The Chateau Read online

  “I didn’t mean for the taxi to come quite so soon,” he said. “I was hoping we could explore the village first.”

  But he was relieved that they were on their way again. Six days on shipboard had made him hungry for movement. They rode through the flat countryside with their faces pressed to the car windows.

  “Just look at that woodpile!”

  “Look how the orchard is laid out.”

  “Never mind the orchard, look at the house!”

  “Look at the vegetable garden.”

  Look, look.…

  Though they thought they knew what to expect, at their first glimpse of the medieval abbey they both cried out in surprise. Rising above the salt marshes and the sand flats, it hung, dreamlike, mysterious, ethereal. “Le Mont-Saint-Michel,” the driver said respectfully. As the taxi brought them nearer, it changed; the various parts dissolved their connection with one another in order to form new connections. The last connection of all was with the twentieth century. There were nine chartered sight-seeing buses outside the medieval walls, and the approach to the abbey was lined on both sides of the street with hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops.

  The concierge of the Hôtel Mère Poulard was not put out with them for arriving a day late. Their room was one flight up, and they tried not to see the curtains, which were a large-patterned design of flowers in the most frightful colors. Without even opening their suitcases, they started up the winding street of stairs. Mermaid voices sang to them from the doorways of the open-fronted shops (“Monsieur-dame … monsieur-dame …”) and it was hard not to stop and look at everything, because everything was for sale. He bought two tickets for the conducted tour of the abbey, and they stood a little to one side, waiting for the tour to begin.

  “Did you ask for a guide who speaks English?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think there are any,” he said, arguing by analogy from the fact that there were no porters in the railway stations.

  “The other time, we always had a guide who spoke English.”

  “I know, but that was before the war.”

  “You could ask them if there is one.”

  But he was reluctant to ask. Instead, he studied the uniformed guides, trying to make out from their faces if they spoke English. At last he went up to the ticket booth and the ticket seller informed him disapprovingly—rather as if he had asked if the abbey was for sale—that the guides spoke only French.

  It was their first conducted tour and they tried very hard to understand what the guide said, but names, dates, and facts ran together, and sometimes they had to fall back on enjoying what their eyes saw as they went from room to room. What they saw—stone carvings, stone pillars, vaulting, and archways—seemed softened, simplified, and eroded not only by time but also by the thousands and thousands of human eyes that had looked at it. But in the end, reality failed them. They felt that some substitution had been effected, and that this was not the real abbey. Or if it was, then something was gone from it, something that made all the difference, and they were looking at the empty shell.

  They stood in front of the huge fireplace in the foyer of their hotel and watched the famous omelets being made. With their own omelet they had a green salad and a bottle of white wine, which was half a bottle too much. Half drunk, they staggered upstairs to their room and fell asleep in the room with the frightful curtains, to the sound of the omelet whisk. When they woke, the afternoon was half gone. Lying in one another’s arms, dreamy and drained, they heard a strange new sound, and sat up and saw through the open casements the sea come rushing in. Within twenty minutes all the surrounding land but the causeway by which they had come from Pontorson was under water. They waited for that too to be covered, but this wonderful natural effect, so often described by earlier travelers, the tide at Mont-Saint-Michel, had been tampered with. The island was not an island any more; the water did not cover the tops of the sight-seeing buses; it did not even cover their hubcaps.

  But another tide rising made them turn away from the window. All afternoon, while they were making love and afterward, whether they were awake or asleep, the omelet whisk kept beating and the human tide came and went under their window: tourists from Belgium, tourists from Denmark and Sweden and Switzerland, tourists from Holland, Breton tourists in embroidered velvet costumes, tourists from all over France.

  In the evening, they dressed and went downstairs. The omelet cook was again making omelets in front of the roaring wood fire. Harold found out from the concierge that there was no provision in the timetable of the S.N.C.F. for a quick, easy journey by train from Mont-Saint-Michel to Cap Finisterre. They would have to go to Brest, which they had no desire to see, changing trains a number of times along the way. At Brest they could take a bus or a local train to Concarneau.

