William Maxwell - The Chateau

The less equipped you are to answer such questions, the more flattering it is to be asked them, but to answer even superficially in a foreign language you need more than a tourist’s vocabulary.

“You don’t speak German?”

Harold shook his head. They stood looking at each other helplessly.

“You don’t speak any English?” Harold said.

“Pas un mot.”

A few minutes later, as they were walking and talking again, the Frenchman forgot and shifted to German anyway, and Harold stopped him, and they went on trying to talk to each other in French. Very often Harold’s answer did not get put into the right words or else in his excitement he did not pronounce them well enough for them to be understood, the approximation being some other word entirely, and the two men stopped and stared at each other. Then they tried once more, and impasses that seemed hopeless were bridged after all; or if this didn’t happen, the subject was abandoned in favor of a new subject.

It began to rain in earnest, and they turned up their coat collars and went on walking and talking.

“Shall we go in?” the Frenchman asked, a moment later.

As they went back through the gap in the hedge, Harold said to himself that it was a different house they were returning to. By the addition of a man of the family it had changed; it had stopped being matriarchal and formal and cold, and become solid and hospitable and human, like other houses.

At the door of the petit salon, they separated. Harold took in the room at a glance. M. Carrère sat looking quite forlorn, the one man among so many women. And did he imagine it or was Mme Viénot put out with them? There was an empty chair beside Mme de Boisgaillard and he sat down in it and tried once more to follow the conversation. He learned that the woman he had taken for the children’s nurse or possibly M. de Boisgaillard’s mother was Mme de Boisgaillard’s mother instead; which meant that she was Mme Viénot’s sister and had a perfect right to be here. What he had failed to perceive, like the six blind men and the elephant, was that she was deaf and so could not take part in general conversation. During dinner she did not even try, but now if someone spoke directly to her she adjusted the pointer of the little black box that she held to her ear as if it were a miniature radio, and seemed to understand.

When the others retired to their rooms at eleven o’clock, Eugène de Boisgaillard swept the Americans ahead of him, through a doorway and down a second-floor hall they had not been in before, and they found themselves in a bedroom with a dressing room off it. They stood looking down at the baby, who was fast asleep on her stomach but escaped entirely from the covers, at right angles to the crib, with her knees tucked under her, her feet crossed like hands, her rump in the air.

Her mother straightened her around and covered her, and then they tiptoed back into the larger room and began to talk. Mme de Boisgaillard translated and summarized quickly and accurately, leaving them free to go on to the next thing they wanted to say.

Unlike M. Carrère, Eugène de Boisgaillard did not hate all Germans. His political views were Liberal and democratic. He was also as curious as a cat. He wanted to know how long Harold and Barbara had been married, and how they had met one another, and what part of America they grew up in. He asked their first names and then what their friends called them. He asked them to call him by his first name. And then the questions began again, as if the first thing in the morning he and they were starting out for the opposite ends of the earth and there was only tonight for them to get to know each other. Once, when a question was so personal that Harold thought he must have misunderstood, he turned to Mme de Boisgaillard and she smiled and shook her head ruefully and said: “I hope you do not mind. That is the way he is. When I think he cannot possibly have said what I think I have heard him say, I know that is just what he did say.”

At her husband’s suggestion, she left them and went downstairs to see what there was in the larder, and they were surprised to discover that without her they couldn’t talk to each other. They waited awkwardly until she came into the room carrying a tray with a big bowl of sour cream and four smaller bowls, a sugar bowl, and spoons.

Eugène de Boisgaillard pointed to the empty fireplace and said: “No andirons. Does the one in your room work?”

Harold explained that it had a shield over it.

“During the Occupation the Germans let the forests be depleted—intentionally—and so one is allowed to cut only so much wood,” Mme de Boisgaillard said, “and if they used it now there would not be enough for the winter. Poor Tante! She drives herself so hard.… The thing I always forget is what a beautiful smell this house has. It may be the box hedge, though Mummy says it is the furniture polish, but it doesn’t smell like any other house in the world.”

“Have your shoes begun to mildew?” Eugène de Boisgaillard said.

Barbara shook her head.

“They will,” he said.

“You will drive them away,” Mme de Boisgaillard said, “and then we won’t have anyone our age to talk to.”

“We will go after them,” Eugéne de Boisgaillard said, “talking every step of the way. The baby’s sugar ration,” he said, saluting the sugar bowl.

Sweetened with sugar, the half-solidified sour cream was delicious.

“Have you enjoyed knowing M. Carrère?” Eugène asked.

Harold said that M. Carrère seemed to be a very kind man.

“He’s also very rich,” Eugène said. “Everything he touches turns into more money, more gilt-edged stock certificates. He is a problem to the Bank of France. Toinette has a special tone of voice in speaking of him—have you noticed? Where does she place him, I wonder? On some secondary level. Not with Périclès, or Beethoven. Not with Louis XIV. With Saint-Simon, perhaps … In the past year I have learned how to interpret the public face. It has been very useful. The public face is much more ponderous and explicit than the private face and it asks only one question: ‘What is it you want?’ And whatever you want is unfortunately just the thing it isn’t convenient for you to be given.… Do you get on well with your parents, Harold?”

He listened attentively to Alix’s translation of the answer to this question and then said: “My father is very conservative. He has never in his whole life gone to the polls and voted.”

“Why not?” Barbara asked.

“His not voting is an act of protest against the Revolution.”

“You don’t mean the Revolution of 1789?”

“Yes. He does not approve of it.”

Tears of amusement ran down Harold’s cheeks and he reached for his handkerchief and wiped them away.

“What does your father do?” Barbara asked.

“He collects porcelain. That’s all he has done his whole life.”

In a moment Harold had to get his handkerchief out again as Eugène launched forth on the official and unofficial behavior of his superior, the Minister of Planning and External Affairs.

At one o’clock the Americans stood up to go, and, still talking, Eugène and Alix accompanied them down the upstairs hall until they were in their own part of the house. Whispering and tittering like naughty children, they said good night. Was Mme Viénot awake, Harold wondered. Could she hear them? Did she disapprove of such goings on?

Eugène said that he had one last question to ask.

“Don’t,” Alix whispered.

“Why not? Why shouldn’t I ask them?… Is there a double bed in your room?”

Harold shook his head.

“I knew it!” Eugène said. “I told Alix that there wouldn’t be. Don’t you find it strange—don’t you think it is extraordinary that all the double beds in the house are occupied by single women?”