them. “You can speak English if you prefer,” she said. “I speak it badly but—They are all well in the country?”

  Barbara nodded.

  “I’m afraid you haven’t had very nice weather. It has been cold and rainy here, also. You arrived in Paris when?”

  “Yesterday,” Barbara said.

  “But we didn’t see any dancing in the streets,” Harold said. “Last night at midnight we saw a crowd of people singing and marching in the square in front of Notre Dame, but they were Communists, I think. Anyway, there was no dancing.

  “In Montmartre you would have seen it, perhaps,” the French girl said. “Or the Place Pigalle.”

  They couldn’t think what to say next.

  “Mother has written how much she enjoyed having you with her,” the French girl said.

  “We are returning to Bre
nodville tomorrow,” Harold said, “and your mother asked us to let you know the train we are taking. She thought you might also be intending to—”

  “I may be going down to the country tomorrow,” the French girl said thoughtfully. “I don’t know yet.”

  “We’re taking the four o’clock train,” he said. “Your mother suggested that we might all three take one taxi from Blois.”

  “That is very kind of you. Perhaps I could telephone you tomorrow morning. You are staying where?”

  “It’s quite near here, actually.” He tore a leaf out of his financial diary, wrote down the name of their hotel, and held it out to her. She glanced at the slip of paper but did not take it from him. They shook hands, and then she was gone.

  Standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the flow of traffic to stop so they could cross over, he said: “I thought at first she was like her mother—like what Mme Viénot was at that age. But she isn’t.”

  “Not at all,” Barbara said.

  “Her voice made me realize that she wasn’t.”

  “She has a lovely voice—so light. And silvery.”

  “She has a charming voice. Something of the French intonation carries over into her English, of course. But it’s more than that, I think. It’s an amused voice. It has a slight suggestion of humor, at no one’s expense. As if she had learned to see things with a clarity that—that was often in excess of whatever need there was for seeing things clearly. And the residue had turned into something like amusement.”

  “But she didn’t ask us to lunch.”

  “I know.”

  They went to the Guaranty Trust Company and were directed to the little upstairs room where their mail was handed to them.

  “So what do we do now?” Barbara asked when they were outside again.

  He looked at his watch. They had spent a considerable part of their first twenty-four hours in Paris walking the streets. He was dog-tired, his feet hurt, and Notre Dame in daylight faced the wrong way. For the moment, they were satiated with looking, and ready to be with someone they knew, it didn’t matter how slightly, so long as they could talk about what they had seen, ask questions, and feel that they were a part of the intense sociability that they were aware of everywhere around them. Paris on the day after Bastille Day was not a deserted city. Also the sun was shining, and it was warm; it was like summer, and that lifted their spirits.

  He said: “What about having lunch with Gagny at that bistro he told us about?”

  “But we don’t know where it is.”

  “Rue de Castellane.” He consulted the plan of Paris by arrondissements. “It’s somewhere behind the Madeleine … L17.” He turned the pages. “Here it is. See?”

  She pretended to look at the place he pointed out to her on the map, and then said: “If you’re sure it’s not too far.”

  The rue de Castellane proved to be farther than it appeared to be on the map, and when they got there, they found two, possibly three, eating places that answered to Gagny’s description. Also, they were not very clear in their minds about the distinction between a bistro and a restaurant. They walked back and forth, peering at the curtained windows and trying to decide. They took a chance on one, the smallest. Gagny had said that it was a hangout of doubtful characters, and that there was sometimes brawling. The bistro was very quiet, and it looked respectable. They were shown to the last free table. Harold ordered an apéritif, and they settled down to read their mail from home, unaware that they were attracting a certain amount of attention from the men who were standing at the bar. Thugs and thieves do not, of course, wear funny hats or emblems in their buttonholes, like Lions and Elks, and some types of human behavior have to be explained before they are at all noticeable. The bistro was what Hector Gagny had said it was. In her letter about him, the cousin of the Canadian Ambassador failed to inform Mme Viénot of something that she happened to know, and that he didn’t know she knew. It was in his folder in the Embassy files: he had a taste for low company. He enjoyed watching heated arguments, stage after stage of intricate insult, so stylized and at the same time so personal, all leading up to the point where the angry arguers could have exchanged blows—and never did. He also enjoyed being the unengaged spectator to situations in which the active participants must feel one another out. His eyes darting back and forth between their eyes, he measured accurately the risk taken, and then calculated enviously the chance of success.

  In places the police knew about, Gagny never disguised his education, or pretended to be anything but an observer. He sat, well dressed, well bred, quiet, and conspicuous, with his glass of wine in front of him, until the type who had been eying him for some time disengaged himself from the others and wandered over and was invited to sit down at his table.