  They stepped out of the hotel into a surprising silence. The cobblestone street was empty. The chartered buses were all gone.

  Turning their back on the street of stairs, they followed the upward-winding dirt paths, and discovered the little gardens, here, there, and everywhere. They stood looking down on the salt marshes and the sandbars. Above them the medieval abbey hung dreamlike and in the sky, and that was where they were also, they realized with surprise. The swallows did not try to sell them anything, and the sea air made them excited. Time had gone off with the sight-seeing buses, and they were free to look to their heart’s content. Stone towers, slate roofs, half-timbered houses, cliffs of cut stone, thin Gothic windows and crenelated walls and flying buttresses, the rock cliffs dropping sheer into the sea and the wet sand mirroring the sky, cloud pinnacles that were changing color with the coming on of night, and the beautiful past, that cannot quite bear to go but stands here (as it does everywhere, but here especially) saying Good-by, good-by.…

  SHORTLY BEFORE NOON the next day, they returned to Pontorson by bus, left their luggage at the hotel, where their old room was happily waiting for them, and went off sight-seeing. The bus driver was demonically possessed. Dogs, chickens, old people, and children scattered at the sound of his horn. The people who got on at villages and crossroads kept the bus waiting while they delivered involved messages to the driver or greeted those who were getting off. Bicycles accumulated on the roof of the bus. Passengers stood jammed together in the aisles. On a cool, cloudy, Wednesday afternoon, the whole countryside had left home and was out enjoying the pleasures of travel.

  St. Malo was disappointing. Each time they came to a gateway in the ramparts of the old town, they stopped and looked in. The view was always the same: a street of brand-new boxlike houses that were made of stone and would last forever. They took a motor launch across the harbor to Dinard, which seemed to be made up entirely of hotels and boarding houses, all shabby and in need of paint. The tide was far out, the sky was a leaden gray, the wind was raw. At Concarneau it would be colder still.

  They bought postcards to prove to themselves later that they had actually been to Dinard, and tried to keep warm by walking. They soon gave up and took the launch back across the harbor. Something that should have happened had not happened; they had been told that Dinard was charming, and they had not been charmed by it, through no fault of theirs. And St. Malo was completely gone. There was nothing left that anybody would want to see. The excursion had not been a success. And yet, in a way, it had; they’d had a nice day. They’d enjoyed the bus ride and the boat ride and the people. They’d enjoyed just being in France.

  They had the seven-course dinner again, and, lying in bed that night, they heard singing in the street below their window. (Who could it be? So sad …)

  In the morning they explored the village. They read the inscriptions in the little cemetery and, in an atmosphere of extreme cordiality, cashed a traveler’s check at the mairie. They stared in shop windows. A fire broke out that was like a fire in a dream. Smoke came pouring out of a building; shopkeepers stood in their doorways watching and made comments about it, but did no
t try to help the two firemen who came running with a hose cart and began to unreel the hose and attach it to a hydrant in a manhole. Though they couldn’t have been quicker or more serious about their work, after twenty minutes the hose was still limp. The whole village could have gone up in flames, and for some strange reason it didn’t. The smoke subsided, and the shopkeepers withdrew into their shops. Barbara saw a cowhide purse with a shoulder strap in the window of a leather shop, and when they reappeared a few minutes later, she was wearing the purse and he was writing “purse—1850 fr.” in his financial diary.

  They went back to the hotel and the waitress drew them into the dining room, where she had arranged on an oak sideboard specimens of woodcarving, the hobby of her brother, who had been wounded in the war and could not do steady work. The rich Americans admired but did not buy his chef-d’œuvre, the art-nouveau book ends. Instead, trying not to see the disappointment in her eyes, they took the miniature sabots (500 fr.), which would do nicely for a present when they got back home and meanwhile take up very little room in their luggage. The concierge inquired about their morning and they told him about the fire. A sliding panel in the wall at the foot of the stairs slid open. The cook and the kitchenmaid were also interested.

