William Maxwell - The Chateau

Saturday morning, Harold came down in the elevator alone, and, avoiding the reproachful look of the concierge as he passed through the lobby on his way to the street door, went to the Cunard Line office to see if their return passage could be changed to an earlier date, and was told that they were fortunate to be leaving as soon as the middle of October; the earliest open sailing was December first.

“I think it’s a sign,” Barbara said.

“We might as well take what we have,” he said. “While we have it.”

They got into a taxi and went back to the Left Bank and fanned out through the neighborhood of St. Germain-des-Prés—the rue Jacob, the rue de l’Université, the rue des Saints Pères, the rue des B eaux-Arts … The story was always the same. Their feet ached, their eyes saw nothing but the swinging hotel sign far up the street. Harold had tried to get Barbara to stay in their room while he walked the streets, but she insisted on keeping him company.

At one o’clock she said: “I’m hungry,” and he said: “Shall we try one more?” The concierge was eating his lunch when they walked into the hotel lobby. The smell of beef casserole pierced the Americans to the heart. It was the essence of everything French, and it wasn’t for them.

When they returned to their hotel, the concierge called to Harold. Expecting the worst, he crossed the lobby to the desk. The concierge handed him a letter and Harold recognized Steve Robertson’s tiny, precise handwriting. Inside there was an advertisement clipped from that morning’s Paris Herald . The Hôtel Paris-Dinard, in the rue Cassette, had a vacancy—a room with a bath.

THEY MOVED across the river the first thing Sunday morning, and by lunchtime their suitcases were unpacked and stored away under the bed, their clothes were hanging in the armoire, the washbasin in the bathroom was full of soaking nylon, the towel racks were full, the guidebooks were set out on the rickety little table by the window, and they had all but forgotten about that monotonous dialogue between the possessor and the dispossessed, which began: “Nous désirons une chambre pour deux personnes …”

The hotel was very quiet, there were no other Americans staying there, and they were delighted with the room and the view from their window. They were up high, in the treetops, and could see through the green leaves the greener dome of a church. They looked down into a walled garden directly across the street from the hotel. The room was not large, but it was not too small, and it was clean and quiet and had a double bed and a bathroom adjoining it, and it was not expensive. Fortune is never halfhearted when it decides to reverse itself.

The green dome was in their guidebooks; it was the Church of the Ancient Convent of the Carmelites. During the Reign of Terror, a hundred and sixteen priests had had their throats cut on the church steps, and every morning, in the darkness and the cold just before dawn, Harold was wakened by a bell tolling, so loud and so near that it made his heart race wildly. Barbara slept through it. Leo is sleepy at night and easily wakened in the morning; the opposite is true of Virgo.

When the bell stopped tolling, he drifted off. Three hours later the big breakfast tray was deposited on their laps, before they were wholly awake or decently clothed. Though white flour was illegal, by paying extra they could have, with their coffee, croissants made of white flour. They were still warm from the bakery oven. Through the open window came the massed voices of school children in the closed garden, so like the sound of noisy birds. After they had finished their breakfast they fell asleep again, and when they woke, the street was quiet; the children had been swallowed up by the school. At recess time they reappeared, but the racket was never again so vivid during the rest of the day.

The owner of the hotel sat at a high desk in the lobby, behind his ledger, and nodded remotely to them as they came and went. If they turned right when they emerged from the hotel, they came to a street of religious-statuary shops, which took them into the Place St. Sulpice, with its fountain and plane trees and heavy baroque church. If they turned left, they came to the rue Vaugirard, which was busier, and if they turned left again, they eventually came to the Palais du Luxembourg and the gardens. Sitting on iron chairs a few feet away from the basin where the children sailed their boats, they read or looked at the faces—narrow, unhandsome compared to the Italian faces they had left behind, but intense, nervously alive. Or they got up and walked, past the palace, between the flower beds, down one of the formal avenues.

In an alley off the Place St. Sulpice they found the perfect restaurant, and they went there every day, for lunch or dinner or both. Harold held the door open for Barbara, and they were greeted as they came in—by madame behind her desk and then by monsieur with his hands full of plates—and went on into the back room, where they usually sat at the same table in order to be served by a waiter called Pierre, who took exquisite care of them and smiled at them as if he were their affectionate older brother. Here in this small square room, eating was as simple and as delightful as picking wildflowers in a wood. They had artichokes and pâté en croûte, green peas and green beans from somebody’s garden, and French-fried potatoes that were rushed to their table from the kitchen. They had little steaks with Béarnaise sauce, and pheasant, and roast duck, and sweetbreads, and calf’s liver, and brains, and venison. They had raspberries and pears and fraises des bois and strawberry tarts, and sometimes with their dessert Pierre smuggled them whipped cream. They drank Mâcon blanc or Mâcon rouge. They ate and drank with rapture, and, strangely, grew thinner and thinner.

Though there were always people in the Place St. Sulpice, they almost never saw anybody in the rue Cassette. It had not always been so quiet. Walking home one day they saw there wasn’t a single house that didn’t have pockmarks that could only have been made by machine-gun bullets in the summer of 1944.

They learned to use the buses, so that they could see the upper world of Paris when they went out, instead of the underworld of the Métro. They also walked—down the rue Vaugirard to the Odéon and then down the rue de l’Odéon to the boulevard St. Germain; down the boulevard St. Germain to the Place St. Germain-des-Prés. Over and over, as if this were a form of memorizing, they walked in the rue Bonaparte and the rue Jacob, in the rue Dauphine and the rue du Cherche-Midi, in the rue Cardinale and the Carrefour de l’Odéon, in the rue des Ciseaux and the rue des Saints Pères, in the boulevard St. Germain and the boulevard Raspail.

In their hurry to move into a hotel that wanted them, they neglected to leave behind their new address. Their first piece of mail, forwarded by the bank, was a letter from Mme Straus-Muguet:

Sunday

Dear Little Friends:

What a disappointment! I passed by your hotel a little while ago and you had taken flight this very morning. But where? And how to rejoin you? Have you returned to the country? In short, a word guiding me, I beg of you, for I am leaving for Sarthe for six days, and I had so much hoped to spend this past week with you. Well, that’s life! But your affectionate Minou is so sorry not to see you, and fondly embraces you both!

Straus-Muguet

Harold called the convent in Auteuil, and was told that Mme Straus-Muguet had left. Barbara wrote and told her where they were, and that they would be here until the nineteenth of October. She also wrote to Alix, who answered immediately, inviting them down to the country for the week end.