The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  “It doesn’t sound very intellectual,” Mme Bonenfant said. “Are you sure that you understood correctly.”

  “Quite sure, Maman.… In France, the firm manufactures only machine guns.”

  M. and Mme Carrère never came back to the château. They found another quiet country house that was more comfortable and closer to Paris. But from time to time, when Mme Viénot went into the post office, she was handed a letter that was addressed to him. The letters no doubt contained a request of some sort; for money, for advice, for the use of his name. And how it was answered might change the lives of she did not like to think how many people. In any case, the letter had to be forwarded, and it gave her acute pleasure to think that he would recognize her handwriting on the envelope.

  Hector Gagny never came back either, with his new wife. But Mme Straus came at least once a year. Her summer was a round of visits. For a woman past seventy, without a place of her own in which to entertain, with neither wealth nor much social distinction, she received a great many invitations—many more than she could accept. And if the friends who were so eager to have her come and stay with them did not always invite her back, there were always new acquaintances who responded to her gaiety, opened their hearts to her, and—for a while at least—adjusted the salutation of their letters to conform with the rapidly increasing tenderness of hers.

  A blank space in her calendar between the end of June and the middle of September meant a brief stay at Beaumesnil. She was at the château just after the affair of the robbers, and she brought two friends with her, a M. and Mme Mégille. Monsieur was a member of the permanent staff of the Institut Océanographique, and very distinguished. And since he had been brought up in the country he did not mind the fact that there was no electricity.

  They never found that short circuit?

  Oh yes. This was a piece of foolishness on Mme Viénot’s part. You won’t believe it, but she could not get that gold bullion out of her mind. She induced the priest at Coulanges to come and go all through the house with her, holding a forked stick. There was one place where it responded violently, and in opening up the wall the gardener sawed through the main electric-light cable.

  But surely Mme Viénot was too intelligent to believe that—

  Yes, she did. Mme Viénot is the Life Force, with dyed hair and too much rouge, and the Life Force always believes. Defeated, flat on her back, she waved her arms and legs like a beetle, and in a little while she was walking around again.

  Every novel ought to have a heroine, and she is the heroine of this one. She is a wonderful woman—how wonderful probably no one knows, except an American woman she met only once, on a train journey—a woman who, curiously enough, knew Barbara and Harold Rhodes, though only slightly. The two women opened their hearts to each other, as women sometimes do on a train or sharing a table in the tea room of a department store, and they have continued to write to each other afterward, long letters full of things they do not tell anyone else.

  What Mme Viénot did the summer Barbara and Harold were with her was miraculous. She had nothing whatever to work with, and bad servants, and somehow she kept up the tone of the establishment and provided meals that were admirable. Singlehanded, she saved the château. It would have gone for back taxes if she had not done what she did. No one else in the family could have saved it. As a person, Mme Cestre was more sympathetic, perhaps, but she was an invalid, and introspective. And the men …

  What about the men?

  Well, what about them?

  I guess you’re right. Go on with what you were saying.

  Once more they dined by candlelight. When they went up to bed, they were handed kerosene lamps at the foot of the stairs. There was no writing desk in Mme Straus’s room, and so, sitting up in bed, she used a book to write on. Her hair was in two braids and her reading glasses were resting far down on the bridge of her nose. She wrote rapidly, with no trace of a quaver:

  … Maman Minou finds that she has been a long time without news of her dear American children. The last letter from Harold, written in English, was translated for me by a friend, but tonight I am not in Paris. I beg him not to be vexed with me. Can he not find, at his office, a good-natured comrade who knows how to read French and will translate this letter into English? But my dear friend, why this sudden change? Your old letters, and those of dear Barbara, were perfectly written. It makes me wonder whether you perhaps no longer wish to correspond with poor Minou in France.

  The fountain pen stopped. The old eyes went on a voyage round the room, searching for something to say (one does not create an atmosphere of concert pitch out of accusations of neglect) and came to rest on a large stain in the wallpaper:

  Your presence surrounds me here. I go looking for you, and find my friends occupying your room. I put flowers there for them but Oh miracle! the moment the flowers are in their vase, they fly off toward you. Take them, then, my dears, and may their perfume spread around you. Here it is gray, cheerless, cold. The surroundings are agreeable, even so. M. and Mme Mégille are charming. Sabine pleases me very much. The lady of the manor dolls herself up for each new arrival. So droll! Alix is adorable. She is going off to visit cousins in Toulon next week. I shall miss her. Have you pretty concerts and plays to see? In this moment when we are in summer, are you not in winter? And at the hour when I am writing to you—eleven o’clock at night—your hour of the omelette, the good odor of which I smell even here?

  She thought the United States was in South America?

  Apparently. Some people have no sense of geography.— The letter ended:

  Life is rather difficult here, but I am so eager to obey our dear President Pinay, whom we admire so much, that all becomes easy. Your dear images still have a place in my little chamber, which you know. Pray for your old Maman Minou, who embraces you with all her loving heart.

  Antoinette Straus-Muguet

  Please put the date and the year of your letters. Thank you.

  Why didn’t they answer her letters? It isn’t like them.

