The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  In spite of his constant concern that she dress warmly enough, Barbara caught a cold. They were both showing signs of a general tiredness, of the working out of the law of diminishing returns. There were still days when they enjoyed themselves as keenly as they had in the beginning, but the enjoyment was never quite complete; they enjoyed some things and not others; they couldn’t any more throw themselves on each day as if it were a spear. Also, their appetite was beginning to fail. They found that once a day was all they could stand to eat in the little restaurant in the alley off the Place St. Sulpice. They bought bread and cheese and a bottle of wine, and ate lunch in their room, and at dinnertime were embarrassed by the welcome they received when they walked into the back room of the restaurant. Or they avoided going there at all.

  Sometimes he dreamed in French. He found, at last, the complete correspondence of Flaubert. In a shop in the Place St. Sulpice he saw a beautiful book of photographs of houses on the Ile St. Louis, but it cost twenty dollars and he did not buy it. Their American Express checkbook was very thin, and he had begun to worry about whether they were going to come out even.

  Barbara saw a silk blouse in the window of a shop in the rue Royale, and they went inside, but she shook her head when the clerk told her the price. The clerk suggested that, since they were Americans, all they had to do was get their dollars changed on the black market and then the blouse would be less expensive, but Harold delivered a speech. “Madame,” he said, “j’aime la France et je ne prends pas avantage du marché noir.” The clerk shook hands with him and with tears in her eyes said: “Monsieur, il n’y a pas beaucoup.” But she didn’t reduce the price of the blouse.

  Barbara’s cold got worse, and she had to go to bed with it. Harold stopped at the desk and asked if her meals could be sent up to her until she was feeling better. The hotel no longer served meals, but M. le Patron and his wife ate in the empty dining room, and so he knew that what he was asking for was possible, though it meant making an exception. One of the ways of dividing the human race is between those people who are eager to make an exception and those who consider that nothing is more dangerous and wrong. M. le Patron brusquely refused.

  Burning with anger, Harold started off to see what could be done in the neighborhood. Their restaurant was too far away; the food would be stone-cold by the time he got back with it; and so he tried a bistro that was just around the corner, in the rue Vaugirard, and the bartender sent him home with bread and cheese and a covered bowl of soup from the pot-au-feu. It was just the kind of food she had been longing for. After that, he ate in the bistro and then took her supper home to her. Shopping for fruit, he discovered a little hole-in-the-wall where the peaches were wrapped in cotton and where he and the proprietress and her grown daughter discussed seriously which pear madame should eat today and which she should save till tomorrow.

  He kept calling the apartment in the rue Malène and there was never any answer. It was hard not to feel that there had been a concerted action, a conspiracy, and that the French, realizing that he and Barbara had got in, where foreigners are not supposed to be, had simply put their heads together and decided that the time had come to push them out. It was not true, of course, but that was what it felt like. And it wasn’t wholly not true. Why, for example, didn’t Alix write to them? She knew they were only going to be here eight days longer, and still no word came from her; no message of any kind. Was she going to let them go back to America without even saying good-by?

  The next morning, as if someone at the bank were playing a joke on them, there was a letter, but it was from Berlin, not Brenodville. It was an old letter that had followed them all around Europe:

  Dear Mr. Rhodes:

  A few days before, we returned to Berlin, only our friend Hans got clear his journey to Switzerland at the consulate in Baden-Baden. And now I want to thank you and Mrs. Rhodes once more, also in the name of my wife and of my children. You can’t imagine how they enjoyed the oranges and the chocolate and the fishes in oil and the bananes, etc; many of these things they never saw before. They begged me to send you their thanks and their greetings and a snapshot also “that the friendly uncle and the friendly aunt from America may see how we look.” (I beg your pardon if the expression “aunt” in U.S.A. is less usual than in Germany for a friend of little children.)

  In Paris I was glad that I could report you over the circumstances under which we are living and working. But I am afraid that we saw one side only of the problem. We came from a poor and exhausted country into a town that seemed to be rich and nearly untouched by the war. And personally we were in a rather painful situation. So it could happen that we grew more bitter and more pessimist than it is our kind.

  We told you from the little food rations—but we did not speak from all the men and women who try to get a little harvest out of each square foot bottom round the houses or on the public places. We did not speak from the thousands who leave Berlin each week end trying to get food on the land, who are hanging on the footboards or on the buffers of the railway or wandering along the roads with potatoes or corn or fruit. We did not speak from all those who are working every day in spite of want of food or clothes or tools. And we did not speak from the most important fact, from all the women who supply their husbands and their children and know to make something out of a minimum of food and electricity and gas, and only a small part of all these women is accustomed to such manner of living by their youth.

  To me it seems to be the greatest danger in Germany: on the one side the necessity to live under rather primitive conditions—on the other side the attempts of an ideology to make proletarians out of the whole people with the aim to prepare it for the rule of communisme. A people within such a great need is always in the danger to loose his character, to become unsteady. And the enticement from the other side is very dangerous.

