William Maxwell - The Chateau

When they were on the outskirts of the village, they saw Mme Viénot’s gardener coming toward them in the cart and assumed he had business in the village. He stopped when he was abreast of them, and waited. They stood looking up at him and he told them to get in. Mme Viénot had sent him, thinking that they would be tired after their long day’s excursion. They were tired, and grateful that she had thought of them.

In the beautiful calm evening light, driving so slowly between fields that had just been cut, they learned that the white horse was named Pompon, and that he was thirty years old. The gardener explained that it was his little boy who had taken Harold by the hand and led him to the house of M. Fleury. They found it easy to talk to him. He was simple and direct, and so were the words he used, and so was the look in his eyes. They felt he liked them, and they wished they could know him better.

On the table in their room, propped against the vase of flowers, was a letter from Mme Straus-Muguet. The handwriting was so eccentric and the syntax so full of flourishes that Harold took it downstairs and asked Alix to translate it for them. Mme Straus was inviting them to take tea with her at the house of her friends, who would be happy to meet two such charming Americans.

He watched Alix’s face as she read the protestations of affection at the close of the letter.

“Why do you smile?”

She refused to explain. “You would only think me uncharitable,” she said. “As in fact I am.”

He was quite sure that she wasn’t uncharitable, so there must be something about Mme Straus that gave rise to that doubtful smile. But what? Though he again urged her to tell him, she would not. The most she would say was that Mme Straus was “roulante.”

He went back upstairs and consulted the dictionary. “Roulante” meant “rolling.” It also meant a “side-splitting, killing (sight, joke).”

Reluctantly, he admitted to himself, for the first time, that there was something theatrical and exaggerated about Mme Straus’s manner and conversation. But there was still a great gap between that and “side-splitting.” Did Alix see something he didn’t see? Probably she felt that as Americans they had a right to their own feelings about people, and did not want to spoil their friendship with Mme Straus. But in a way she had spoiled it, since it is always upsetting to discover that people you like do not think very much of each other.

When he showed Barbara the page of the dictionary, it turned out that she too had reservations about Mme Straus. “The thing is, she might become something of a burden if she attached herself to us while we’re in Paris. We’ll only be there for ten days. And I wouldn’t like to hurt her feelings.”

Though they did not speak of it, they themselves were suffering from hurt feelings; they did not understand why Alix would not spend more time with them. For reasons they could not make out, she was simply inaccessible. They knew that she slept late, and she was, of course, occupied with the baby, and perhaps with her sister’s children. But on the other hand, she had brought a nursemaid with her, so perhaps it wasn’t the children who were keeping her from them. Perhaps she didn’t want to see any more of them.… But if that were true, they would have felt it in her manner. When they met at mealtime, she was always pleased to see them, always acted as if their friendship was real and permanent, and she made the lunch and dinner table conversation much more enjoyable by the care she took of them. But why didn’t she want to go anywhere with them? Why did she never seek out their company at odd times of the day?

She was uneasy about Eugène—that much she did share with them. She had hoped that he would write and there had been no letter. Harold suggested that he might be too busy to write, since the government had jumped after all, without waiting this time for the August vacation to be over. He asked if the crisis would affect Eugène’s position, and she said that, actually, Eugène had two positions in the Ministry of Planning and External Affairs, neither of which would suffer any change under a different cabinet, since they were not that important.

The dining-room table was now the smallest the Americans had seen it and, raising her hearing aid to her ear, Mme Cestre took part in the conversation.

Alix explained that her mother’s health was delicate; she was a prey to mysterious diseases that the doctors could neither cure nor account for. There would be an outbreak of blisters on the ends of her fingers, and then it would go away as suddenly as it had come. She had attacks of dizziness, when the floor seemed to come up and strike her foot. She could not stand to be in the sun for more than a few minutes. Alix herself thought sometimes that it was because her mother was so good and kind—really much kinder than anybody else. Beggars, old women selling limp, tarnished roses, old men with a handful of pencils had only to look at her and she would open her purse. She could not bear the sight of human misery.

Leaning toward her mother, Alix said: “I have been telling Barbara and Harold how selfish you are.”

Mme Cestre raised the hearing aid to her ear and adjusted the little pointer. The jovial remark was repeated and she smiled benignly at her daughter.

When she entered the conversation, it was always abruptly, on a new note, since she had no idea what they were talking about. She broke in upon Mme Bonenfant’s observation that there was no one in Rome in August—that it was quite deserted, that the season there had always been from November through Lent—with the observation that cats are indifferent to their own reflection in a mirror.

“Dogs often fail to recognize themselves,” she said, as they all stared at her in surprise. “Children are pleased. The wicked see what other people see … and the mirror sees nothing at all.”

Or when Alix was talking about the end of the war, and how she and Sabine suddenly decided that they wanted to be in Paris for the Liberation and so got on their bicycles and rode there, only to be sent back to the country because there wasn’t enough food, Mme Cestre remarked to Barbara: “My husband used to do the packing always. I did it once when we were first married, but he had been a bachelor too long, and no one could fold coatsleeves properly but him.… It is quite true that when I did it they were wrinkled.”

It was hard not to feel that this note of irrelevance must be part of her character, but once she was oriented in the conversation, Mme Cestre’s remarks were always pertinent to it, and interesting. Her English was better than Alix’s or than Mme Viénot’s, and without any trace of a French accent.

Sometimes she would sit with her hearing aid on her lap, content with her own thoughts and the perpetual silence that her deafness created around her. But then she would raise the hearing aid to her ear and prepare to re-enter the conversation.

“Did Alix tell you that I am writing a book?” she said to her sister as they were waiting for Thérèse and the boy to clear the table for the next course.

“I didn’t know you were, Maman,” Alix said.

“I thought I had told you. It is in the form of a diary, and it consists largely of aphorisms.”

“You are taking La Rochefoucauld as your model,” Mme Bonenfant said approvingly.

“Yes and no,” Mme Cestre said. “I have a title for it: ‘How to Be a Successful Mother-in-Law.’ … The relationship is never an easy one, and a treatise on the subject would be useful, and perhaps sell thousands of copies. I shall ask Eugène to criticize it when I am finished, and perhaps do a short preface, if he has the time. I find I have a good deal to say.… ”