The Chateau

by William Maxwell

The club was an army-officer’s club, and he had done murals for it, which he showed them after dinner. Looking at the people around them, they thought: This is not at all the sort of place Americans usually see.… Neither was it very interesting. Then they sat down again and, over a glass of brandy, went on talking. But something was missing from the conversation. There were moments when they had to work to make it go. Why does it have to go, Harold wondered. Because it went before was the answer. His eyes came to rest on one figure after another at the nearby tables—the neat blond mustache, the trim military carriage, the look of cold pride.

  He heard Barbara saying: “They gave Gluck’s Orpheus in the Riding Academy, and there was a wonderful moment. The canvas roof was rolled back without our knowing it, and as Orpheus emerged from the Underworld we saw the lights of Salzburg.…”

  Jean Allégret nodded politely, and Harold thought: Has she left out something? The music, of course. The most important part of all.

  “Orpheus is a beautiful opera,” he said, but Jean Allégret’s expression did not change.

  There is something he’s not saying, Harold thought, and that’s why the evening has gone this way. Instead of listening, he watched Jean Allégret’s face. It told him nothing, and he decided that, as so often happened, he was imagining things that did not really exist.

  “In the mountains,” Jean Allégret was saying, “the political struggle and all the unsolved problems of modern life belong to a tiny lost spot over there in the evening fog, miles away in the bottom of the valley … the last village. We slept in any deserted hut or rolled up in our blankets in a hole between rocks. Our only concern was the direction of the winds, the colors of the sunset, the fog climbing from the valley, the bucks always on the top of the following peak …”

  “My older brother loved to hunt,” Harold said.

  Jean Allégret turned and looked at him with interest.

  “He took me rabbit hunting with him when I was about eight years old. It was winter, and very cold, and there was deep snow on the ground. I still remember it vividly. We got up at five o’clock in the morning, to go hunting, and he missed three rabbits in a row. I think it flustered him, having me there watching him. And he swore. And then we went home.”

  It seemed hardly worth putting beside a shooting expedition in the Pyrenees, but Harold, too, was holding something back, and it was: I never had a gun. I never wanted one. I always thought I couldn’t bear to kill anything. But once when we were staying in the country—this was after Barbara and I were married—there was a rabbit in the garden every day, and it was doing a lot of damage, and I killed it with a borrowed shotgun, and I didn’t feel anything. People are so often mistaken about themselves.…

  Though they were close enough to have reached out and touched each other (and it would perhaps have been better if they had) the broad Atlantic Ocean lay between them. That first conversation, under the full moon, had been so personal and direct that it left no way open for increasing intimacy, and so they had reverted; they had become an aristocratic Frenchman and an American tourist.

  Outside on the steps of the building, they thanked Jean Allégret for a very pleasant evening, and shook hands, and at the last possible moment the brandy brushed Harold’s hesitations aside and spoke for him: “There were no brown-eyed people in Austria.”

  “Why not?” Jean Allégret said.

  “You know why not,” Harold said solemnly.

  “Yes, I’m afraid I do,” Jean Allégret said, after a moment.

  “I kept looking for them everywhere. All dead. No brown-eyed people left. Terrible!” And then: “It was all right before, and now it isn’t.… Home, I’m talking about … not Austria. I didn’t know about any other place. Or any other kind of people. I didn’t have to make comparisons. I will never be intact again.”

  “In the modern world,” Jean Allégret said gently, “nobody is intact. It is only an illusion. When you are home, you will forget about what it is like here. And be happy, as you were before.”

  “No I won’t!”

  “Well, you will be busy, anyway,” Jean Allégret said, looking into Harold’s eyes, the same person, suddenly, that he had been on that moon-flooded terrace in the Touraine. Having reached each other at last, they shook hands once more, and Jean Allégret said: “If you come back to France one day, come and spend a few days with me.”

