William Maxwell - The Chateau

The key that Mme Viénot had obtained from the gatekeeper they did not need after all. The padlock was hanging open. The two young men put their weight against the door and it gave way. When their eyes grew accustomed to the feeble light, they could make out a dirt floor, simple carving on the capitals of the thick stone pillars, and cross-vaulting.

Barbara was enchanted.

“It is considered a jewel of eleventh-century architecture,” Mme Viénot said. “There is a story— It seems that one of the dukes was ill and afraid he would die, and he made a vow that if he recovered from his sickness he would build a prieuré in honor of the Virgin. And he did recover. But he forgot all about the prieuré and thought of nothing but his hawks and his hounds and hunting, until the Virgin appeared in a dream to someone in the neighborhood and reminded him, and then he had to keep his promise.”

The interior of the building was all one room, and not very large, and empty except for an object that Harold took for a medieval battering ram until Mme Viénot explained that it was a wine press.

“In America,” he said, “this building would have been taken apart stone by stone and shipped to Detroit, for Henry Ford’s museum.”

“Yes?” Mme Viénot said. “Over here, we have so many old buildings. The museums are crammed. And so things are left where they happen to be.”

He examined the stone capitals and walked all around the wine press. “What became of the nuns?” he asked suddenly.

“They went away,” Mme Viénot said. “The building hasn’t been lived in since the time of the Revolution.”

What the nuns didn’t take away with them other hands had. If you are interested in those poor dead women , the dirt floor of the priory said— in their tapestries, tables, chairs, lectuaries, cooking utensils, altar images, authenticated and unauthenticated visions, their needlework, feuds, and forbidden pets, go to the public library and read about them. There’s nothing here, and hasn’t been, for a hundred and fifty years .

ON THE WAY HOME the walking party was caught in a heavy shower and drenched to the skin.

Dressing hurriedly for dinner, Barbara said: “It’s so like her: ‘Thérèse will bring you a can—what time would you like it?’ and then when seven o’clock comes, there isn’t a sign of hot water.”

“Do you want me to go down and see about it?”

“No, you’d better not.”

“Maybe she does it on purpose,” he said.

“No, she’s just terribly vague, I’ve decided. She only half listens to what people are saying. I wouldn’t mind if we were on a camping trip, but to be expected to dress for dinner, to have everything so formal, and not even be able to take a bath! Do you want to button me up in back?… I’ve never seen anyone look as vague as she does sometimes. As if her whole life had been passed in a dream. Her eyelids come down over her eyes and she looks at us as if she couldn’t imagine who we were or what we were doing here.”

“M. Carrère likes Americans, but Mme Carrère doesn’t. I don’t think she likes much of anybody.”

“She likes the Canadian.”

“Does she?”

“She laughs at his jokes.”

“I don’t think Gagny’s French is as good as he thinks it is. It’s an exaggeration of the way the others speak. Almost a parody.”

“M. Carrère speaks beautiful French.”

“He speaks French the way an American speaks English. It just comes out of him easily and naturally. Gagny shrugs his shoulders and draws down the corners of his mouth and says ‘mais oui’ all the time, and it’s as if he had picked up the mannerisms of half a dozen different people—which I guess you can’t help doing if the language isn’t your own. At least, I find myself beginning to do it.”

“But it is his language. He’s bilingual.”

“French-Canadian isn’t the same as French.” He pulled his tie through and drew the knot snugly against his collar. “While you are trying to make the proper sounds and remember which nouns are masculine and which feminine, the imitation somehow unconsciously— M. Carrère’s English is something else again. His pronunciation is so wide of the mark that sometimes I can’t figure out what on earth he’s talking about. “ ’ut doaks, ’ut doaks!” And so impatient with us for not understanding.”

“I shouldn’t have laughed at him,” Barbara said sadly. “I was sorry afterward. Because our pronunciation must sound just as comic to the French, and they never laugh at us.”

AT DINNER, Mme Viénot’s navy-blue silk dress was held together at the throat by a diamond pin, which M. Carrère admired. He had a passion for the jewelry of the Second Empire, he said. And Mme Carrère remarked dryly that there was only one thing she would do differently if she had her life to live over again. She let her husband explain. In the spring of 1940, as they were preparing to escape from Paris by car, she had entrusted her jewel case to a friend, and the friend had handed it over to the Nazis. The few pieces that she had now were in no way comparable to what had been lost forever. Even so, Barbara had to make an effort to keep from looking at the emerald solitaire that Mme Carrère wore next to her plain gold wedding ring, and she was sorry that she had listened to Harold when he suggested that she leave everything but a string of cultured pearls in the bank at home.

Having established a precedent, the Americans were concerned to live it down. They remained in the petit salon with the others, after dinner. The company sat, the women with sweaters and coats thrown over their shoulders, facing the empty Franklin stove. Observing that Gagny smoked one cigarette and then no more, the Americans, not wanting to be responsible for filling the room with smoke, denied the impulse each time it recurred, and sometimes found to their surprise that they had a lighted cigarette in their hand.

While Hector Gagny and M. Carrère were solemnly discussing the underlying causes of the defeat of 1940, the present weakened condition of France, and the dangers that a reawakened Germany would present to Europe and the rest of the world, a quite different conversation was taking place in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Harold Rhodes’s reflection, leaning forward in his chair, said to Mme Viénot’s reflection: “I am not accustomed to bargaining. It makes me uneasy. But we have a friend who lived in France for years, and she said—”

“Where in France?” Mme Viénot’s reflection interrupted.

“In Paris. They had an apartment overlooking the Parc Monceau.”

“The Monceau quarter is charming. Gounod lived there. And Chopin.”

“She said it was a matter of principle, and that in traveling we must keep our eyes open and not be above bargaining or people would take advantage of us … of our inexperience. It was she who told us to ask you to figure the price by the week instead of by the day, but if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t listen to her. I’d just pay you what you asked for, and let it go at that.”

Instead of giving him the reassurance he wanted, Mme Viénot’s reflection leaned back among the sofa pillows, with her hand to her cheek. It would have been better, he realized, not to have brought the matter up at all. It was not necessary to bring it up. It had been settled before they ever left America. In his embarrassment he turned for help to the photograph of the schoolboy on the piano. “What I am trying to say, I guess, is that it’s one thing to live up to your principles, and quite another thing to live up to somebody else’s idea of what those principles should be.”