William Maxwell - The Chateau

She sat up and rearranged the pillows. Her face was now disturbingly close to his. He shifted his position.

“My nephew maintains that we were a perverted generation,” Mme Viénot said cheerfully, “and I dare say he is right. All we cared about was excitement.… ”

Though he was prevented from going toward the gaiety in the center of the room, he was aware that Mme Carrère had come out of her shell at last and, pleased with the extent of Barbara’s vocabulary, was coaching her.

“I’m no good at anything that has to do with words,” the Canadian said mournfully. “When something funny happens to me, I never can put it in a letter. I have to save it all up until I go home.”

Mme Bonenfant was slower still, and kept the others waiting, and had to be shown where her pieces would fit into the meandering diagram. Mme Straus-Muguet was quick as lightning, and when Barbara completed a word, she complimented her, seized her hand, called her “chérie,” taught her an idiom to go with the word, and put down a counter of her own—all in thirty seconds.

“MME CARRÈRE loves words,” Barbara said later as she was transferring four white shirts from the armoire to an open suitcase. “Any kind of abstraction. Anything sufficiently intellectual that she can apply her mind to it. When we started to play that game she became a different person.”

“I saw that she was. Gagny asked us to have lunch with him on Thursday at a bistro he goes to. He said it was quite near our hotel.”

“Did you say we would?”

He shook his head. “I left it up in the air. I wasn’t sure that was what we’d most want to be doing.”

“Did you enjoy your conversation with Mme Viénot?”

“It was interesting. I had a different feeling about the house tonight. And the people. I’m glad we decided not to leave.”

“So am I.”

“All in all, it’s been a nice day.”

“Very.”

He pulled the covers back and jumped into bed.

“They seemed very pleased with us when I said we were thinking of going up to Paris.… As if we were precocious children who had suddenly grasped an idea that they would have supposed was too old for us.”

“I expect they’d all like to be going up to Paris in the morning,” Barbara said.

“Or as if we had found the answer to a riddle. Or managed to bring a long-drawn-out parlor game to an end.”

THE CANADIAN did not appear at breakfast, and Mme Viénot did not offer any explanation of why he was not coming, but neither did she appear to be surprised, so he must have spoken to her. Either his threats had been idle and he had no friends in Paris who were waiting for him with open arms, or else he was avoiding a long train journey in their company. If he was, they did not really care. They were too lighthearted, as they sipped at their peculiar coffee and concealed the taste of the bread with marmalade, to care about anything but their own plans. They were starting on a train journey across an entirely new part of France. They were going to have to speak French with all kinds of strangers, some of whom might temporarily become their friends. They were going to change trains in Orléans, and at the end of their journey was Paris on Bastille Day. They could hardly believe their good fortune.

The taxi was old, and the woman who sat behind the wheel looked like a man disguised as a woman. Mme Viénot stood in the open doorway and waved to them until they were out of sight around the corner of the house. As the taxi turned into the public road, they looked back but they could not see the house from here. He felt the bulge in his inside coat pocket: passports, wallet, traveler’s checks. He covered Barbara’s gloved hand with his bare hand, and leaned back in the seat. “This is more like it,” he said.

“JUST WHERE is the Hôtel Vouillemont?” Harold said when they were out in the street in front of the Gare d’Austerlitz.

Barbara didn’t know.

He managed to keep from saying: “How can you not know where it is when you spent two whole weeks there?” by saying instead: “I should have asked Mme Viénot.” But she was aware of his suppressed impatience with her, and sorry that she couldn’t produce this one piece of helpful information for him when he, who had never been to Europe before, had got them in and out of so many hotels and railroad stations. Actually she could have found it all by herself, simply by retracing her steps. It was the only way she ever found her way back to some place she didn’t know the location of. Back through three years of being married to him, and two years of working in New York, to the day she graduated from college, and from there back to the day she sat watching her mother and Mrs. Evans sewing name tapes on the piles of new clothes that were going off with her to boarding school, and then back to the time when the walls of her room were covered with pictures of horses, and so finally to the moment when they were leaving the Hôtel Vouillemont to go to the boat train—which was, after all, only what other people do, she thought; only they do it in their minds, in large jumps, and she had to do it literally.

She tried, anyway. She thought very carefully and then said: “I think it’s not far from the Louvre.”

They went into the Métro station, and there he found an electrified map and began to study it.

Also, she thought, when she was here before, it was with her father, who had an acutely developed sense of geography and never got lost in strange cities, any more than in the woods. Instead of trying to figure out for themselves where they were, they always stood and waited for him to make up his mind which was north, south, east, and west. As soon as he had arrived at the points of the compass, he started off and they followed, talking among themselves and embroidering on old jokes and keeping an eye on him without difficulty even in crowds because he was half a head taller than anybody else.

Harold pushed a button, lights flashed, and he announced: “We change trains at Bastille.”

With a sense that they were journeying through history, they climbed the steps to the platform. They were delighted with the beautiful little toy train, all windows and bright colors and so different from the subway in New York. They changed at Bastille and got off at Louvre and came up out onto the sidewalk. The big forbidding gray building on their left was the Louvre, Barbara was positive, but there was no dancing in the street in front of it. A short distance away, they saw another building with a sign Louvre on it, but that turned out to be a department store. It was closed. All the shops were closed. Paris was as empty and quiet as New York on a Sunday morning. They listened. No sound of distant music came from the side streets. Neither did a taxi. Their suitcases grew heavier with each block, and at the first sidewalk café they sat down to rest. A waiter appeared, and Harold ordered two glasses of red wine. When he had drunk his, he got up and went inside. The interior of the café was gloomy and ill-lit, and he was glad he had left Barbara outside. It was clearly a tough joint. He asked if he could see the telephone directory and discovered that there was more than one, and that they were compiled according to principles he didn’t understand, and in that poor light the Hôtel Vouillemont did not seem to be listed in any of them. So he appealed to the kindness of Madame la Patronne, who left the bar untended and came over to the shelf of telephone books and looked with him.