  WITH SABINE they did not feel any constraint. She came to their hotel on Saturday evening, and they took her to the restaurant in the alley off the Place St. Sulpice. She had a job, she told them. She was going to work for an elderly man who published lithographic reproductions of paintings and some art books. The salary was a little less than she had been earning at La Femme Elégante, but it was work that she would enjoy doing, she liked the man she would be working for, and perhaps it might lead to something better, in time. The job was to start on the first of November, and she had come up to Paris a few days early.

  She was wearing the same white silk blouse and straight skirt that she invariably wore. Doesn’t she have any other clothes, Harold wondered. But it turned out to be one of those things men don’t understand; the white silk blouse was beautifully tailored, Barbara said later, and right for any occasion.

  There were no awkward silences, because they never ran out of things to say. The few things Sabine told them about herself were only a beginning of all there was to tell, and each time they were with her they felt they knew her a little better. But there was something elusive about her. The silvery voice that was just right for telling stories and the faintly mysterious smile, though charming in themselves, were also barriers. It is possible to see the color of flowers by moonlight, but you can never quite read a book.

  While Pierre was changing the plates, Harold said suddenly: “Would you like to hear a ghost story?… In Marseilles, all the hotels were full, because of a big fair of some kind, and we went to one after another, and finally one that the taxi driver had never heard of, and he didn’t even think it was a hotel, but it was listed in the Michelin, so I made him stop there and I got out and went inside. There was no hotel sign, and when I opened the door and walked in off the street, there wasn’t any lobby either. Nothing but a spiral stairway. I decided the lobby must be one flight up. On the second floor there was a landing, but no doors led from it. So I went on, and while I was climbing the stairs I heard footsteps.”

  “This is not a true story?” Sabine said. “You are inventing it just to please me?”

  “No, no, it all happened.… Someone was climbing the stairs ahead of me. I called out and there was no answer. I stood still and listened. The footsteps continued, and I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. I went a little farther, and when there were still no doors, I stopped again. This time there wasn’t any sound. My heart was pounding. I could feel somebody up there waiting for me to climb the last few steps. I turned and ran all the way down the stairs and burst through the doorway into the open air.… What was it, do you think? Was it really a hotel?”

  “I think it was a nightmare,” Sabine said.

  “But I was wide awake.”

  “One is, sometimes,” she said, and he thought of the drama that had happened in her family. He had a feeling that if he leaned forward at that moment and asked: “What did happen?” she would tell them. But the next course arrived, and put an end to the possibility.

  Sabine said to Barbara: “Where did you find your little heart?”

  The little heart was of crystal, bound with a thin band of gold, and Barbara had noticed it in the window of an antique shop in Toulon, during the noon bus stop. “It wasn’t very expensive,” she said. “Do you think it’s a child’s locket? Do you think I shouldn’t wear it?”

  “No, it’s charming,” Sabine said. “And perfectly all right to wear.”

  “Do you remember,” Barbara said, “that little diamond heart that Mme Straus always wore?”

  They began to talk about the gloves and scarves and purses in the wind
ow of Hermès, and he picked up his fork and started eating.

  After dinner they walked through the square and back to the hotel, and sat on the big bed, leaning against the headboard or the footboard, with their legs tucked under them, talking, until eleven thirty. He knew that Sabine liked Barbara, and had always liked her, but as he was walking her to the Métro station he realized with surprise that she liked him too. She could not say so, directly and simply, as Alix said such things; it came out, instead, in her voice, in the way she listened to his account of their last days in Paris, and how queer he felt about going home. It was something he had been refusing to think about, but apparently he had been carrying the full weight of it around, because now that he had spoken to somebody about it, he felt lighter. He had the feeling that, no matter what he told her, she would get it right; she wouldn’t go off with a totally wrong idea of what he was feeling or thinking.

  He was going to take her all the way to her door but she wouldn’t let him. At the entrance to the Métro, they stopped and he started to say good-by, under a street lamp, and she said: “I will be at my aunt’s house on Monday.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” he exclaimed. “Then I won’t say good-by.… I keep trying to get to the Ile St. Louis. It’s as if my life depended on it. As if I must see it. And every day something keeps me from going there. What is it like?”

