William Maxwell: The Chateau

“Ecrevisses” turned out to be tiny crawfish, fried, with tartar sauce. There were only two other guests in the dining room, a man and a woman who spoke in such low tones and were so absorbed in each other that it was quite clear to anyone who had ever seen a French movie that they were lovers.

As the waitress changed their plates for the fourth time, Barbara said: “Wonderful food!” The color had come back into her face.

“Wonderful wine,” Harold said, and asked the waitress what it was that they were drinking. The wine was Algerian and had no name, so he couldn’t write it down in his little notebook.

When they went up to their room, the images started coming once more. Their eyelids ached. They felt strung on wires.

The street outside their window was as quiet as a cemetery. They undressed and sank sighing into the enormous bed, so like a mother to them in their need of rest.

AFTER TEN O’CLOCK there was no sound in the little hotel, and no traffic in the street. The night trucks passed by a different route.

At midnight it rained. Between three and four in the morning, the sky cleared and there were stars. The wind was off the sea. The air was fresh. A night bird sang.

The sleepers knew nothing whatever about any of this. One minute they were dropping off to sleep and the next they heard shouting and opened their eyes to broad daylight. When they sat up in bed they saw that the street was full of people, walking or riding bicycles. The women all wore shapeless long black cotton dresses. An old woman went by, leading her cow. Chickens and geese. Goats. The shops were all open. A man with a vegetable cart was shouting that his string beans were tender and his melons ripe.

“It’s like being in the front row at the theater,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“Wonderful.”

“So do I. Do you think if I pressed this button anything would happen?”

“You mean like breakfast?”

She nodded.

“Try it,” he said with a yawn.

Five minutes later there was a knock at the door and the waitress came in with a breakfast tray. “Bonjour, monsieur-dame.”

“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he said. “Avez-vous bien dormi?”

“Oui, merci. Très bien. Et vous?”

“Moi aussi.”

“Little goat, bleat. Little table, appear,” Harold said as the door closed after her. “Have some coffee.”

After breakfast, they got up and dressed. She packed while he was downstairs paying the bill. The concierge called a taxi for them.

“I hate to leave that little hotel,” she said, looking back through the rear window as they drove off.

“I didn’t mean for the taxi to come quite so soon,” he said. “I was hoping we could explore the village first.”

But he was relieved that they were on their way again. Six days on shipboard had made him hungry for movement. They rode through the flat countryside with their faces pressed to the car windows.

“Just look at that woodpile!”

“Look how the orchard is laid out.”

“Never mind the orchard, look at the house!”

“Look at the vegetable garden.”

Look, look.…

Though they thought they knew what to expect, at their first glimpse of the medieval abbey they both cried out in surprise. Rising above the salt marshes and the sand flats, it hung, dreamlike, mysterious, ethereal. “Le Mont-Saint-Michel,” the driver said respectfully. As the taxi brought them nearer, it changed; the various parts dissolved their connection with one another in order to form new connections. The last connection of all was with the twentieth century. There were nine chartered sight-seeing buses outside the medieval walls, and the approach to the abbey was lined on both sides of the street with hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops.

The concierge of the Hôtel Mère Poulard was not put out with them for arriving a day late. Their room was one flight up, and they tried not to see the curtains, which were a large-patterned design of flowers in the most frightful colors. Without even opening their suitcases, they started up the winding street of stairs. Mermaid voices sang to them from the doorways of the open-fronted shops (“Monsieur-dame … monsieur-dame …”) and it was hard not to stop and look at everything, because everything was for sale. He bought two tickets for the conducted tour of the abbey, and they stood a little to one side, waiting for the tour to begin.

“Did you ask for a guide who speaks English?”

He shook his head.

“Why not?”

“I don’t think there are any,” he said, arguing by analogy from the fact that there were no porters in the railway stations.

“The other time, we always had a guide who spoke English.”

“I know, but that was before the war.”

“You could ask them if there is one.”

But he was reluctant to ask. Instead, he studied the uniformed guides, trying to make out from their faces if they spoke English. At last he went up to the ticket booth and the ticket seller informed him disapprovingly—rather as if he had asked if the abbey was for sale—that the guides spoke only French.

It was their first conducted tour and they tried very hard to understand what the guide said, but names, dates, and facts ran together, and sometimes they had to fall back on enjoying what their eyes saw as they went from room to room. What they saw—stone carvings, stone pillars, vaulting, and archways—seemed softened, simplified, and eroded not only by time but also by the thousands and thousands of human eyes that had looked at it. But in the end, reality failed them. They felt that some substitution had been effected, and that this was not the real abbey. Or if it was, then something was gone from it, something that made all the difference, and they were looking at the empty shell.

They stood in front of the huge fireplace in the foyer of their hotel and watched the famous omelets being made. With their own omelet they had a green salad and a bottle of white wine, which was half a bottle too much. Half drunk, they staggered upstairs to their room and fell asleep in the room with the frightful curtains, to the sound of the omelet whisk. When they woke, the afternoon was half gone. Lying in one another’s arms, dreamy and drained, they heard a strange new sound, and sat up and saw through the open casements the sea come rushing in. Within twenty minutes all the surrounding land but the causeway by which they had come from Pontorson was under water. They waited for that too to be covered, but this wonderful natural effect, so often described by earlier travelers, the tide at Mont-Saint-Michel, had been tampered with. The island was not an island any more; the water did not cover the tops of the sight-seeing buses; it did not even cover their hubcaps.

But another tide rising made them turn away from the window. All afternoon, while they were making love and afterward, whether they were awake or asleep, the omelet whisk kept beating and the human tide came and went under their window: tourists from Belgium, tourists from Denmark and Sweden and Switzerland, tourists from Holland, Breton tourists in embroidered velvet costumes, tourists from all over France.

In the evening, they dressed and went downstairs. The omelet cook was again making omelets in front of the roaring wood fire. Harold found out from the concierge that there was no provision in the timetable of the S.N.C.F. for a quick, easy journey by train from Mont-Saint-Michel to Cap Finisterre. They would have to go to Brest, which they had no desire to see, changing trains a number of times along the way. At Brest they could take a bus or a local train to Concarneau.

They stepped out of the hotel into a surprising silence. The cobblestone street was empty. The chartered buses were all gone.