  I’ll get around to that in a minute. One thing at a time. She blew the lamp out—

  We have to hear about the lamp?

  Yes. And settled herself between the damp sheets. And it was at that moment that the odor of kerosene brought back to her something priceless, a house she had not seen for half a century.

  The youngest of a large family, she had all through her childhood been the charming excitable plaything of older brothers and sisters. When evening came, so did Charles and Emma and Andrée and Edouard and Lucienne and Maurice and Marguerite and Anna. They gathered in the nursery to assist in putting Minou to bed, invented new games when her head hung like a heavy flower on its stalk, and, as they peeled her clothes off over her head, cried: “Skin the rabbit! Don’t let the little white bunny get away.” “Stop her!” “Catch her, somebody!” And when she escaped from them, they tracked her down with all the cruelty of love, and carried her on their shoulders around the nursery, a laughing overexcited child with too bright eyes and a flushed face and a nature that was too highstrung and delicate to be playing such games at the end of the day.

  All dead, the pursuers; long dead; leaving her no choice but to pursue.

  As for the Americans, it was much harder to think in French when they were not in France. They had to sit down with a French-English dictionary and a French grammar, and it took half a day to answer one of Mme Straus’s letters, and they were leading a busy life. Also, he hated to write letters. He used to wait for days before he opened a letter from Mme Straus, because of his shame at not having answered the last one. But they did answer some of the letters. They did not altogether lose touch with her.

  Quite apart from the effort it took, and the fact that year after year the friendship had nothing to feed on, her letters to them were really very strange. (“The monsieur who is at Fifth Avenue is not my relative, but my niece is flying over soon, on business for the house, of which she is administrator, director, in place of her d
ead husband. She will be, alone, in our confidence, but see you, become acquainted with you, speak to you of Maman Minou. You will see how nice she is. Answer her telephone calls above everything. She will give you news of me, and fresh news …) None of the people she said were coming to America and that Harold and Barbara could expect to hear from ever turned up. And there was one frantic, only half-legible letter, which they had to take to the friend who had lived in the Monceau quarter, to translate for them. She found it distrait, full of idioms that she had never seen and that she didn’t believe existed. The letter was about money. Mme Straus’ income, with inflation, was no longer adequate to meet her needs. Her daughter had refused to do anything for her, and Mme Straus was afraid that she would be put out of the convent. In the next letter it appeared that this crisis had passed: Mme Straus-Muguet’s children, to whom her notary had made a demand, had finally understood that it was their duty to help her. “Forgive me,” she wrote, “for boring you with all my miseries, but you are all my consolation.” Her letters were full of intimations of increasing frailty and age, and continually asked when they were coming back to France. At last they were able to write her that they were coming, in the spring of 1953, and she wrote back: “If Heaven wills it that I have not already departed for my great journey, it will be with arms wide open that I will receive you.… ”

  And was she there to receive them?

  They went first to England, and had two weeks of flawless weather. The English countryside was like the Book of Hours, and they loved London. They arrived in Paris on May Day Eve, and by nightfall they were in the Forest of Fontainebleau, in a rented car, on their way south. They spent the night in Sens, and in the morning everyone they saw carried a little nosegay of muguets. After their other trip, they enrolled in the Berlitz, and spent one winter conscientiously studying French. Though that was years ago now, it did seem that their French had improved.

  The boy learns to swim in winter, William James said, and to skate in summer.

  From Provence, Barbara wrote to Mme Straus that they would be in Paris by the end of the second week in May. When they were settled in—someone had told them about a small hotel whose windows overlooked the gardens of the Palais-Royal—Harold telephoned, and the person who answered seemed uncertain of whether Mme Straus could come to the telephone. The stairs have become too much for her, he thought. There was another of those interminable waits, during which he had a chance to reflect. Five years is a long time, and to try and pick up the threads again, with people they hardly knew, and with the additional barrier of language … But they couldn’t not call, either.…

  Mme Straus’s voice was just the same, and she seemed to be quite free of the doubts that troubled him. They settled it that she would come to their hotel at seven that evening.

  At quarter after six, as they were crossing the Place du Palais-Royal, Barbara said: “Aren’t we going to have an apéritif?”

  They had only five weeks altogether, for England and France, and there was never a time, it seemed, when they could sit in front of a sidewalk café, as they used to do before, and watch the people. They were both tired from walking, and he very much wanted a bath before dinner, but he decided that with luck they could do it, in spite of the crowd of people occupying the tables of that particular café, and the overworked waiter. They did it, but without pleasure, because he kept looking at his watch. They hurried through the gardens, congratulating themselves on the fact that it was still only twenty minutes of seven—just time enough to get upstairs and bathe and dress and be ready for Mme Straus.

  “You have company,” Mme la Patronne said as they walked into the hotel. “A lady.” There was a note of disapproval in her voice. “She has been waiting since six o’clock.”

