William Maxwell - The Chateau

The taxi was where they had left it. It had waited all afternoon for them, time in Brenodville being far less dear than gasoline. Mme Viénot’s errand took them a considerable distance out of their way but gave them an opportunity to see the villages of Chouzy and Onzain. The grain merchant at Onzain was away, and his wife refused to let Mme Viénot have the laying mash she had come for. They rode home with two large sacks of inferior horse feed tied across the front and back of the taxi.

That evening before dinner, Harold heard a knock and went to the door. Mme Straus entered breathing harshly from the stairs. “What a charming room!” she exclaimed.

She was leaving tomorrow morning, to go and stay with friends at Chaumont, and she wanted to give them her address and telephone number in Paris. “When you come,” she said, squeezing Barbara’s hand, “we will have lunch together, and afterward take a drive through the city. It will be my great pleasure to show it to you.”

She had brought with her two books—two thin volumes of poetry, which they were to read and return to her when they met again—and also some letters. They lay mysteriously in her lap while she told them about the convent in Auteuil where she now lived. She was most fortunate that the sisters had taken her in; the waiting list was long. And the serenity was so good for her.

She looked down at the letters in her lap. They were from Mme Marguerite Mailly, of the Comédie Française, whose Phèdre and Andromaque were among the great performances of the French theater. Mme Straus considered these letters her most priceless possession, and took them with her wherever she went. Mme Mailly’s son, such a gifted and handsome boy, so intelligent, was only eighteen when his plane was shot down at the very beginning of the war.

“I too lost a son in this way,” Mme Straus said.

“Your son was killed in the war?” Harold asked.

“He died in an airplane accident in the thirties,” Mme Straus-Muguet said. The look in her eyes as she told them this was not tragic but speculative, and he saw that she was considering their chaise longue. Because she knew only too well the dangers of giving way to immoderate grief, she had been able, she said, to lead her friend gently and gradually to an attitude of acceptance. She opened her lorgnette and, peering through it, read excerpts from the actress’s letters, in which Mme Mailly thanked her dear friend for pointing out to her the one true source of consolation.

Harold read the inscription on the flyleaf of one of the books (the handwriting was bold and enormous) and then several of the poems. They seemed to be love poems—incestuous love sonnets to the actress’s dead son, whose somewhat girlish countenance served as a frontispiece. But when would he ever have time to read them?

“I’m afraid something might happen to them while they’re in our possession,” he said. “I really don’t think we ought to keep them.”

But Mme Straus was insistent. They were to keep the two volumes of poetry until they saw her again.

The next morning, standing in the foyer, with her suitcases around her on the black and white marble floor, she kept the taxi waiting while she thanked Mme Viénot elaborately for her hospitality. When she turned and put out her hand, Harold bent down and kissed her on the cheek. Her response was pure pleasure. She dropped her little black traveling bag, raised her veil, said: “You have made it possible for me to do what I have been longing to do,” and with her hands on both his shoulders kissed him first on one cheek and then on the other.

“Voilà l’amour,” Mme Viénot said, smiling wickedly. The remark was ignored.

Mme Straus kissed Barbara and then, looking into their eyes affectionately, said: “Thank you, my dear children, for not allowing the barrier of age to come between us!”

Then she got into the taxi and drove off to stay with her friends at Chaumont. In order that her friends here should not be totally without resource during her absence, she was leaving behind the box of diamonoes .

THAT AFTERNOON, Barbara and Harold and Alix took the bus into Blois. The Americans were paying still another visit to the château; Harold wanted to see with his own eyes the rooms through which the Duc de Guise had moved on the way to his death. They suggested that Alix come with them, but she had errands to do, and she wanted to pay a visit to the nuns at the nursery school where she had worked during the early part of the war. They would gladly have given up the château for the nursery school if she had asked them to go with her, but she didn’t ask them, and she refused gently to meet them for tea at the pâtisserie. They did not see her again until they met at the end of the afternoon. She was pushing a second-hand baby carriage along the sidewalk and they saw that she was radiantly happy.

“It is a very good carriage,” she said, “and it was cheap. Eugène will be very pleased with me.”

The baby carriage was hoisted on top of the bus, and they took turns pushing it home from the highway. Alix pointed out the house of Thérèse’s family, and in a field Harold saw a horse-drawn reaper. “Why, I haven’t seen one of those since I was a child!” he said excitedly, and then proceeded to describe to Alix the elaborate machine that had taken its place.

It was a nice evening, and they were enjoying the walk. “I hope you will decide to stay in our apartment,” Alix said suddenly. “It would be so pleasant for Eugène. It would mean company for him.”

They did not have to answer because at that moment they were passing a farmhouse and she saw a little boy by the woodshed and spoke to him. He was learning to ride a bicycle that was too big for him. She left the baby carriage in the middle of the road and went over to give him some pointers.

When they got home, the Americans went straight to their room, intending to rest before dinner. Harold had just got into bed and pulled the covers up when they heard a knock. Barbara slipped on her dressing gown, and before she got to the door it opened. Though one says the nail is drawn to the magnet, if you look very closely you see that the magnet is also drawn to the nail. Mme Viénot had come to tell them about her visit to the mayor of Brenodville.

“… I said that the ferry at Chaumont was extremely dangerous, and that some day, unless something was done about it, a number of people would lose their lives.… You won’t believe what he said. The whole history of modern France is in this one remark. He said”—her eyes shone with amusement—“he said: ‘I know but it’s at Chaumont.’ … How was your afternoon?”

She sat down on the edge of Harold’s bed, keeping him a prisoner there; he was stark naked under the covers.

Since she did not seem concerned by the fact that his shoulders and arms were bare, he did his best to forget this, and she went on talking cozily and cheerfully, as if their intimacy were long established and a source of mutual pleasure. He realized that, with reservations and at arm’s length, he really did like her. She was intelligent and amusing, and her pale-blue eyes saw either everything or nothing. Her day was full of small but nevertheless remarkable triumphs. In spite of rationing and shortages of almost everything you could think of, the food was always interesting. Though the house was cold, it was also immaculately clean. And there were never any awkward pauses in the conversations that took place in front of the empty Franklin stove or around the dining-room table.

She told them how she had searched for and finally found the wallpaper for this room; and about the picturesque fishing villages and fiords of Ile d’Yeu, where, in happier circumstances, the family always went in August, for the sea air and the bathing; and about the year that Eugène and Alix had spent in Marseilles. Rather than be a fonctionnaire in Paris, Eugène chose to work as a day laborer, carrying mortar and rubble, in Marseilles. They lived in the slums, and their evenings were spent among working people, whom he hoped to educate so that France would have a future and not, like Italy, merely a past. He was not the only young man of aristocratic family to dedicate himself to the poor in this way; there were others; there was, in fact, a movement, which was now losing its impetus because the church had not encouraged it. Eugène should perhaps have taken holy orders, as he once thought seriously of doing. It was in his temperament to go the whole way, to go to extremes, to become a saint. Shortly before the baby was born, they came back to Paris. Alix did not want their child to grow up in such sordid surroundings. He was not very happy in his job at the Ministry of Planning and External Affairs, and Mme Viénot could not help thinking that both of them were less happy than they had been before, but the decision was, of course, the only right one. And after all, if one applied oneself, and had the temperament for it, one could do very well in the government. Her son-in-law, for instance—“I hope you didn’t repeat to M. Carrère what I said about his being talked about as the future Minister of Finance?”