William Maxwell - The Chateau

“BONJOUR, monsieur-dame,” said the tall, full-bosomed woman with carrot-colored hair and a beautiful carriage. She raised the front wheels of the teacart and then the back, so that they did not touch the telephone cord. When she had gone back to the kitchen, Harold said: “There are plates and cups for three, which can only mean that he is having breakfast with us.”

“You think?” Barbara said.

“By his own choice,” Harold said, “since there is now someone to bring him a tray in his room.”

They sat and waited. In due time, Eugène appeared and drew the armchair up to the teacart.

It was a beautiful day. The window was wide open and the sunlight was streaming in from the balcony. Eugène inquired about their evening with Sabine, and the telephone, like a spoiled child that cannot endure the conversation of the grownups, started ringing. Eugène left the room. When he came back, he said: “It is possible that I may be going down to the country on Friday. A cousin of Alix is marrying. And if I do go—as I should, since it is a family affair—it will be early in the morning, before you are up. And I may stay down for the week end.”

They tried not to look pleased.

He accepted a second cup of coffee and then asked what they had done about getting gasoline coupons. “But we don’t need them,” Harold said, and so, innocently, obliged Eugène to admit that he did. “I seldom enjoy the use of my car,” he said plaintively, “and it would be pleasant to have the gasoline for short trips into the country now and then.”

He reached into his bathrobe pocket and brought out a slip of paper on which he had written the address of the place they were to go to for gasoline coupons.

“How can we ask for gasoline coupons if we don’t have a car?” Harold said.

“As Americans traveling in France you are entitled to the coupons whether you use them or not,” Eugène said. “And the amount of gasoline that tourists are allowed is quite considerable.”

Harold put the slip of paper on the teacart and said: “Could you tell us— But there is no reason you should know, I guess. We have to get a United States Army visa to enter Austria.”

“I will call a friend who works at the American Embassy,” Eugène said, rising. “He will know.”

Five minutes later, he was back with the information Harold had asked for.

Walking past the open door of the dressing room, Harold saw the Germans for the first time that morning. They were crowded around Eugène, and pressing on him their latest thoughts about their predicament. He avoided looking at whoever was speaking to him, and his attention seemed to be entirely on the arrangement of his shirt tails inside his trousers.

Later he stopped to complain about them, standing in the center of the Americans’ room, with the door open, so that there was a good chance that he might be overheard. It was already too late for the Germans to get to the conference in Rome in time to present their credentials, he said. Their places would be taken by alternates.

“What will they do?” Harold asked. “Turn around and go home?”

“There are other conferences scheduled for other Italian cities,” Eugène said, “and they hope to be allowed to attend one of these. Unfortunately, there isn’t the slightest chance of their getting the visas they need to cross the Italian border. The whole thing is a nuisance—the kind of silliness only Germans are capable of.”

Though Eugène was bored with the Germans’ dilemma and despised them personally for having got themselves into it, they had thrown themselves on his kindness, and it appeared that he had no choice but to go on trying to help them.

The Americans spent the morning getting to know parts of Paris that are not mentioned in guidebooks. The address on Eugène’s slip of paper turned out to be incorrect; there was no such number. Harold was relieved; he had dreaded exposure. The information about where to go to get the Austrian visa was also wrong. They talked to the concierge of the building, who gave them new and explicit directions, and in a few minutes they found themselves peering through locked doors at the marble foyer of an unused public building. Eventually, by asking a gendarme, they arrived at the Military Permit Office. There they stood in line in a large room crowded with people whom no country wanted and whom France could not think what to do with. When Harold produced their American passports, the man next to him turned and looked at him reproachfully. All around them, people were arguing tirelessly with clerks who pretended (sometimes humorously) not to understand what they wanted, not to speak German or Italian, not to know that right there on the counter in front of them was the rubber stamp that would make further argument unnecessary. As Harold and Barbara went from clerk to clerk, from the large room on the first floor to a smaller office on the third floor, and finally outdoors with a new address to find, they began to feel less and less different from the homeless people around them, even though they had a perfectly good home and were only trying to get to a music festival. At the right place at last, they were told that they had to leave their passports with the application for their visas, which would be ready the next day.

After lunch, they walked through the looking glass, leaving the homeless on the other side, and spent the afternoon sight-seeing. They took the Métro to the Place du Trocadéro, descended the monumental stairs of the Palais de Chaillot, went through the aquarium, and then strolled across the Pont d’Ièna in the sunshine.

At the top of the Tour Eiffel there was a strong wind and they could not bear to look straight down. All that they remembered afterward of what they saw was the colored awnings all over Paris. They took a taxi home, and as they went down the hall to their own room they could hear the Germans talking to each other, behind the closed door of theirs.

Meeting Herr Rothenberg in the hall, they learned that he and his friends had spent the day going the rounds of the embassies and consulates.

“But you ought to be seeing Paris,” Harold said. “It’s so beautiful.”

“We will come back and see the museums another time,” Herr Rothenberg said, smiling and quite pleased with the Paris they had seen.

Shortly afterward, he appeared at their door and said that Françoise had gone home and could they please have some bread and butter and coffee?

Harold followed Barbara into the kitchen and as she was putting the kettle on he said: “Do you suppose they don’t realize that all those things are rationed?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but let’s not tell them.”

“All right. I wasn’t going to. It just occurred to me that maybe the national characteristics were asserting themselves.”

“I’m so in love with this kitchen,” Barbara said. “If it were up to me, I’d never leave.”

The two Americans and the three Germans had coffee together in Mme Cestre’s drawing room, with the shutters open and the light pouring in. The Germans showed Barbara snapshots of their wives, and Harold wrote their names and addresses in his financial diary, and then they all went out on the balcony so that Barbara could take the Berliners’ pictures. They stood in a row before her, three pale scarecrows stiffly composed in attitudes that would be acceptable to posterity.

Still in a glow from the success of the tea party, Harold went down into the Place Redouté and found the orange peddler and bought a bag of oranges from him, which he then presented to Herr Rothenberg at the door of their room, with a carefully prepared little speech and three thousand-franc notes, in case the Germans found themselves in need of money on the next lap of their journey. The effect of this act of generosity was partly spoiled because, out of a kind of Anglo-Saxon politeness they were unfamiliar with, he didn’t give them a chance to finish their speeches of gratitude. But at all events the money got from his wallet into theirs, where it very much needed to be.