William Maxwell - The Chateau

“My likeness is here among the others,” the boy in the photograph said, “but in their minds I am dead. They have let me die.”

“The house is cold and damp and depressing,” Barbara Rhodes’s reflection said to the reflection of M. Carrère. “Why must we all sit with sweaters and coats over our shoulders? Why isn’t there a fire in that stove? I don’t see why we all don’t get pneumonia.”

“People born to great wealth—”

All the other reflections stopped talking in order to hear what M. Carrère’s reflection was about to say.

“—are also born to a certain kind of human deprivation, and soon learn to accept it. For example, those letters that arrive daily, even in this remote country house—letters from my lawyer, from my financial advisors, from bankers and brokers and churchmen and politicians and the heads of charitable organizations, all read and acknowledged by Mme Carrère, lest they tire me (which indeed they would). The expressions of personal attachment, of concern for my health, are judged according to their sincerity, in most instances not great, and a few are read aloud to me, lest I think that no one cares. I am accustomed to the fact that in every Jetter, sooner of later, self-interest shows through. I do not really mind, any more. Music is my delight. When I want companionship, I go to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and look at the porcelains and the period furniture.”

“I used to have a friend—” Mme Bonenfant’s reflection said. “She has been dead for twenty years: Mme Noë—”

“Mme Noë?” M. Carrère interrupted. “I knew her also. That is, I was taken to see her as a young man.”

“Mme Noë was fond of saying, and of writing in letters and on the flyleaf of books: ‘Life is something more than we believe it to be.’ ”

“Since my illness,” M. Carrère said, “I have become aware for the first time of innumerable—reconciliations, I suppose one would call them, that go on around us all the time without our noticing it. Again and again, Mme Carrère hands me something just as I am on the point of asking for it. And in her dreams she is sometimes a party to financial transactions that I am positive I have not told her about.… But it is strange that you should speak of Mme Noë. I was thinking about her this very afternoon as I stood looking at that grass-choked garden and that house gutted by fire. She was quite old when I was taken to see her. And she asked me all sorts of questions about myself that no one had ever asked me before, and that I went on answering for days afterward.”

“She had that effect on everyone,” Mme Bonenfant said.

“I remember that she led me to a vase of flowers and we talked.”

“And what did you say?” Barbara Rhodes asked.

“I said something that pleased her,” M. Carrère said, “but what it was I can no longer remember. All I know is that it was not at all like the sort of thing I usually said. And when she left me to speak to someone else, I did not have the feeling that I was being abandoned. Or that she would ever confuse me afterward with anyone else.… She is an important figure in the memoirs of a dozen great men, and reading about her the same question always occurs to me. What manner of woman she was really, if you made no claim on her, if you asked for nothing (as she asked for nothing) but merely sat, silent, content merely to be there beside her, and let her talk or not talk, as she felt like doing, all through a summer afternoon, none of them seem to know.”

“She was frail,” Mme Bonenfant said. “She was worn out by ill-health, by the demands, the endless claims upon her time and energy—”

“Which she must have encouraged,” M. Carrère said.

“No doubt,” Mme Bonenfant said. “By temperament she was not merely kind, she was angelic, but there was also irony. Once or twice, toward the end of her life, she talked to me about herself. It seems she suffered always from the fear that, wanting only to help people, she nevertheless unwittingly brought serious harm to them. This may have been true but I do not know a single instance of it. For my own part, I am quite content to believe that life is nothing more than our vision of it—of what we believe it to be. Tacitus says that the phoenix appears from time to time in Egypt, that it is a fact well verified. Herodotus tells the same story, but skeptically.”

“At the Council of Nicaea,” M. Carrère said, “three hundred and eighteen bishops took their places on their thrones. But when they rose as their names were called, it appeared that they were three hundred and nineteen. They were never able to make the number come out right; whenever they approached the last one, he immediately turned into the likeness of his neighbor.”

“Before Harold and I were married,” Barbara said, “a woman in a nightclub read our palms, and she said Leo and Virgo should never marry. Their horoscopes are in conflict. If they love each other and are happy it is a mistake.… That’s why he doesn’t like fortunetellers. I don’t think our marriage is a mistake, but on the other hand, sometimes I lie awake between three and four in the morning, planning dinner parties and solving riddles and worrying about curtains that don’t hang straight in the dark, and about my clothes and my hair, and about whether I have been unintentionally the cause of hurt feelings. And about Harold, sound asleep beside me and sharing not only the same bed but some of my worst faults.… Does anybody know the answer to the riddle that begins: ‘If three people are in a room and two of them have a white mark on their forehead—’ ”

“The answer to the riddle of why I am not married,” Hector Gagny said, “is that I am. And my wife hates me.”

“So did the woman I gave my jewel case to,” Mme Carrère said. “But I didn’t know it.”

“She has all but ruined my career,” Gagny said. “She is beautiful and willful and perverse, and in her own way quite wonderful. But she makes no concessions to the company she finds herself in, and I sit frozen with fear of what may come out of her mouth.”

“Do not despair,” Mme Bonenfant said. “Be patient. Your wife, M. Gagny, may only be acting the way she does out of the fear that you do not love her.”

“In the beginning we seemed to be happy, and only after a while did it become apparent that there were things that were not right. And that they were not ever going to be right. I began to see that behind the fascination of her mind, her temperament, there was some force at work that was not on my side, and bent on destroying both of us. But what is it? Why is she like that?”

“Though there was only two years difference in our ages,” Mme Viénot said, “my mother held me responsible for my brother’s safety when we were children. I used to have nightmares in which something happened to him or was about to happen to him. When we played together, I never let go of his hand.”

“Maurice was delicate,” Mme Bonenfant said.

“He cried easily,” Mme Viénot said. “He was always getting his feelings hurt. My daughter Sabine is very like him in appearance. I only hope that her life is not as unhappy as his.”

“I see that you haven’t forgiven me,” the boy in the photograph said. “I failed to distinguish myself in my studies but I made three friendships that were a credit to me, and I died bravely. It took me almost an hour to kill myself.… Now I am an effect of memory. When you have completely forgotten me, I assume that I will pass on to other places.”

“They say that people who talk about committing suicide never actually do it,” Mme Viénot said. “Maurice was the exception. When his body was brought home for burial we were warned that it would be better not to open the coffin.”