William Maxwell - The Chateau

As they turned away from the window, Mme Viénot said: “I have an errand to do this afternoon, in the next village. It would make a pleasant walk if you care to come.”

Off they went immediately, with the Canadian. Mme Viénot led them through the gap in the hedge and down the long straight path that bisected the potager. Over their heads storm clouds were racing across the sky, threatening to release a fresh downpour at any moment. She stopped to give instructions to the gardener, who was on his hands and knees among the cabbages, and the walk was suspended a second time when they encountered a white hen that had got through the high wire netting that enclosed the chicken yard. It darted this way and that when they tried to capture it. With his arms spread wide, Gagny ran at the silly creature. “Like the Foreign Office, she can’t bear to commit herself,” he said. “Steady … steady, now … Oh, blast!”

When the hen had been put back in the chicken yard, where she wouldn’t offer a temptation to foxes, they resumed their walk. The path led past an empty potting shed with several broken panes of glass, past the gardener’s hideous stucco villa, and then, skirting a dry fountain, they arrived at a gate in the fence that marked the boundary of Mme Bonenfant’s property. On the other side, the path joined a rough wagon road that led them through a farm, and the farm provoked Mme Viénot to open envy. “It is better kept than my garden!” she exclaimed mournfully.

“In Normandy,” Harold said, “in the fields that we saw from the train window, there were often poppies growing. It was so beautiful!”

“They are a pest,” Mme Viénot said. “We have them here, too. They are a sign of improper cultivation. You do not have them in the fields in America?… I am amazed. I thought they were everywhere.”

He decided that this was the right moment to bring up the subject of the double bed in their room.

“We never dreamed that it would take so long to recover from the Occupation,” she said, as if she knew exactly what he was on the point of saying, and intended to forestall him. “It is not at all the way it was after the Guerre de Quatorze. But this summer, for the first time, we are more hopeful. Things that haven’t been in the shops for years one can now buy. There is more food. And the farmers, who are not given to exaggeration, say that our wheat crop is remarkable.”

“Does that mean there will be white bread?” he asked.

“I presume that it does,” Mme Viénot said. “You dislike our dark bread? Coming from a country where you have everything in such abundance, you no doubt find it unpalatable.”

Ashamed of the abundance when his natural preference was to be neither better nor worse off than other people, he said untruthfully: “No, I like it. We both do. But it seemed a pity to be in France and not be able to have croissants and brioches.”

They had come to a fork in the road. Taking the road that led off to the right, she continued: “Of course, your government has been most generous,” and let him agree to this by his silence before she went on to say, in a very different tone of voice: “You knew that in order to get wheat from America, we have had to promise to buy your wheat for the next ten years—even though we normally produce more wheat than we need? One doesn’t expect to get something for nothing. That isn’t the way the world is run. But I must say you drive a hard bargain.”

And at that moment Hector Gagny, walking a few feet behind them, with Barbara, said: “We’re terribly restricted, you know. Thirty-five pounds is all we can take out of England for travel in a whole year, and the exchange is less advantageous than it is with your dollars.”

What it is like, Harold thought, is being so stinking rich that there is no hope of having any friends.

Walking along the country road in silence, he wondered uneasily about all the people they had encountered during their first week in France. So courteous, so civilized, so pleasant; so pleased that he liked their country, that he liked talking to them. But what would it have been like if they’d come earlier—say, after the last excitement of the liberation of Paris had died down, and before the Marshall Plan had been announced? Would France have been as pleasant a place to travel in? Would the French have smiled at them on the street and in train corridors and in shops and restaurants and everywhere? And would they have been as helpful about handing the suitcases down to him out of train windows? In his need, he summoned the driver of the empty St. Malo-St. Servan bus who was so kind to them, the waitress in the hotel in Pontorson, the laborer who had offered to share his bottle of wine in the train compartment, the nice woman with the little boy, the little boy in the carnival, M. Fleury and his son—and they stood by him. One and all they assured Harold Rhodes solemnly in their clear, beautiful, French voices that he was not mistaken, that he had not been taken in, that the kindness he had met with everywhere was genuine, that he had a right to his vision.

“Americans love your country,” he said, turning to look directly at the Frenchwoman who was walking beside him. “They always have.”

“I am happy to hear it,” Mme Viénot said.

“The wheat is paid for by taxation. I am taxed for it. And everybody assumes that it comes to you as a gift. But there are certain extremely powerful lobbying interests that operate through Congress, and the State Department does things that Americans in general sometimes do not approve of or even know about. With Argentina, and also with Franco—”

“Entendu!” Mme Viénot exclaimed. “It is the same with us. The same everywhere. Only in politics is there no progress. Not the slightest. Whatever we do as individuals, the government undoes. If France had no government at all, it would do much better. No one has faith in the government any more.”

“There is nothing that can be done about it?”

“Nothing,” she said firmly. “It has been this way since 1870.”

As they walked along side by side, his rancor—for he had felt personally attacked—gradually faded away, and they became once more two people, not two nationalities, out walking. Everything he saw when he raised his eyes from the dirt road pleased him. The poppy-infested fields through which they were now passing were by Renoir, and the distant blue hills by Cézanne. That the landscape of France had produced its painters seemed less likely than that the painters were somehow responsible for the landscape.

The road brought them to a village of ten or twelve houses, built of stone, with slate roofs, and in the manner of the early Gauguin. He asked if the village had a name.

“Coulanges,” Mme Viénot said. “It is very old. The priest at Coulanges has supernatural powers. He is able to find water with a forked stick.”

“A peach wand?”

“How did you know?” Mme Viénot asked.

He explained that in America there were people who could find water that way, though he had never actually seen anyone do it.

“It is extraordinary to watch,” she said. “One sees the point of the stick bending. I cannot do it myself. They say that the priest at Coulanges is also able to find other things—but that is perhaps an exaggeration.”

A mile beyond the village, they left the wagon road and followed a path that cut diagonally through a meadow, bringing them to a narrow footbridge across a little stream. On the other side was an old mill, very picturesque and half covered with climbing blush roses. The sky that was reflected in the millpond was a gun-metal gray. A screen of tall poplars completed the picturesque effect, which suggested no special painter but rather the anonymous style of department-store lithographs and colored etchings.