William Maxwell - The Chateau

“How old do you think Gagny is?” Barbara said.

“I don’t know. He varies so. Somewhere between twenty-three and thirty-five.”

More maps. Visit rapide … Visite du Château …

“Why isn’t he married?”

“People don’t have to get married,” he said. “Sometimes they just—”

Rain blew against the windowpanes, so hard that they both turned and looked.

“Besides, he’s in the diplomatic service,” Harold said. “He can’t just marry any pretty girl he feels like marrying. He needs a countess or somebody like that, and I suppose they won’t have him because he isn’t rich.”

“How do you know he isn’t rich?”

“If he were rich he wouldn’t be here. He’d be somewhere where the sun is shining.”

Behind his back a voice said: “Good morning!” and Mme Viénot swept into the dining room, wearing a dark-red housecoat, with her head tied up in a red and green Liberty scarf. She sat down at the head of the table. “You slept well?… I’m so glad. You must have been very tired after your journey.” She placed her box of sugar directly in front of her, so there could be no possible misunderstanding, and then said: “What a pity it is raining again! M. Gagny is very discouraged about the weather, which I must say is not what we are accustomed to in July.”

“Is it bad for the grain?” Harold asked.

Mme Viénot lifted the quilted pad and considered the burned bread with a grimace of disapproval. “Not at this time of year. But my gardener is worried about the hay.” She peered into the china pitcher and her eyebrows rose in disbelief. “Perhaps it is only a shower. I hope so.” She picked up the plate of toast and pushed her chair back. “The cook, poor dear, forgot to moisten the bread. I don’t care for it when it is hard like this. Taking the pitcher also with her, she went out to the kitchen.

“We shouldn’t have had a second cup,” Barbara whispered.

“I think it was all right,” he said.

“But she looked—”

“I know. I saw it. Coffee is rationed, but surely that wasn’t coffee.… There wasn’t enough for the others, in any case.”

“You won’t forget to speak to her about the beds, will you?” Barbara said. “I wrote her that we wanted a room with a grand lit , and if she didn’t have anything but twin beds, it was up to her to tell us. And she didn’t.”

“No,” he agreed, shifting in his chair, the uneasy male caught between two females.

“And the bicycles … You don’t think she overheard what we were saying?”

“It wouldn’t matter, unless she was standing out in the hall the whole time.”

“She could have been.”

They sat in wary silence until the pantry door opened.

“We must plan some excursions for you,” Mme Viénot said. “You are in the center of one of the most interesting parts of France. The king used to come here with the court, for the hunting. They each had their own château and it was marvelous.”

“We want to see Azay-le-Rideau,” he said, “and Chinon, and Chenonceau—”

“Chinon is a ruin,” Mme Viénot said disapprovingly. “Unless you have some particular reason for going there—” She surveyed the table and then got up again and pried open the door of the sideboard with her table knife. They heard a faint exclamation and then: “Within twenty-four hours after I open a jar of confitures it is half gone.

“Do have some,” she said as she sat down again. “It is plum.”

They both refused.

“Chenonceau is ravishing,” Mme Viénot said, and helped herself sparingly to the jam. “It belonged to Diane de Poitiers. She was the king’s mistress. She adored Chenonceau, and Catherine de Médicis took it away from her and gave her Chaumont instead.”

He asked the reason for this exchange.

“She was jealous,” Mme Viénot explained, with a shrug.

“But couldn’t the king stop her?”

“He was killed in a tournament.”

“Are the châteaux within walking distance?” Barbara asked.

“Alas, no,” Mme Viénot said.

“But we can bicycle to some of them?” he asked.

In one of the two polite letters that arrived before they left New York, Mme Viénot had assured them that bicycles would be waiting for them when they arrived. Now she filled their cups and then her own and said plaintively: “I inquired about bicycles for you in the village, and it appears there aren’t any. Perhaps you can arrange to rent them in Blois. Or in Tours. Tours is a dear old city—you know it?”

“We were there overnight,” Barbara said.

“You saw the cathedral?”

Barbara shook her head.

“You must see the cathedral,” Mme Viénot said. “The old part of the city was badly damaged during the war. Whole blocks went down between the center of town and the river. So shocking, isn’t it?”

The servant girl appeared with a plate of fresh toast that had not been burned and the china pitcher, now full of steaming hot coffee. Mme Viénot remarked in French to the surrounding air that someone in the house was extremely fond of confitures , and with a sullen look Thérèse withdrew to the kitchen.

“Now, with the rubble cleared away,” Mme Viénot said cheerfully: “you can have no idea what it was like.… The planes were American.”

For a whole minute nobody said anything. Then Harold said: “Riding on the train we saw a great deal of rebuilding. Everywhere, in fact.”

“Our own people raised the money for the new bridge at Tours,” Mme Viénot said. “Naturally we are very proud of it. They are of stone, the new buildings?”

He nodded. “There’s one thing, though, I kept noticing, and that is that the openings—the windows and doors—were all the same size. Do they have to do that? The new buildings look like barracks.”

“In Tours all the new buildings are of stone. It would have been cheaper to use wood, but that would have meant sacrificing the style of the locality, which is very beautiful,” Mme Viénot said firmly, and so prevented him from pursuing a subject that, he now perceived, might well be painful to her. Probably it wasn’t possible to rebuild, exactly as they were before, houses that had been built hundreds of years ago, and added onto and changed continually ever since.

He said: “Is there a taxi in the village?”

“There is one,” Mme Viénot said. “A woman has it, and I’m afraid you will find her expensive. I’m sorry we haven’t a car to offer you. We sold our Citroën after the war, thinking we could get a new one immediately, and it was a dreadful mistake. You can take the train, you know.”

“From Brenodville?”

She nodded. Rearranging her sleeves so they wouldn’t trail across her plate, she said: “I used to go to parties at Chaumont before the war. The Princesse de Broglie owned it then. She married the Infant Louis-Ferdinand, of Spain, and he was not always nice to her.” She looked expectantly at them and seemed to be waiting for some response, some comment or anecdote about a royal person they knew who was also inconsiderate. “The Princesse was a very beautiful woman, and immensely rich. She was of the Say family—they manufacture sugar—and she wanted a title. So she married the Prince de Broglie, and he died. And then in her old age she married the Infant, and mothered him, and gave parties to which everyone went, and kept an elephant. The bridge at Chaumont is still down, but there is a ferry, I am told. I must find out for you how often it goes back and forth.… The Germans blew up all the bridges across the Loire, and for a while it was most inconvenient.”

“How do we get to Chenonceau?” Harold asked.

“You take a train to Amboise, and from there you take a taxi. It’s about twelve kilometers.”