William Maxwell: The Chateau

Turning their back on the street of stairs, they followed the upward-winding dirt paths, and discovered the little gardens, here, there, and everywhere. They stood looking down on the salt marshes and the sandbars. Above them the medieval abbey hung dreamlike and in the sky, and that was where they were also, they realized with surprise. The swallows did not try to sell them anything, and the sea air made them excited. Time had gone off with the sight-seeing buses, and they were free to look to their heart’s content. Stone towers, slate roofs, half-timbered houses, cliffs of cut stone, thin Gothic windows and crenelated walls and flying buttresses, the rock cliffs dropping sheer into the sea and the wet sand mirroring the sky, cloud pinnacles that were changing color with the coming on of night, and the beautiful past, that cannot quite bear to go but stands here (as it does everywhere, but here especially) saying Good-by, good-by .…

SHORTLY BEFORE NOON the next day, they returned to Pontorson by bus, left their luggage at the hotel, where their old room was happily waiting for them, and went off sight-seeing. The bus driver was demonically possessed. Dogs, chickens, old people, and children scattered at the sound of his horn. The people who got on at villages and crossroads kept the bus waiting while they delivered involved messages to the driver or greeted those who were getting off. Bicycles accumulated on the roof of the bus. Passengers stood jammed together in the aisles. On a cool, cloudy, Wednesday afternoon, the whole countryside had left home and was out enjoying the pleasures of travel.

St. Malo was disappointing. Each time they came to a gateway in the ramparts of the old town, they stopped and looked in. The view was always the same: a street of brand-new boxlike houses that were made of stone and would last forever. They took a motor launch across the harbor to Dinard, which seemed to be made up entirely of hotels and boarding houses, all shabby and in need of paint. The tide was far out, the sky was a leaden gray, the wind was raw. At Concarneau it would be colder still.

They bought postcards to prove to themselves later that they had actually been to Dinard, and tried to keep warm by walking. They soon gave up and took the launch back across the harbor. Something that should have happened had not happened; they had been told that Dinard was charming, and they had not been charmed by it, through no fault of theirs. And St. Malo was completely gone. There was nothing left that anybody would want to see. The excursion had not been a success. And yet, in a way, it had; they’d had a nice day. They’d enjoyed the bus ride and the boat ride and the people. They’d enjoyed just being in France.

They had the seven-course dinner again, and, lying in bed that night, they heard singing in the street below their window. (Who could it be? So sad …)

In the morning they explored the village. They read the inscriptions in the little cemetery and, in an atmosphere of extreme cordiality, cashed a traveler’s check at the mairie. They stared in shop windows. A fire broke out that was like a fire in a dream. Smoke came pouring out of a building; shopkeepers stood in their doorways watching and made comments about it, but did not try to help the two firemen who came running with a hose cart and began to unreel the hose and attach it to a hydrant in a manhole. Though they couldn’t have been quicker or more serious about their work, after twenty minutes the hose was still limp. The whole village could have gone up in flames, and for some strange reason it didn’t. The smoke subsided, and the shopkeepers withdrew into their shops. Barbara saw a cowhide purse with a shoulder strap in the window of a leather shop, and when they reappeared a few minutes later, she was wearing the purse and he was writing “purse—1850 fr.” in his financial diary.

They went back to the hotel and the waitress drew them into the dining room, where she had arranged on an oak sideboard specimens of woodcarving, the hobby of her brother, who had been wounded in the war and could not do steady work. The rich Americans admired but did not buy his chef-d’œuvre, the art-nouveau book ends. Instead, trying not to see the disappointment in her eyes, they took the miniature sabots (500 fr.), which would do nicely for a present when they got back home and meanwhile take up very little room in their luggage. The concierge inquired about their morning and they told him about the fire. A sliding panel in the wall at the foot of the stairs slid open. The cook and the kitchenmaid were also interested.

Upstairs in their room, he said: “I don’t suppose we ought to stay here when there are a thousand places in France that are more interesting.”

“I could stay here the rest of my life,” Barbara said.

They did nothing about leaving. They squandered the whole rest of the day, walking and looking at things. As for their journey to Brittany, they would do better to go inland, the concierge said; at Rennes, for example, they could get an express train from Paris that would take them straight through to Brest.

The next morning, they closed their suitcases regretfully and paid the bill (surprisingly large) and said good-by to the waitress, the chambermaid, the cook, and the kitchenmaid, all of whom they had grown fond of. Their luggage went by pushcart to the railway station, and they followed on foot, with the concierge. Out of affection and because he was sorry to see them go, the concierge was keeping them company as long as possible, and where else would they find a concierge like him?

When they got off the train in Rennes, the weather had grown colder. There was no train for Brest until the next day, and so they walked half a block to the Hôtel du Guesclin et Terminus. Rennes was an ugly industrial city, and they wished they were in Pontorson. An obliging waiter in the restaurant where they ate dinner gave Barbara the recipe for Palourdes farcies. “Clams, onions, garlic, parsley,” Harold wrote in his financial diary. It was raining when they woke the next morning. Their hotel room was small and cramped and a peculiar shape. Only a blind person could have hung those curtains with that wallpaper. They could hardly move for their luggage, which they hated the sight of. What pleasure could they possibly have at the seashore in this weather? They decided to go farther inland, to Le Mans, in the hope that it would be warmer. When they got there, they could decide whether to take the train to Brest or one going in the opposite direction, to Paris. But they had not planned to be in Paris until September, and perhaps they would like Le Mans enough to stay there a week. They had arranged to spend the two weeks after that as paying guests at a château in Touraine.

Late that same afternoon, pale and tired after two train journeys—Le Mans was hideous—they stood in the lobby of the Hôtel Univers in Tours, watching the profile of the concierge, who was telephoning for them and committed heart and soul to their cause. With the door of the phone booth closed, they couldn’t hear what he said to the long-distance operator, but they could tell instantly by the way he shed his mask of indifference that he was talking to someone at the château. They watched his eyes, his expression, his sallow French face, for clues.

The call was brief. The concierge put the receiver back on its hook and, turning, pushed open the glass door. “I talked to Mme Viénot herself,” he said. “It’s all right for you to come.”

“Thank God,” Harold said. “Now we can relax.”

Taking Barbara’s arm above the elbow, he guided her across the lobby to the street door. Outside, a white-gloved policeman directed the flow of Saturday-afternoon bicycle traffic around the orange and green flower beds in the middle of a busy intersection.