  And another point seems important to me: there are two forms of democracy in Germany, the one of the western powers, the other of communisme in the strange form of “Volksdemokratie.” It is not necessary to speak about this second form, but also the first is not what we need. The western democracy may be good for the western countries. Also the German people wants to bear the whole responsibility for his government, but it is not prepared to do so. It is very dangerous to put it into a problem that it cannot solve. Our people needs some decades of political education (but it does not need instructors which try to feed it with their own ideas and ideologies) and in the meantime it ought to get a strong governent of experts assisted by a parliament with consultative rights only. German political parties incline to grow dogmatical and intolerant and radical—even democratical parties—and it is necessary to diminish their influence in administration and legislative and, later on, specially in foreign affairs.

  I am sure that my opinion is very different from the opinion of the most Germans but I don’t believe in the miracle of the majority.

  Dear Mr. Rhodes, I suppose you are smiling a little about my manner of torturing your language, but I am sure that you hear what I want to say and that you will not be inconvenienced by the outside appearance.

  May I ask you for giving my respects to Mrs. Rhodes?

  Would you allow me to write you then and now.

  Always your faithfully

  Stefan Doerffer.

  “Let’s see the picture of the children,” Barbara said when he had finished reading the letter to her.

  The children were about four and six. Both were blond and sturdy. The little girl looked like a doll, the boy reminded Harold of those fat Salzburgers whose proud stomachs preceded them and whose wives followed two steps behind, carrying the luggage. It was partly the little boy’s costume—he had on what looked like a cheap version of Bavarian lederhosen—and partly his sullen expression, which might have been nothing more than the light the picture was taken by or a trick of the camera, but it made him look like a Storm Trooper in the small size. The children’s feet were partly covered by a large square block of buildi
ng stone. It could have been ruins or a neglected back yard. The little boy’s hands made it clear that he was only a child and that there was no telling what kind of German he would be when he grew up.

  “I don’t feel like being their uncle,” Harold said as he put the letter back in its envelope. “ ‘A strong government of experts, assisted by a parliament with consultative rights only …’ It’s all beyond me. It depresses me.”

  “Why should it depress you?” Barbara said. “It’s a truthful letter.”

  “But they haven’t learned anything—anything at all. He feels sorry for the German women but not a word about the others, all over the world. Not a word about who started it. Not a word about the Jews.”

  “What can he say? They’re dead. Maybe he doesn’t speak about it because he can’t bear to.”

  “He could say he was sorry.”

  “Maybe. But you aren’t a Jew. What right have you to ask for or receive an apology in their name? And how do you know they would accept his apology if he said it? I wouldn’t—not if it was my relatives that were sent to the gas chambers.”

  “I don’t know,” he said sadly. “I don’t know anything. All I know is I’m tired, and I guess I’m ready to go home.”

  She looked at him, to see if he really meant it. He didn’t. But she was ready to go home, and had been for some time. In Beaulieu her period was five days late. This disappointment she was not able to leave behind her in the South of France. She woke to it every morning, and it confronted her in the bathroom mirror when she washed her face. For his sake she concealed the weight on her heart and did not allow herself so much as a sigh. But more and more her pleasure was becoming second-hand, the reflection of his.

  Chapter 18

  JUST WHEN they had got used to the idea that they had been cast out, and had managed to accept it philosophically, they discovered that they were not cast out; there had been no change in the way that the French felt about them.

  Sabine was the first to call. Harold asked about Alix, and Sabine said that they were back too—they had all come up from the country together.

  And while he was out doing an errand, Alix called and asked them to tea on Monday.

  “What did she sound like?” he asked.

  “Herself,” Barbara said.

  “You didn’t hear anything in her voice that might indicate she was hurt or anything?”

  “No. She was just affectionate, as always.”

  “Perhaps we imagined it,” he said. “It will be so nice to see them and the apartment again. Did she say Eugène would be there?”

  “She said he wouldn’t be there.”

  The next morning, Barbara heard him say: “ ‘My dear little friends, do not come to Le Mans,’ ” and called out from the bathroom, where she was brushing her teeth: “It’s too far!”

  “Nobody’s going to Le Mans,” he said, and doubled over with laughter.

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  “Mme Straus. She’s coming after all. Just listen: ‘Tuesday … Mes petits amis chéris, Do not come to LeMans’—underlined—‘It is I who will arrive in Paris Saturday evening, Gare Montparnasse, at six o’clock. I have arranged all in order to see you …”

  In the same mail, there was an invitation from Jean Allégret, who had been in the country, and had just returned to Paris and found their note, and was inviting them to have dinner with him at his club on Friday.

  “Do you want to?” Barbara asked dubiously.

  “It might be interesting,” Harold said.

  His pajamas had split up the back and, later that morning, he went out to buy a new pair. When he came back, he showed them to her and said: “Look—they’re made of parachute cloth.”

  “Not really?”

