William Maxwell - The Chateau

Their hotel room was small and bare but it looked out over the harbor. Undressing for bed, Harold would step out onto their balcony in his bathrobe, see the lanterns hanging from the masts of fishing boats, hear God knows what mermaid singing, and reach for his bathing slip. At night the water was full of phosphorescence. They slept the sleep of stones. The man in the camel’s-hair coat could not find them. Those faint lines in her forehead, put there prematurely by riddles at three a.m., by curtains that did not hang straight in the dark, by faults there was no correcting, disappeared. With his lungs full of sea air, he held himself straighten “I feel the way I ought to have felt when I was seventeen and didn’t,” he said. Their skin grew darker and darker. Their faces bloomed. The very bed they made love on was like a South Sea Island.

They should never have left Beaulieu, but they did; after ten days, he went and got bus tickets, and she packed their suitcases, and he went downstairs and paid the bill, and early the next morning they stood in the road, waiting for the bus to Marseilles. It is impossible to say why people put so little value on complete happiness.

They arrived at Marseilles at five o’clock in the evening. The city was plastered with posters advertising the annual industrial fair, and they were turned away from one hotel after another. They decided that the situation was hopeless, and Harold told the taxi driver to take them to the railway station. The next train to anywhere left at seven thirty a.m. They drove back into the center of town and tried more places. While Harold was standing on the sidewalk, wondering where to go next, a man came up to him and handed him a card with the name of a hotel on it. Harold showed the card to the taxi driver, who tore it up. Though they had no place to stay, they had a friend; the driver had taken them under his protection; their troubles were his. He remained patient and optimistic. After another hour and a half, Harold dipped a pen into an inkwell and signed the register of the Hôtel Splendide. It had a hole right down through the center of the building, because the elevator shaft was being rebuilt. The lobby was full of bricks and mortar and scaffolding, and their room was up five flights and expensive, but they knew how lucky they were to have a roof over their heads. And besides, this time tomorrow they would be in Paris.

They went for a walk before dinner and found the Old Port, but whatever was picturesque had been obliterated by the repeated bombings. They saw some sailboats along an esplanade that could have been anywhere, and left that in favor of a broad busy boulevard with shops. After a few blocks they turned back. As a rule, the men who turned to stare at Barbara Rhodes in public places were generally of a romantic disposition or else old enough to be her father. Even more than her appearance, her voice attracted and disturbed them, reminding them of what they themselves had been like at her age, or throwing them headlong into an imaginary conversation with her, or making them wonder whether in giving the whole of their affection to one woman they had settled for less than they might have got if they had had the courage and the patience to go on looking. But this was not true here. In the eyes that were turned toward her, there was no recognition of who she was but only of the one simple use that she could be put to.

Harold had the name of a restaurant, and the shortest way to it was an alley so dark and sinister-looking that they hesitated to enter it, but it was only two blocks long and they could see a well-lighted street at the other end, and so they started on, and midway down the alley encountered a scene that made their knees weak—five gendarmes struggling to subdue a filthy, frightened, ten-year-old boy. At the corner they came upon the restaurant, brightly lighted, old-fashioned, glittering, clean. The waiters were in dinner jackets, and the food was the best they had had in Europe. They managed to relegate to the warehouse of remembered dreams what they had just seen in the alley; also the look of considered violence in faces they did not ever want to see again.

THE PORTER who carried their heavy luggage through the Gare Montparnasse informed them that there was a taxi strike in Paris. He put the luggage down at the street entrance, and pointed to the entrance to the Métro, directly across the street. “If you’ll just help me get these down into the station,” Harold said. The porter was not permitted to go outside the railway station, and left them stranded in the midst of their seven pieces of luggage. Though they had left the two largest suitcases here in Paris with the American Express, during their travels they had acquired two more that were almost as big. Harold considered moving the luggage in stages and found that he didn’t have the courage to do this. Somewhere—in Italy or Austria or the South of France—he had lost contact with absolutes, and he was now afraid to take chances where the odds were too great. While they stood there helplessly at the top of a broad flight of stone steps, discussing what to do, a tall, princely man with a leather strap over his shoulder came up to them and offered his services.

“Yes,” Harold said gratefully, “we do need you. If you’ll just help me get the suitcases across the street and down into the Métro—” and the man said: “No, monsieur, I will go with you all the way to your hotel.”

He draped himself with the two heaviest suitcases, using his strap, and then picked up three more. Harold shouldered the dufflebag, and Barbara took the dressing case, and they made their way through the bicycles and down the stairs. While they stood waiting for a train, the Frenchman explained that he was not a porter by profession; he worked in a warehouse. He had been laid off, the day before, and he had a family to support, and so he had come to the railway station, hoping to pick up a little money. At this moment, he said, there were a great many people in Paris in his circumstances.

At his back there was a poster that read, incongruously: L’Invitation au Château . Harold thought of Beaumesnil. Then, turning, he looked up into the man’s eyes and saw that they were full of sadness.

Each day, the Frenchman said, things got a little worse, and they were going to continue to get worse. The only hope was that General de Gaulle would come back into power.

“Do you really think that?” Harold said, concerned that a man of this kind, so decent and self-respecting, so courteous, so willing to take on somebody else’s heavy suitcases while weighted down by his own burdens, should have lost all faith in democracy.

They talked politics all the way to the Concorde station, and made their way up the steps and across the rue de Rivoli and past the Crillon and down the narrow, dark, rue Boissy d’Anglas. In the lobby of the Hôtel Vouillemont, the Frenchman divested himself of the suitcases, and Harold paid him, and shook hands with him, and thanked him, and thought: It isn’t right to let him go like this when he is in trouble , but did let him go, nevertheless, and turned to the concierge’s desk, thinking that their own troubles were over, and learned that they were just beginning. They had wired ahead for a reservation but the concierge was not happy to see them. The delegates to the General Assembly of the United Nations, the secretarial staff, the delegates’ families and servants—some three thousand people—had descended on Paris the day before, and the Hôtel Vouillemont was full; all the hotels were full. How long did monsieur expect to stay?… Ah no. Decidedly no. They could stay here until they had found other accommodation, but the sooner they did this the better.