  “From the Ile St. Louis there is a beautiful view of the back of Notre Dame,” she said. “Voltaire lived there for a while. So did Bossuet. And Théophile Gautier, and Baudelaire, and Daumier. In the Ile St. Louis you feel the past around you, more than anywhere else in Paris. The houses are very old, and the streets are so silent. Perhaps you will go there tomorrow.…”

  HE SUGGESTED to Mme Straus, over the telephone on Sunday morning, that she take a taxi directly to their hotel, and she said Mon dieu, she would be taking the bus, and that they should meet her at one o’clock in front of the church of St. Germain-des-Prés, which was only five minutes’ walk from where they were staying.

  Barbara was still dressing when the time came to start out to meet her, and since Mme Straus was usually prompt and they did not want to keep her waiting outside on a damp, raw day, he went on ahead. As he crossed the boulevard St. Germain, he saw standing in front of the church a figure that could have been Mme Straus; he wasn’t sure until he had reached the sidewalk that it wasn’t. In the two months since they had seen her, her face had grown dim in his mind. The old woman at the foot of the church steps was poorly dressed, and when he got closer to her, he saw she had a cigar box in her hand. The purpose of the cigar box became clear when people began to pour out of the church at the conclusion of the service. Harold stood in a doorway where he could keep an eye on the buses arriving from Auteuil and from across the river. One bus after another arrived, stopped, people got off and other people got on, but still no Mme Straus.

  The beggarwoman was also not having much luck. About one person in fifty, he calculated. He found himself judging the people who came out of the church solely in relation to her. Those who gave her something were nice, were good, were kind. Those who ignored her outstretched box, or were annoyed, or raised their eyebrows, or just didn’t see her, he disliked. He watched a young woman who was helping an older woman down the steps—mother and daughter, they must be. So like Alix, he thought. The young woman didn’t notice the box at first, and then when she did see it, she immediately smiled at the old woman, stopped, opened her purse—all in such a way that there could be no questioning her sincerity and goodness of heart. As for the others, perhaps they had been stopped by too many beggars, or knew the old woman was a fraud, or just didn’t have ten francs to spare.

  He kept expecting the old woman to come over to him, and she did finally. She came over and spoke to him—a rushing speech full of bitterness and sly derision at the churchgoers—that much was clear—though most of it he could not understand. He looked at her and listened, and smiled, and didn’t say anything, thinking that she must know by his clothes that he was an American, and waiting for her to present the box. She didn’t, and so he didn’t put his hand in his pocket and draw out his folded French money. Something more personal was happening between them. Either he was serving her well enough by listening so intently to what she said, or else she recognized in him a character somehow on the same footing with her—a beggar holding out his hand for something if not for money, a fraud, a professional cheat of some kind, at odds with society and living off it, a blackmailer, a thief—somebody the police are interested in, or if not the police then the charity organizations.… A poor blind tourist, that’s what he was.

  While he was listening, his eyes recorded the arrival of Mme Straus-Muguet. She stepped down to the cobblestones from the back platform of a bus, and as he went toward her, looking at her clothes—her fur piece, her jaunty hat with a feather, her lorgnette swinging by its black ribbon—he wondered how he could, even at a distance, have mistaken the old beggar woman with the cigar box and a grievance against society for their faithful, indomitable, confusing friend.

  Her voice, her greeting, her enthusiasm, the pressure on his arm were all affectionate and unchanged. She could not bear to leave the vicinity of such a famous church, the oldest church in Paris, without going inside for a moment. They stood in the hushed empty interior, looking down the nave at the altar and the stained-glass windows, and then they came out again. As they were crossing the street, she said that she knew the quarter well. Her sister had an apartment in the boulevard Raspail, and as a child she had lived in the rue Madame, a block from their hotel.