  The Americans looked at each other with dismay. “You go on upstairs,” he said, and hurried down the hall to the little parlor where Mme Straus was waiting, with two small parcels on the sofa beside her. His first impression was that she looked younger. Could he have misjudged her age? She kissed him on both cheeks, and told him how well he looked. They sat down and he began to tell her about Provence. Then there was an awkward pause in the conversation, and to dispell it they asked the questions people ask, meeting after years. When Barbara came in, he started to leave the room, intending to go upstairs and at least wash his face and hands, but Mme Straus stopped him. It was the moment for the presentation of the gifts, and again they were dismayed that they had not thought to bring anything for her. They were also dismayed at her gifts—a paper flower for Barbara, a white scarf for Harold that had either lain in a drawer too long or else was of so shoddy a quality that it bore no relation to any man’s evening scarf he had ever seen. Mme Straus had learned to make paper flowers—as a game, she said, and to amuse herself. “Oeillet,” she said, resuming her role of language professor, and Barbara pinned the pink carnation on her dark violet-colored coat, where it looked very pretty, if a trifle strange.

  They left the hotel intending to have dinner at a restaurant in the rue de Montpensier, but it was closed that night, and so Mme Straus led them across the Place du Théâtre-Français, to a restaurant where, she assured them, she was well known and the food and wine were excellent. It was noisy and crowded; the maître d’hôtel received Mme Straus coldly, but at least the waiter knew her and was friendly. “He is like a son to me,” she said, as they sat down.

  There were a dozen restaurants in the neighborhood where the food was better, and Harold blamed himself for not insisting that they go to some place more suited to a long-delayed reunion, but Mme Straus seemed quite happy. Nobody had very much to say.

  The Vienna Opera was paying a visit to Paris, and during dinner he explained that he had three tickets for The Magic Flute. She said: “Quelle joie!” and then: “Where are they?” He told her and she exclaimed: “But we won’t be able to see the stage!”

  The tickets had cost five times what tickets for the Opéra usually cost, and were the most he felt he could afford. He said: “They’re in the center,” and she seemed satisfied. And would they arrange for her to stay at their hotel that night, since the doors of her convent were closed at nine o’clock?

  Arm in arm, they walked to the bus stop, and waving from the back of the bus, she was swept away.

  “It isn’t the same, is it?” he said, as they were walking back to their hotel.

  “We’re not the same,” Barbara said. “She took one look at us and saw that the jig was up.”

  “Too bad.”

  “If you hadn’t got tickets for the opera—”

  “I know. Well, one more evening won’t kill us.”

  Harold found that Mme Straus could stay at their hotel the night of the opera, and when she arrived—again an hour early—she was delighted with her room. “It’s just right for a jeune fille,” she said, laughing. And did Barbara have a coat she could wear? And wouldn’t it be better if they had dinner in the same place, because the service was so prompt, and above all they didn’t want to be late.

  When they arrived at the Opéra, she introduced them to the tall man in evening clothes who was taking tickets, and they were introduced again on the stairs, to an ouvreuse or someone like that. They climbed and climbed and eventually arrived at their tier, which was above the “basket.” Their seats were in the first row and they had a clear view of the stage and the stage was not too far away. Mme Straus arranged her coat and offered Harold and Barbara some candy. Stuffed with food and wine, they said no, and she took some herself and then seized their hands affectionately. She made them lean far forward so that she could point out to them, in the tier just below, the two center front-row seats that her father and mother had always occupied. She regretted that Les Indes Galantes was not being performed during their stay in Paris. A marvelous spectacle.

  The Magic Flute was also something of a spectacle, and the soprano who sang the role of Pamina had a very beautiful voice.

  Harold had failed to get a program and so they didn’t k
now who it was. In the middle of the first act, he became aware of Mme Straus’s restlessness. At last she leaned toward him and whispered that this opera was always sung at the Comique; that it did not belong on so large a stage. The Opéra was more suited to Aida. She found the singing acceptable but the opera itself did not greatly interest her. Did he know Aida? It was her favorite. Again she pressed the little bag of candy on him in the dark, and he suddenly remembered the strange behavior of Mme Marguerite Mailly, when they went backstage after her play. A few minutes later, hearing the rustle of the little bag again coming toward him, he was close to hating Mme Straus-Muguet himself. They left their seats between the acts, and as they walked through the marble corridors, he noticed a curious thing: because their French had improved, Mme Straus understood what they were saying, but not always what they meant, and when they explained, it only added to the misunderstanding. Wherever her quick intuitive mind was, it wasn’t on them.

  After the performance, she insisted that they go across the street, as her guests, and have something to eat. Harold and Barbara drank a bottle of Perrier water, and Mme Straus had a large ham sandwich.

  “I am always hungry,” she confessed.

  Worn out with the effort of keeping up the form of an affectionate relationship that had lost its substance, they sat and looked at the people around them. Mme Straus borrowed the souvenir program of a young woman at the next table, and they learned the name of the soprano with the beautiful voice: Irmgard Seefried. Then Mme Straus brought up the matter of when they would see her next. Barbara said gently that they were only going to be in Paris a few more days, and that this was their last evening with her.

  “Ah, but chérie, just one time! After five years!”

  “Two times,” Barbara said, and Mme Straus smiled. She was not hurt, it seemed, but only pretending.