William Maxwell - The Chateau

Harold started to explain who they were and she said that she knew; her mother had written to her about them. “You can speak English if you prefer,” she said. “I speak it badly but—They are all well in the country?”

Barbara nodded.

“I’m afraid you haven’t had very nice weather. It has been cold and rainy here, also. You arrived in Paris when?”

“Yesterday,” Barbara said.

“But we didn’t see any dancing in the streets,” Harold said. “Last night at midnight we saw a crowd of people singing and marching in the square in front of Notre Dame, but they were Communists, I think. Anyway, there was no dancing.

“In Montmartre you would have seen it, perhaps,” the French girl said. “Or the Place Pigalle.”

They couldn’t think what to say next.

“Mother has written how much she enjoyed having you with her,” the French girl said.

“We are returning to Brenodville tomorrow,” Harold said, “and your mother asked us to let you know the train we are taking. She thought you might also be intending to—”

“I may be going down to the country tomorrow,” the French girl said thoughtfully. “I don’t know yet.”

“We’re taking the four o’clock train,” he said. “Your mother suggested that we might all three take one taxi from Blois.”

“That is very kind of you. Perhaps I could telephone you tomorrow morning. You are staying where?”

“It’s quite near here, actually.” He tore a leaf out of his financial diary, wrote down the name of their hotel, and held it out to her. She glanced at the slip of paper but did not take it from him. They shook hands, and then she was gone.

Standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the flow of traffic to stop so they could cross over, he said: “I thought at first she was like her mother—like what Mme Viénot was at that age. But she isn’t.”

“Not at all,” Barbara said.

“Her voice made me realize that she wasn’t.”

“She has a lovely voice—so light. And silvery.”

“She has a charming voice. Something of the French intonation carries over into her English, of course. But it’s more than that, I think. It’s an amused voice. It has a slight suggestion of humor, at no one’s expense. As if she had learned to see things with a clarity that—that was often in excess of whatever need there was for seeing things clearly. And the residue had turned into something like amusement.”

“But she didn’t ask us to lunch.”

“I know.”

They went to the Guaranty Trust Company and were directed to the little upstairs room where their mail was handed to them.

“So what do we do now?” Barbara asked when they were outside again.

He looked at his watch. They had spent a considerable part of their first twenty-four hours in Paris walking the streets. He was dog-tired, his feet hurt, and Notre Dame in daylight faced the wrong way. For the moment, they were satiated with looking, and ready to be with someone they knew, it didn’t matter how slightly, so long as they could talk about what they had seen, ask questions, and feel that they were a part of the intense sociability that they were aware of everywhere around them. Paris on the day after Bastille Day was not a deserted city. Also the sun was shining, and it was warm; it was like summer, and that lifted their spirits.

He said: “What about having lunch with Gagny at that bistro he told us about?”

“But we don’t know where it is.”

“Rue de Castellane.” He consulted the plan of Paris by arrondissements. “It’s somewhere behind the Madeleine … L17.” He turned the pages. “Here it is. See?”

She pretended to look at the place he pointed out to her on the map, and then said: “If you’re sure it’s not too far.”

The rue de Castellane proved to be farther than it appeared to be on the map, and when they got there, they found two, possibly three, eating places that answered to Gagny’s description. Also, they were not very clear in their minds about the distinction between a bistro and a restaurant. They walked back and forth, peering at the curtained windows and trying to decide. They took a chance on one, the smallest. Gagny had said that it was a hangout of doubtful characters, and that there was sometimes brawling. The bistro was very quiet, and it looked respectable. They were shown to the last free table. Harold ordered an apéritif, and they settled down to read their mail from home, unaware that they were attracting a certain amount of attention from the men who were standing at the bar. Thugs and thieves do not, of course, wear funny hats or emblems in their buttonholes, like Lions and Elks, and some types of human behavior have to be explained before they are at all noticeable. The bistro was what Hector Gagny had said it was. In her letter about him, the cousin of the Canadian Ambassador failed to inform Mme Viénot of something that she happened to know, and that he didn’t know she knew. It was in his folder in the Embassy files: he had a taste for low company. He enjoyed watching heated arguments, stage after stage of intricate insult, so stylized and at the same time so personal, all leading up to the point where the angry arguers could have exchanged blows—and never did. He also enjoyed being the unengaged spectator to situations in which the active participants must feel one another out. His eyes darting back and forth between their eyes, he measured accurately the risk taken, and then calculated enviously the chance of success.

In places the police knew about, Gagny never disguised his education, or pretended to be anything but an observer. He sat, well dressed, well bred, quiet, and conspicuous, with his glass of wine in front of him, until the type who had been eying him for some time disengaged himself from the others and wandered over and was invited to sit down at his table.

“We’re terribly restricted, you know,” Gagny would tell the character with franc notes to be converted into dollars or, if worst came to worst, pounds sterling. “I mean to say, thirty-five pounds is all we’re allowed to take out of England.” Or, as he handed the pornographic postcards back to their owner: “Why do the men all have their shoes and socks on?” The type , a cigarette hanging from his lips and sometimes a question hanging in his eyes, would begin to talk. After a moment or two, Gagny would interrupt him politely in order to signal to the waiter to bring another glass.

In exchange for the glimpses of high life that he offered casually, not too much or too many at a time, he himself was permitted glimpses into the long corridor leading down, where crimes are committed for not very much money, or out of boredom, or because the line between feeling and action has become blurred; where the gendarme is the common enemy, and nobody knows the answer to a simple question, and danger is ever-present, the oxygen in the wine-smelling, smoke-filled air.

Only in France did Gagny allow himself this sort of diversion. In London it was not safe. He might be followed. His name was in the telephone directory. And he might have the bad luck to run into some acquaintance who also had a taste for low company.

Also, it was a matter of the Latin sensibility as compared with Anglo-Saxon. Oftener than not in Paris the type proved to be gentle, amiable, confused and more than willing (though the occasion for this had never presented itself) to pass over into the world of commonplace respectability. His education may have been sordid, pragmatic, and one-sided, but at least it had taught him how to stay alive, and he had a story to tell, invariably. Gagny had a story to tell, too, but he refrained from telling it. The types understood this. They were responsive, they understood many things—states of feeling, human needs, gradations of pleasure, complexities of motive—that people of good breeding unfortunately do not.