William Maxwell - The Chateau

Blushing and angry, with the guide and with himself (for he had had in his wallet the means of erasing this embarrassment as completely as if it had never happened), he made his way down the ramp with Barbara, past the château gift shop, and into the street.

It was too soon for the bus, and so they turned in at the pâtisserie, and ordered tea and cakes, and found that they had no appetite for them when they came. They got up and left, and a few minutes later had a third contretemps. The bus driver, misunderstanding Harold’s “deux” for “douze,” gave him the wrong change and would not rectify his mistake or let them get on the bus until everybody else had got on. So they had to stand, after being first in line at the bus stop.

“So far,” he said, peering through the window at the river, “we’ve had very few experiences like what happened this afternoon, and they were really the result of growing confidence. We were attempting to behave as if we were at home.”

Out of consideration for his feelings, Barbara did not point out that this was only partly true; at home he was neither as friendly nor as trusting as he was here, and he did not expect strangers to be that way with him. She herself did not mind what had happened half as much as she minded having to come down to dinner in a dress that she had already worn three times.

MME STRAUS-MUGUET was waiting for them on the stairs. She praised them for carrying out her errand so successfully, in a city they did not know well, and invited them to take an apéritif with her before lunch on Sunday morning. She seemed subdued, and as if during their absence in Paris she had suffered a setback of some kind—a letter containing bad news that her mind kept returning to, or unkindness where she least expected it.

Feeling tired and bruised by their own series of setbacks, they hurried on up the stairs, conscious that the house was cold and there would not be any hot water to wash in and they would have to spend still another evening trying to understand people who could speak English but preferred to speak French.

From the conversation at the lunch table, Harold had pieced together certain facts about Mme Viénot’s relatives. The blonde young woman with the charming low voice and the beautiful accent was Mme Viénot’s niece, and the young man was her husband. Listening and waiting, he eventually found out their names: M. and Mme de Boisgaillard. And they had brought with them not only their own three-months-old baby but Mme de Boisgaillard’s sister’s two children, who were too young to come to the table, and a nursemaid. But when they sat down to dinner he still did not know who the middle-aged woman directly across from him was. There was something that separated her from everybody else at the table. Studying her, he saw that she wore no jewelry of any kind, and her blue dress was so plain and inexpensive-looking that he wasn’t absolutely sure that it wasn’t a uniform—in which case, she was the children’s nurse. Or perhaps M. de Boisgaillard’s mother, he decided; a woman alone in the world, and except for her claim on her son, without resources. Now that he was married, the claim was, of course, much slighter, and so she was obliged to be grateful that she was here at all. No one spoke to her. Thinking that it might ease her shyness, her feeling of being (as he was) excluded from the conversation, he smiled directly at her. The response was polite and impersonal, and he decided that, as so often was the case with him, she was past rescuing.

He listened to the pitch, the intonations, of Mme de Boisgaillard’s voice as if he were hearing a new kind of music, and decided that there were as many different ways of speaking French as there were French people. Because of her voice he would have trusted absolutely anything she said. But he trusted her anyway, because of the naturalness and simplicity of her manner. Looking at her, he felt he knew her very well, without knowing anything at all about her. It was as if they had played together as children. Her husband’s voice was rather high, thin, and reedy. It was also the voice of someone who knows exactly what to respect and what to be contemptuous of. So strange that two such different people should have married …

Mme de Boisgaillard spoke English fluently. In an undertone, with a delicate smile, she supplied Barbara, who sat next to her, with the word or phrase that would limit the context of an otherwise puzzling statement or explain the point of an amusing remark. Harold clutched at these straws eagerly. When Mme Viénot translated for them, it was usually some word that he knew already, and so she was never the slightest help. He watched M. de Boisgaillard until their eyes met across the table. The young Frenchman immediately looked away, and Harold was careful not to look at him again.

Mme Viénot was eager to learn whether her nephew thought the Schumann cabinet would jump during September. The young man and M. Carrère both thought it would—not because of a crisis, easy though it was to find one, but because of political squabbles that were of no importance except to the people directly involved.

“Why would they wait until September?” Harold asked. “Why not in August?”

“Because August is the month when Parliament takes its annual vacation,” Mme Viénot said. “No government has ever been known to jump at this time of year. They always wait until September.”

The joke was thoroughly enjoyed, and Mme Straus-Muguet nodded approvingly at Harold for having made it possible.

After the dessert course, napkins were folded in such a way as to conceal week-old wine stains and then inserted in their identifying rings.

Barbara saw that Mme Straus was aware that she had been looking at her, and said: “I have been admiring your little diamond heart.”

“You like it?” Mme Straus said. From her tone of voice one would almost have supposed that she was about to undo the clasp of the fine gold chain and present the little heart, chain and all, to the young woman at the far end of the table. However, her hands remained in her lap, and she said: “It was given to me by a friend, long long ago,” leaving them to decide for themselves whether the fiery little object was the souvenir of a romantic attachment. Mme Viénot gave her a glance of frank disbelief and pushed her chair back from the table.

The ladies left the dining room in the order of their age. Harold started to follow M. Carrère out of the room and to his surprise felt a hand on his sleeve, detaining him. M. de Boisgaillard drew him over to the other side of the room and asked him, in French, how he liked it at the château. Harold started to answer tactfully and saw that the face now looking down into his expected a truthful answer, was really interested, and would know if he was not candid; so he was, and the Frenchman laughed and suggested that they walk outside in the garden.

He opened one of the dining-room windows and stepped out, and Harold followed him around the corner of the house and through the gap in the hedge and into the potager. With a light rain—it was hardly more than a mist—falling on their shoulders, they walked up and down the gravel paths. The Frenchman asked how rich the ordinary man in America was. How many cars were there in the whole country? Did American women really rule the roost? And did they love their husbands or just love what they could get out of them? Was it true that everybody had running water and electricity? But not true that everybody owned their own house and every house had a dishwasher and a washing machine? Did Harold have any explanation to offer of how, in a country made up of such different racial strains, every man should be so passionately interested in machinery? Was it the culture or was it something that stemmed from the early days of the country—from its colonial period? How was America going to solve the Negro problem? Was it true that all Negroes were innately musical? And were they friendly with the white people who exploited them or did they hate them one and all? And how did the white people feel about Negroes? What did Americans think of Einstein? of Freud? of Stalin? of Churchill? of de Gaulle? Did they feel any guilt on account of Hiroshima? Did they like or dislike the French? Had he read the Kinsey Report, and was it true that virtually every American male had had some homosexual experience? And so on and so on.