  “We’re terribly restricted, you know,” Gagny would tell the character with franc notes to be converted into dollars or, if worst came to worst, pounds sterling. “I mean to say, thirty-five pounds is all we’re allowed to take out of England.” Or, as he handed the pornographic postcards back to their owner: “Why do the men all have their shoes and socks on?” The type, a cigarette hanging from his lips and sometimes a question hanging in his eyes, would begin to talk. After a moment or two, Gagny would interrupt him politely in order to signal to the waiter to bring another glass.

  In exchange for the glimpses of high life that he offered casually, not too much or too many at a time, he himself was permitted glimpses into the long corridor leading down, where crimes are committed for not very much money, or out of boredom, or because the line between feeling and action has become blurred; where the gendarme is the common enemy, and nobody knows the answer to a simple question, and danger is ever-present, the oxygen in the wine-smelling, smoke-filled air.

  Only in France did Gagny allow himself this sort of diversion. In London it was not safe. He might be followed. His name was in the telephone directory. And he might have the bad luck to run into some acquaintance who also had a taste for low company.

  Also, it was a matter of the Latin sensibility as compared with Anglo-Saxon. Oftener than not in Paris the type proved to be gentle, amiable, confused and more than willing (though the occasion for this had never presented itself) to pass over into the world of commonplace respectability. His education may have been sordid, pragmatic, and one-sided, but at least it had taught him how to stay alive, and he had a story to tell, invariably. Gagny had a story to tell, too, but he refrained from telling it. The types understood this. They were responsive, they understood many things—states of feeling, human needs, gradations of pleasure, complexities of motive—that people of good breeding unfortunately do not.

  The sense of unreality—the dreadful recognition that he belonged not to the white race but to the pink or gray—that often came over him at official functions, among people of the highest importance and social distinction, he never experienced in any place where there was sawdust on the floor. He enjoyed the tribute that was paid to his social superiority (sometimes it only lasted a second, but it was there, nevertheless—a flicker of incredulity that he should be talking to them) and also their moment of vanity, encouraged by his lack of condescension. Though their fingernails were dirty and their clothes had been bought and worn by somebody else, they thought well of themselves; they were not apologetic. As a rule they understood perfectly what he wanted of them, and when he had checked the addition and put the change in his pocket notebook, they clapped him on the shoulder, smiling at his way of doing business, and went back to theirs. Now and then, misunderstanding, they offered him their friendship—were ready to throw in their lot, such as it was, with his, whatever that might prove to be. And when this offer was not accepted, they became surly or abusive, and it was a problem to get rid of them.

  The Americans passed their letters back and forth, and when they were all read, Harold glanced at his watch again and said: “It looks as if he isn’t coming.”

  Before he could catch the eye of the waitress, they saw Gagny, and saw
that he had already seen them, but it was a very different Gagny from the one they had known in the country—erect and handsome and as wildly happy as if he had just succeeded in extricating himself from a long-standing love affair with a woman ten years older than he, and very demanding, given to emotional scenes, threats, tears, accusations that could only be answered in bed. He was delighted that they had kept their engagement with him. He had checked in at his hotel, he said, and come straight here, hoping to find them. They had been missed, he told them cheerfully. Mme Viénot and Mme Carrère had agreed that the house was not the same without the Americans. Then, seeing the look of surprise on their faces, he said: “You can believe me. I never make anything up.” He surveyed the bar, in one fleeting glance, and for this afternoon renounced its interesting possibilities.

  The waitress came and stood beside the table.

  “Let me order for you,” Gagny said, “since I know the place. And this is my lunch.”

  “Oh no it’s not!” Harold cried.

  “Oh yes it is!”

  By the time the pâté arrived, they were all three talking at once, exchanging confidences, asking questions, being funny. The Americans found it a great relief to confide to someone their feelings about staying at the château, and who was in a better position to understand what they meant than someone who had seen them floundering? But if they had only known what he was really like …

  He kept saying “Well exactly!” and they kept saying “I know. I know.” They talked steadily through course after course. They finished the carafe of red wine and Gagny ordered a second, and cognac after that. The bistro was empty when they finally pushed their chairs back from the table. In spite of the adverse exchange, Gagny seized the check and would not hear of any other arrangement.

  The sun was shining in the street outside. Gagny had an errand to do in the rue St. Honoré, and they walked with him as far as the rue Boissy d’Anglas. He was their favorite friend, and they felt sure that he was just as fond of them, but when the moment came for exchanging addresses, they were all three silent.