  “So the clerk said. I guess they don’t have anything else. Anyway, something wonderful happened. I asked him if they weren’t too large and he looked at me and said no, they were the normal size.… In France I’m the normal size. Not football players. The first time in my life anybody has ever said that.… It’s so beautiful out. No matter which direction you look. The clerk was the normal size too. Everything in France is normal. It doesn’t seem possible that Tuesday morning we’re going to get on a train and— Except that maybe we won’t. The railway strike is supposed to start Monday or Tuesday.”

  “What will we do if there are no trains?”

  “There probably will be,” he said.

  “Would you like to stay?”

  “A few days longer, you mean?”

  “No, for good.”

  “We can’t,” he said soberly. “There is no way that it is possible, or reasonable. And besides, they tried that, in the twenties, and it didn’t work. In the end they all had to come home.”

  He read in La Semaine de Paris the plays that were to be performed at the Comédie Française and the Odéon, the movies, the concerts, for the first three days after they would be gone. Like a man sentenced to execution, he had a sudden stabbing vision of the world as it would be without him. The day after they left, there was to be a performance of Louise at the Comique.

  And he was haunted by that book he felt he shouldn’t buy—the book of photographs of the old houses on the Ile St. Louis. And by the Ile St. Louis itself. Every time he went across the river, there it was, in plain sight, just beyond the Ile de la Cité. He kept trying to get there, and instead he found himself going to the American Express, getting a haircut, cashing traveler’s checks, standing at the counter at the Cunard Line. These errands all seemed to take more time than they would have at home, and time—time running out—was what he kept having to deal with.

  It did not interest him to wonder if he could stay, if there was after all some way of arranging this, because he did not want to stay here as an observer, an outsider, an expatriate; he was too proud to do that. He wanted to possess the thing he loved. He wanted to be a Frenchman.

  When he got home in the late afternoon, a group of school boys would be having choir practice out of doors under the trees in the school yard. There was no music teacher—only an older boy with a pitch pipe—and the singing that rose from the walled garden was so beautiful that it made him hold his head in his hands. This and other experiences like it (the one-ring circus on the outskirts of Florence; the big searchlight from the terrace of Winkler’s Café picking out a baroque church, which they then ran through the streets to, and then moving on to a palace, and then to a fountain—all the churches and palaces and fountains of Salzburg, bathed in lavender-blue light; the grandiose Tiepolo drawn in white chalk on the pavement of the Via Ventidue Marzo in Venice by a sixteen-year-old boy out of another century, who began his work at eight in the morning and finished at four in the afternoon and was rewarded with a hatful of lira notes; arriving in Venice at midnight, leaving Pisa at six in the morning, taking an afternoon nap in Rome, eating ice cream under a canvas awning by the Lake of Geneva during a downpour; the view from the Campanile at Siena in full sunshine—a medieval city constructed on the plan of a rose; the little restaurant on a jetty in San Remo, where they ate dinner peering out through the rain at the masts of fishing boats; the carnival in Tours, the Grand Entertainment in Beaulieu, dinner at Iznard, dinner at Doney’s, the dinner with Sabine at Le Vert Gallant, just before they left for Switzerland, with the river only a few yards from their table, and with their vision concentrated by the candle flame until they saw only their own three faces, talking about what they believed, what they thought, what they felt—so intently that they did not know exactly when it got dark or even at what point the tables all around them were taken by other diners. And so on, and so on)—these ecstatic memories were, he thought, what made the lines in his face, and why he had lost so much weight. He felt that he was slowly being diminished by the succession of experiences that he had responded to with his whole heart and that seemed to represent something that belonged to him, and that he had not had, and, not having, had been starved for all his life, without knowing it. He was
being diminished as people are always diminished who are racked with love, and that it was for a place and not a person was immaterial.

  JEAN ALLÉGRET’S CLUB was in a little narrow street behind the Chamber of Deputies, and they did not allow enough time to get there from their hotel, and had trouble finding it, and when they walked into the courtyard, half an hour late, Jean Allégret was standing on the steps of the building. They felt that he felt that in not being punctual they had been guilty of rudeness, and so the evening began stiffly. Through dinner, they talked about Austria and Italy, and he talked about his farm—about how the people he was living with—the two old gardeners who had been in the family for fifty years—were sick, and would have to go, since they could not help him any longer, and he did not know who he would find to do his cooking, for he could not do it himself; and about the water system, which would be running at the end of the month; and about his efforts to bring a few improvements to his little village. There was no doctor or chemist nearer than four miles, and he had decided that there must be a dispensary. With the help of the men and boys of the place, he had fixed up an old uninhabited house, and got two nuns to come there, and provided them with supplies. The money they needed for this had been raised through benefits—plays given by boys and girls, bicycle races, that sort of thing; and a few days ago they had celebrated the hundredth case treated there. In his spare time he had been drawing, doing sketches of rabbits, pheasants, wild ducks, stags, wild boars, or of people working in the fields or going to market. Someday, perhaps, he would publish some of them in a book.