William Maxwell: The Chateau

A blank space in her calendar between the end of June and the middle of September meant a brief stay at Beaumesnil. She was at the château just after the affair of the robbers, and she brought two friends with her, a M. and Mme Mégille. Monsieur was a member of the permanent staff of the Institut Océanographique, and very distinguished. And since he had been brought up in the country he did not mind the fact that there was no electricity.

They never found that short circuit?

Oh yes. This was a piece of foolishness on Mme Viénot’s part. You won’t believe it, but she could not get that gold bullion out of her mind. She induced the priest at Coulanges to come and go all through the house with her, holding a forked stick. There was one place where it responded violently, and in opening up the wall the gardener sawed through the main electric-light cable.

But surely Mme Viénot was too intelligent to believe that —

Yes, she did. Mme Viénot is the Life Force, with dyed hair and too much rouge, and the Life Force always believes. Defeated, flat on her back, she waved her arms and legs like a beetle, and in a little while she was walking around again.

Every novel ought to have a heroine, and she is the heroine of this one. She is a wonderful woman—how wonderful probably no one knows, except an American woman she met only once, on a train journey—a woman who, curiously enough, knew Barbara and Harold Rhodes, though only slightly. The two women opened their hearts to each other, as women sometimes do on a train or sharing a table in the tea room of a department store, and they have continued to write to each other afterward, long letters full of things they do not tell anyone else.

What Mme Viénot did the summer Barbara and Harold were with her was miraculous. She had nothing whatever to work with, and bad servants, and somehow she kept up the tone of the establishment and provided meals that were admirable. Singlehanded, she saved the château. It would have gone for back taxes if she had not done what she did. No one else in the family could have saved it. As a person, Mme Cestre was more sympathetic, perhaps, but she was an invalid, and introspective. And the men …

What about the men?

Well, what about them?

I guess you’re right. Go on with what you were saying .

Once more they dined by candlelight. When they went up to bed, they were handed kerosene lamps at the foot of the stairs. There was no writing desk in Mme Straus’s room, and so, sitting up in bed, she used a book to write on. Her hair was in two braids and her reading glasses were resting far down on the bridge of her nose. She wrote rapidly, with no trace of a quaver:

… Maman Minou finds that she has been a long time without news of her dear American children. The last letter from Harold, written in English, was translated for me by a friend, but tonight I am not in Paris. I beg him not to be vexed with me. Can he not find, at his office, a good-natured comrade who knows how to read French and will translate this letter into English? But my dear friend, why this sudden change? Your old letters, and those of dear Barbara, were perfectly written. It makes me wonder whether you perhaps no longer wish to correspond with poor Minou in France.

The fountain pen stopped. The old eyes went on a voyage round the room, searching for something to say (one does not create an atmosphere of concert pitch out of accusations of neglect) and came to rest on a large stain in the wallpaper:

Your presence surrounds me here. I go looking for you, and find my friends occupying your room. I put flowers there for them but Oh miracle! the moment the flowers are in their vase, they fly off toward you. Take them, then, my dears, and may their perfume spread around you. Here it is gray, cheerless, cold. The surroundings are agreeable, even so. M. and Mme Mégille are charming. Sabine pleases me very much. The lady of the manor dolls herself up for each new arrival. So droll! Alix is adorable. She is going off to visit cousins in Toulon next week. I shall miss her. Have you pretty concerts and plays to see? In this moment when we are in summer, are you not in winter? And at the hour when I am writing to you—eleven o’clock at night—your hour of the omelette, the good odor of which I smell even here?

She thought the United States was in South America?

Apparently. Some people have no sense of geography.— The letter ended:

Life is rather difficult here, but I am so eager to obey our dear President Pinay, whom we admire so much, that all becomes easy. Your dear images still have a place in my little chamber, which you know. Pray for your old Maman Minou, who embraces you with all her loving heart.

Antoinette Straus-Muguet

Please put the date and the year of your letters. Thank you.

Why didn’t they answer her letters? It isn’t like them .

I’ll get around to that in a minute. One thing at a time. She blew the lamp out—

We have to hear about the lamp?

Yes. And settled herself between the damp sheets. And it was at that moment that the odor of kerosene brought back to her something priceless, a house she had not seen for half a century.

The youngest of a large family, she had all through her childhood been the charming excitable plaything of older brothers and sisters. When evening came, so did Charles and Emma and Andrée and Edouard and Lucienne and Maurice and Marguerite and Anna. They gathered in the nursery to assist in putting Minou to bed, invented new games when her head hung like a heavy flower on its stalk, and, as they peeled her clothes off over her head, cried: “Skin the rabbit! Don’t let the little white bunny get away.” “Stop her!” “Catch her, somebody!” And when she escaped from them, they tracked her down with all the cruelty of love, and carried her on their shoulders around the nursery, a laughing overexcited child with too bright eyes and a flushed face and a nature that was too highstrung and delicate to be playing such games at the end of the day.

All dead, the pursuers; long dead; leaving her no choice but to pursue.

As for the Americans, it was much harder to think in French when they were not in France. They had to sit down with a French-English dictionary and a French grammar, and it took half a day to answer one of Mme Straus’s letters, and they were leading a busy life. Also, he hated to write letters. He used to wait for days before he opened a letter from Mme Straus, because of his shame at not having answered the last one. But they did answer some of the letters. They did not altogether lose touch with her.

Quite apart from the effort it took, and the fact that year after year the friendship had nothing to feed on, her letters to them were really very strange. (“The monsieur who is at Fifth Avenue is not my relative, but my niece is flying over soon, on business for the house, of which she is administrator, director, in place of her dead husband. She will be, alone , in our confidence, but see you, become acquainted with you, speak to you of Maman Minou. You will see how nice she is. Answer her telephone calls above everything. She will give you news of me, and fresh news …) None of the people she said were coming to America and that Harold and Barbara could expect to hear from ever turned up. And there was one frantic, only half-legible letter, which they had to take to the friend who had lived in the Monceau quarter, to translate for them. She found it distrait, full of idioms that she had never seen and that she didn’t believe existed. The letter was about money. Mme Straus’ income, with inflation, was no longer adequate to meet her needs. Her daughter had refused to do anything for her, and Mme Straus was afraid that she would be put out of the convent. In the next letter it appeared that this crisis had passed: Mme Straus-Muguet’s children, to whom her notary had made a demand, had finally understood that it was their duty to help her. “Forgive me,” she wrote, “for boring you with all my miseries, but you are all my consolation.” Her letters were full of intimations of increasing frailty and age, and continually asked when they were coming back to France. At last they were able to write her that they were coming, in the spring of 1953, and she wrote back: “If Heaven wills it that I have not already departed for my great journey, it will be with arms wide open that I will receive you.… ”