William Maxwell - The Chateau

The gardener told the men he would help them. He agreed to leave a cellar window open for them, but not that night. It was not a good time, he said; the house was full of people. And if they’d wait until there was no one here but the women, their chances would be better. They decided upon a signal, and as soon as the two men were off the property, the gardener came to find Mme Viénot.

Then what happened?

She went to the police, and together they worked out a plan. The only men in the house, Eugène and Mme Viénot’s son-in-law, Jean-Claude Lahovary, were to leave as conspicuously as possible in Eugène’s car and come back after dark, on foot. The gardener would hang the lantern in the potting shed—the signal that had been agreed upon—and the police would be nearby, waiting for a telephone call saying that the robbers were actually inside the house. It was all very melodramatic and like a British spy movie, except for one characteristically French touch. When the police cars came up the drive, they were blowing their sirens.

So the robbers got away?

No, they were caught. They must not have heard the sirens. Or else they were confused, or couldn’t find their way out of the house in the dark. They were convicted of housebreaking, and sentenced to a term in jail. At the trial it came out that one of them had had some education; he had been a government clerk. Later, in the woods back of Beaumesnil, somebody found the remains of a campfire, and it was assumed that the robbers hid out there, while they were waiting for the signal.

What an amazing story .

Yes, isn’t it. What would you like to know about next?

I think I’d like to know about Eugène — why he acted the way he did. Was he in the study, the day the Americans came to say good-by?

Of course.

And Alix knew that he was there?

Her hearing was excellent. It was her mother who suffered from deafness. There was no one Eugène could not make love him if he chose to, but he blew hot and cold about people. He blew hot and they mistook it for friendship; he blew cold and they had to learn, in self-defense, to despise him. This deadly, monotonous pattern did not occur with his wife. In spite of his belief that married people change and grow less fond of one another with time, this did not happen in his case. Their marriage had its ups and downs, like all marriages, but it did not become absent-minded or perfunctory. Would you like to see them sleeping together?

Well, I don’t know that I —

It’s quite all right. No trouble at all. The workshirt hanging across the attic window has been replaced by a potted geranium, and the Prodigal Son is gone. Someone, unable to stand the sight of so much raw emotion any longer, took it down and put it away in a closet. If you look closely, you will see that the fauteuil that belonged to Eugène’s great-great-grandfather has been mended. The dresses and skirts in the armoires throughout the apartment are of a different length, and Alix and Eugène have three children now. But certain things are the same: the church bell, the rays of the star arriving and departing simultaneously, and whoever it is that at daybreak comes through the rue Malène and silently searches through the garbage cans for edible peelings, cheese rinds, moldy bread, good rags, diamond rings, broken objects that can be mended, shoes with holes in their soles, paper, string, and other treasures often found in just such refuse by old men and women with the will to live. The sky, growing lighter, says: What is being but being different, night from day, the earth from the air, the way things were from the way things are? The newspaper lying in the gutter announces that a turning point has been reached in the tide of human affairs, and the swallows, skimming the rooftops—

I’ve really had enough of those swallows .

For some reason, I never grow tired of them. The swallows, in their quick summarizing trip over the rooftops prove conclusively that there is no point of turning, because turning is all there is—constant, never-ending patterns of turning.

The shutters are open, the awnings are rolled. Alix and Eugène are sleeping with their backs turned to each other but touching. When she moves in her sleep, his body accommodates itself to the change without waking. Now they are facing each other. Of his forearm, shoulder, and cheek he makes a soft warm box for her head. Over her bent knees he extends protectively a relaxed weightless leg. Shortly afterward they turn away from each other. In their marriage also there is no real resting place; one partner may dominate, may circumscribe, the actions of the other, briefly, but nothing is fixed, nothing is final.

His moods — what were they all about?

Those recurring periods of melancholy, of a kind of darkness of the soul, had nothing to do with her.

What did they have to do with?

Money, chiefly. Money that is lost becomes a kind of magic mirror in which the deprived person sees himself always in the distorted landscape of what might have been. When they were living in Marseilles, Eugène did not think about money, largely because everyone else was poor also. But in Paris he was reminded continually that his father had always lived in a certain way, and so had his grandfather, and he would have liked to live in the same way himself and he couldn’t, and never would be able to, because they have made no provision for him to do this.

Shouldn’t they have?

Perhaps.

Then why didn’t they?

Life was beautiful, and they thought it couldn’t go on being this way—about this they were quite right—and in any case it would have meant sacrificing their pleasures and they needed their pleasures; they needed all of them. His father’s desk was a mosaic of unpaid bills, which he never disturbed. When he wanted to write a letter, he used his wife’s desk.

What about Alix? Did she mind it that they were poor?

Not for herself. But she listened carefully to what Eugène had to say about rich young men like Jean Allégret and René Simon, and what she perceived was that it was not the money itself but that he felt the loss of it had cast a shadow over their lives so dense that they could not be seen. They were no longer part of the world. They did not move among people who counted. They might as well be the children of shopkeepers.

It would have been better if she had not made him give up his work among the poor in Marseilles .

She didn’t. That was only Mme Viénot’s idea of what happened. Since he had renounced his spiritual vocation in order to marry her, she was prepared to give up everything for his sake, but unfortunately it turned out that he did not really have a spiritual vocation. If he had, he would not have taken it so to heart when the men he was trying to educate failed him by falling asleep over the books he lent them, or by getting drunk and beating their wives, or simply by not understanding what it was that he wanted from them. Two or three years later, he threw himself into politics in the same high-minded way. He dedicated every free moment to working for the M.R.P.—the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, the Catholic reform party. Then he decided that all political efforts were futile, and found himself once more committed to nothing, nothing to cling to, no foothold, and totally outside the life around him. And though he was patient—no one was ever more patient—he was not always easy to live with. Or pleasant to people. Anyone in trouble could count on his help, and the telephone rang incessantly, but he had no friends. If he met someone he liked, someone who interested him, he was intensely curious, direct, personal, and charming. And then, his curiosity satisfied, he was simply not interested any more. The friends of his school days called up, made arrangements to see him, were startled by what they found, and didn’t return.