William Maxwell - The Chateau

“Do you think that means we’re to pay or are we really invited?” he said.

“I don’t know. Do you want to go? I’d just as soon.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to leave Paris.”

They heard a gala performance of Boris Godounov at the Opéra, with the original Bakst settings and costumes. On a rainy night they got into a taxi and drove to the Opéra Comique. The house was sold out but there were folding seats. Blocking the center aisle, and only now and then wondering what would happen if a fire broke out, they heard Les Contes d’Hoffman .

They went to the movies, they went to the marionette theater in the Champs-Elysées. They went to the Grand Guignol. They went to the Cirque Médrano.

“What I like about living in Paris,” he said, “is planning ahead very carefully, so that every day you can do something or see something that you wouldn’t do if you weren’t here.”

“That isn’t what I like,” Barbara said. “What I like is not to plan ahead, but just see what happens. Couldn’t we do that for a change?”

“All right,” he said. But his heart sank at the thought of leaving anything to chance. The days would pass, would be frittered away, and suddenly their five weeks in Paris would be used up and they wouldn’t have seen or done half the things they meant to. He managed to forget what she had said. He waited impatiently for each new issue of La Semaine de Paris to appear on the kiosks, and when it did, he studied it as if he were going to have to pass an examination in the week’s plays, concerts, and movies. They did not understand one word in fifty of Montherlant’s La Reine Morte , and during the first intermission he rushed out into the lobby to buy a program; but they were in France, the rest of the audience did not need a résumé of the plot, the program was not helpful.

At Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles the old woman who opened the door of their box for them came back while the play was going on and tried to oust them from their seats in order to put somebody else in them. With one eye on the stage—the mother was in bed with a cold, the grown son was kneeling on the bed, he accused, she admitted to remorse, incest was in the air—Harold fought off the ouvreuse. They were in their right seats, and indignation made him as eloquent as a Frenchman would have been in these circumstances. But by the time the enemy had retired and he was free to turn his attention to the play, the remarkable love scene was over.

Barbara went off by herself one morning, while he stayed home and wrote letters. When she came back, she reported that she had found a store with wonderful cooking utensils—just the kind of thin skillets that were in Mme Cestre’s kitchen and that she had been looking for for years.

“I would have bought them,” she said, “except that I decided they would take up too much room in the luggage.… Now I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“Where was this shop?” he asked, reaching for his hat.

She didn’t know. “But I can find my way back to it,” she said.

It was a virtuoso performance, up one street and down the next, across squares and through alleys, beyond the sixth arrondissement and well into the fifth. At last they came on the shop she was searching for. They bought four skillets, a nutmeg grater, a salad basket, some cooking spoons, a copper match box to hang beside the stove, and a paring knife. In the next street, they came upon a bookshop with old children’s books and Victorian cardboard toy theaters. They bought the book of children’s songs with illustrations by Boutet de Monvel that was in the bookcase of the red room at Beaumesnil. While Barbara was trying to decide between the settings for La belle au bois dormant and Cendrillon , he said suddenly: “Where did Sabine sleep while we were occupying her room?”

“In the back part of the house, probably. Why?”

“Or one of those dreary attic rooms,” he said. “It’s funny we never thought about it at the time. Do you think she minded our being in her room?”

That evening while Barbara was dressing, he gave M. le Patron the number of the apartment in the rue Malène and waited beside the bed, with the telephone held to his ear. The phone rang and rang. But she’s too thin, he thought, watching her straighten the seam of her stockings. She isn’t getting enough rest.…

Reaching into the armoire, she began pushing her dresses along the rod. She could hardly bear to put any of them on any more.

“Mme Viénot’s affectionate manner with you I took at the time to be disingenuous,” he said. “Looking back, I think that it wasn’t.”

The cotton print dress she had bought in Rome was out of season. The brown, should she wear, with a green corduroy jacket? Or the lavender-blue?

“I think she really did like us. And that we totally misjudged her character,” he said.

She chose the brown, which had a square neck and no sleeves, and so required the green jacket. “We didn’t misjudge her character.”

“How do you know?”

“From one or two remarks that Alix made.”

“They do not answer,” M. le Patron said.

In her letter Alix had said that she would be coming back to Paris soon, but a week passed, and then two, and there was still no answer when they called the apartment in the rue Malène. One morning they made a pilgrimage to the Place Redouté and stood looking affectionately around at the granite monument, the church, the tables piled on top of each other in front of the café, the barber shop. Standing in the rue Malène, they saw that all the windows of Mme Cestre’s apartment were closed, and the shutters as well. “Shall we go in and ask when they are coming back?” Barbara said.

Mme Emile shook hands cordially but had no news. They were all away, she said. Monsieur also. She did not know when they were returning.

“Do you think she wrote and the letter got lost in the mails?” Barbara asked as they were walking toward the bus corner.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. Perhaps their feelings were hurt that we didn’t accept the invitation to come down to the country.”

“We should have gone,” Barbara said with conviction.

“But then we would have had to leave Paris.”

“What do you think really happened?”

“You mean the ‘drame’? They lost their money.”

“But how?” Barbara said.

“There are only about half a dozen ways that a family that has money can lose it. They can run through it—”

“I don’t think they did.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “Or they can lose it through inflation—which could have happened, because the franc used to be twenty to the dollar before the war. But then what about the drama? Maybe they were swindled out of it.”

“Not Mme Viénot, surely.”

“Well, something,” he said.

SUMMER DEPARTED without their noticing exactly when this happened. Fall was equally beautiful. It was still warm in the daytime. The leaves were turning yellow outside their window. He started wearing pajamas because the nights were cold. So was their room when they got up in the morning. Soon, even in the middle of the day it was cool in the shade, and they kept crossing the street to walk in the sun. They discovered the Marché St. Germain, and wandered up and down the aisles looking with surprise at the wild game and enjoying the color and fragrance and appetizingness of the fruit and vegetables. They walked all the way down the rue de Varennes, and saw the Rodin Museum and Napoleon’s tomb. They took a bus to the Jardin des Plantes and walked there. They took the Métro to the Bois de Vincennes. Walking along the Left Bank of the Seine in the late afternoon, they examined the bookstalls, but with less interest than they had shown in the shabby merchandise in the avenue de Grammont in Tours. The apparatus of rejection was fatigued; they only looked now at what there was some possibility of their wanting, and the bookstalls were too picked-over.