  “But you are thin!” she exclaimed.

  “Too much aesthetic excitement,” he said jokingly, and she said: “You must eat more!”

  Barbara was waiting for them in the rue des Canettes. Mme Straus kissed her, admired Barbara’s new hat, and then, turning, perceived that she knew the restaurant; she had dined here before, with satisfaction. As they walked in, monsieur and madame bowed and smiled respectfully at Mme Straus and then approvingly at Harold and Barbara for having at last got themselves a sponsor. Pierre led them to their regular table, and recommended the pâté en croûte. Mme Straus ordered potage instead. The restaurant was unusually crowded, and the waiters were very busy. Though Barbara had explained to Mme Straus that Pierre was their friend, she called “Garçon!” loudly. And when he left what he was doing and came over to their table, she complained because the pommes de terre frites weren’t hot. He hurried them away and came back with more that had just been taken from the spider. She continued to be condescending to him, but as if she were acting for Harold and Barbara—as if this were one more lesson they ought to learn. He kept his temper but something passed between them, an exchange of irritable glances and cutting phrases that the Americans could not follow and that made them uneasy. They felt left out. Pierre and Mme Straus were like two members of the same family who know each other’s sore spots and can’t resist aggravating them. As Pierre hurried off to bring the coffee filters, Mme Straus assured them that their friend was an intelligent boy. And a few minutes later, when Harold got up and went into the front room to pay the check, Pierre stopped, on his way past, and remarked gravely (but kindly, as if what he was about to say was dictated solely by concern for them): “Your guest—that old lady—is not what she pretends to be. The girl you brought yesterday—she’s the real thing.”

  After lunch they walked in the square, and Mme Straus pointed out that the fountain, which they had never really looked at before, was in commemoration of Bossuet, Fénelon, Massillon, and Fléchier—the four great bishops who should have been but were not made cardinals. “How they must have hated each other!” she exclaimed merrily.

  Barbara took a snapshot of Harold and Mme Straus standing in front of the fountain, and then they walked to their hotel. She approved of their room and of the view, and asked how much they paid. She considered seriously the possibility of taking a room here. She was in mortal terror lest the nuns raise the price
of her small chamber among the roses, in which case she could no longer afford to stay there.

  They left the hotel and wandered up the rue Vaugirard to the Luxembourg Gardens, and walked up and down looking at the flower beds, the people, the Medici fountain, the balloon man, the children sailing their boats in the shallow basin. A gas-filled balloon escaped, and they followed it with their eyes. Since we last saw her, Harold thought, there has been a change—if not in her then in her circumstances.

  Mme Straus kept looking at her wrist watch, and at five o’clock she hurried them out of the Gardens and up the street to a tea shop, where she had arranged for her grandson Edouard to meet them. Edouard was seventeen and in school; he was studying to be an engineer, Mme Straus said, and he had only one desire—to come to America.

  After so big a lunch, they had no appetite. Barbara crumbled but did not eat her cupcake. Harold slowly got his tea and three cakes down. Edouard did not appear. Mme Straus sat with her back to the wall and glanced frequently at the doorway. Conversation died a dull death. There was no one at the surrounding tables, and the air was lifeless. The tea made them feel too warm. Done in by so much walking and talking, or by Edouard’s failure to show up for the tea party, Mme Straus reached out for her special talent, and for the first time in their experience it was not there. She sat, silent and apparently distracted by private thoughts. She roused herself and said how disappointed Edouard would be, not to make their acquaintance. Something must have happened, of a serious nature; nothing else would account for his absence. And a few minutes later she considered the possibility that he had gone to the cinema with friends. Harold found himself wondering whether it is possible to read the mind of someone who is thinking in a language you don’t understand. What he was thinking, and did not want Mme Straus to guess that he was thinking, was: Does Edouard exist? And if there really is an Edouard, does he regard his grandmother with the same impatience and undisguised contempt as the celebrated actress, her friend, to whom she is so devoted?