William Maxwell - The Chateau

“I don’t feel like being their uncle,” Harold said as he put the letter back in its envelope. “ ‘A strong government of experts, assisted by a parliament with consultative rights only …’ It’s all beyond me. It depresses me.”

“Why should it depress you?” Barbara said. “It’s a truthful letter.”

“But they haven’t learned anything—anything at all. He feels sorry for the German women but not a word about the others, all over the world. Not a word about who started it. Not a word about the Jews.”

“What can he say? They’re dead. Maybe he doesn’t speak about it because he can’t bear to.”

“He could say he was sorry.”

“Maybe. But you aren’t a Jew. What right have you to ask for or receive an apology in their name? And how do you know they would accept his apology if he said it? I wouldn’t—not if it was my relatives that were sent to the gas chambers.”

“I don’t know,” he said sadly. “I don’t know anything. All I know is I’m tired, and I guess I’m ready to go home.”

She looked at him, to see if he really meant it. He didn’t. But she was ready to go home, and had been for some time. In Beaulieu her period was five days late. This disappointment she was not able to leave behind her in the South of France. She woke to it every morning, and it confronted her in the bathroom mirror when she washed her face. For his sake she concealed the weight on her heart and did not allow herself so much as a sigh. But more and more her pleasure was becoming second-hand, the reflection of his.

JUST WHEN they had got used to the idea that they had been cast out, and had managed to accept it philosophically, they discovered that they were not cast out; there had been no change in the way that the French felt about them.

Sabine was the first to call. Harold asked about Alix, and Sabine said that they were back too—they had all come up from the country together.

And while he was out doing an errand, Alix called and asked them to tea on Monday.

“What did she sound like?” he asked.

“Herself,” Barbara said.

“You didn’t hear anything in her voice that might indicate she was hurt or anything?”

“No. She was just affectionate, as always.”

“Perhaps we imagined it,” he said. “It will be so nice to see them and the apartment again. Did she say Eugène would be there?”

“She said he wouldn’t be there.”

The next morning, Barbara heard him say: “ ‘My dear little friends, do not come to Le Mans,’ ” and called out from the bathroom, where she was brushing her teeth: “It’s too far!”

“Nobody’s going to Le Mans,” he said, and doubled over with laughter.

“Then what are you talking about?”

“Mme Straus. She’s coming after all. Just listen: ‘Tuesday … Mes petits amis chéris, Do not come to LeMans’ —underlined— ‘It is I who will arrive in Paris Saturday evening, Gare Montparnasse, at six o’clock. I have arranged all in order to see you … ”

In the same mail, there was an invitation from Jean Allégret, who had been in the country, and had just returned to Paris and found their note, and was inviting them to have dinner with him at his club on Friday.

“Do you want to?” Barbara asked dubiously.

“It might be interesting,” Harold said.

His pajamas had split up the back and, later that morning, he went out to buy a new pair. When he came back, he showed them to her and said: “Look—they’re made of parachute cloth.”

“Not really?”

“So the clerk said. I guess they don’t have anything else. Anyway, something wonderful happened. I asked him if they weren’t too large and he looked at me and said no, they were the normal size.… In France I’ m the normal size. Not football players. The first time in my life anybody has ever said that.… It’s so beautiful out. No matter which direction you look. The clerk was the normal size too. Everything in France is normal. It doesn’t seem possible that Tuesday morning we’re going to get on a train and— Except that maybe we won’t. The railway strike is supposed to start Monday or Tuesday.”

“What will we do if there are no trains?”

“There probably will be,” he said.

“Would you like to stay?”

“A few days longer, you mean?”

“No, for good.”

“We can’t,” he said soberly. “There is no way that it is possible, or reasonable. And besides, they tried that, in the twenties, and it didn’t work. In the end they all had to come home.”

He read in La Semaine de Paris the plays that were to be performed at the Comédie Française and the Odéon, the movies, the concerts, for the first three days after they would be gone. Like a man sentenced to execution, he had a sudden stabbing vision of the world as it would be without him. The day after they left, there was to be a performance of Louise at the Comique.

And he was haunted by that book he felt he shouldn’t buy—the book of photographs of the old houses on the Ile St. Louis. And by the Ile St. Louis itself. Every time he went across the river, there it was, in plain sight, just beyond the Ile de la Cité. He kept trying to get there, and instead he found himself going to the American Express, getting a haircut, cashing traveler’s checks, standing at the counter at the Cunard Line. These errands all seemed to take more time than they would have at home, and time—time running out—was what he kept having to deal with.

It did not interest him to wonder if he could stay, if there was after all some way of arranging this, because he did not want to stay here as an observer, an outsider, an expatriate; he was too proud to do that. He wanted to possess the thing he loved. He wanted to be a Frenchman.

When he got home in the late afternoon, a group of school boys would be having choir practice out of doors under the trees in the school yard. There was no music teacher—only an older boy with a pitch pipe—and the singing that rose from the walled garden was so beautiful that it made him hold his head in his hands. This and other experiences like it (the one-ring circus on the outskirts of Florence; the big searchlight from the terrace of Winkler’s Café picking out a baroque church, which they then ran through the streets to, and then moving on to a palace, and then to a fountain—all the churches and palaces and fountains of Salzburg, bathed in lavender-blue light; the grandiose Tiepolo drawn in white chalk on the pavement of the Via Ventidue Marzo in Venice by a sixteen-year-old boy out of another century, who began his work at eight in the morning and finished at four in the afternoon and was rewarded with a hatful of lira notes; arriving in Venice at midnight, leaving Pisa at six in the morning, taking an afternoon nap in Rome, eating ice cream under a canvas awning by the Lake of Geneva during a downpour; the view from the Campanile at Siena in full sunshine—a medieval city constructed on the plan of a rose; the little restaurant on a jetty in San Remo, where they ate dinner peering out through the rain at the masts of fishing boats; the carnival in Tours, the Grand Entertainment in Beaulieu, dinner at Iznard, dinner at Doney’s, the dinner with Sabine at Le Vert Gallant, just before they left for Switzerland, with the river only a few yards from their table, and with their vision concentrated by the candle flame until they saw only their own three faces, talking about what they believed, what they thought, what they felt—so intently that they did not know exactly when it got dark or even at what point the tables all around them were taken by other diners. And so on, and so on)—these ecstatic memories were, he thought, what made the lines in his face, and why he had lost so much weight. He felt that he was slowly being diminished by the succession of experiences that he had responded to with his whole heart and that seemed to represent something that belonged to him, and that he had not had, and, not having, had been starved for all his life, without knowing it. He was being diminished as people are always diminished who are racked with love, and that it was for a place and not a person was immaterial.