  Upstairs in their room, he said: “I don’t suppose we ought to stay here when there are a thousand places in France that are more interesting.”

  “I could stay here the rest of my life,” Barbara said.

  They did nothing about leaving. They squandered the whole rest of the day, walking and looking at things. As for their journey to Brittany, they would do better to go inland, the concierge said; at Rennes, for example, they could get an express train from Paris that would take them straight through to Brest.

  The next morning, they closed their suitcases regretfully and paid the bill (surprisingly large) and said good-by to the waitress, the chambermaid, the cook, and the kitchenmaid, all of whom they had grown fond of. Their luggage went by pushcart to the railway station, and they followed on foot, with the concierge. Out of affection and because he was sorry to see them go, the concierge was keeping them company as long as possible, and where else would they find a concierge like him?

  When they got off the train in Rennes, the weather had grown colder. There was no train for Brest until the next day, and so they walked half a block to the Hôtel du Guesclin et Terminus. Rennes was an ugly industrial city, and they wished they were in Pontorson. An obliging waiter in the restaurant where they ate dinner gave Barbara the recipe for Palourdes farcies. “Clams, onions, garlic, parsley,” Harold wrote in his financial diary. It was raining when they woke the next morning. Their hotel room was small and cramped and a peculiar shape. Only a blind person could have hung those curtains with that wallpaper. They could hardly move for their luggage, which they hated the sight of. What pleasure could they possibly have at the seashore in this weather? They decided to go farther inland, to Le Mans, in the hope that it would be warmer. When they got there, they could decide whether to take the train to Brest or one going in the opposite direction, to Paris. But they had not planned to be in Paris until September, and perhaps they would like Le Mans enough to stay there a week. They had arranged to spend the two weeks after that as paying guests at a château in Touraine.

  Late that same afternoon, pale and tired after two train journeys—Le Mans was hideous—they stood in the lobby of the Hôtel Univers in Tours, watching the profile of the concierge, who was telephoning for them and committed heart and soul to their cause. With the door of the phone booth closed, they couldn’t hear what he said to the long-distance operator, but they could tell instantly by the way he shed his mask of indifference that he was talking to someone at the château. They watched his eyes, his expression, his sallow French face, for clues.

  The call was brief. The concierge put the receiver back on its hook and, turning, pushed open the glass door. “I talked to Mme Viénot herself,” he said. “It’s all right for you to come.”

  “Thank God,” Harold said. “Now we can relax.”

  Taking Barbara’s arm above the elbow, he guided her across the lobby to the street door. Outside, a white-gloved policeman directed the flow of Saturday-afternoon bicycle traffic around the orange and green flower beds in the middle of a busy intersection.

  “I think I’ve seen that building before,” she said, meaning the Hôtel de Ville, directly across the street. He consulted a green Michelin guide to the château country that he had bought in the railway station in Le Mans. The Hôtel de Ville was not starred, and the tricolor flags that hung in clusters along the façade, between caryatids, were old and faded. This was true everywhere they went, and it had begun to trouble him. In the paintings they were always vivid and fresh. Was something not here that used to be here and everywhere in France? Had they come too late?

  The cathedral (**) and the Place Plumereau (*) and the Maison de Tristan (*) all appeared to be at a considerable distance, and since it was late in the afternoon and they did not want to walk far, they decided in favor of the leafy avenue de Grammont, which was wide enough to accommodate not only an inner avenue of trees but also a double row of wooden booths hemmed in by traffic and the streetcar tracks. Unable to stop looking, they stared at the patrons of sidewalk cafés and stood in front of shop windows. What were “rillettes de Tours”? Should they buy a jar?

  Eventually they crossed over into the middle of the street and moved from booth to booth, conscientiously examining pots and pans, pink rayon underwear, dress materials, sweaters, scarves, suspenders, aprons, packets of pins and needles, buttons, thread, women’s hats, men’s haberdashery, knitted bathing suits, toys, stationery, romantic and erotic novels, candy, shoes, fake jewelry, machine-made objets d’art, the dreadful dead-end of the Industrial Revolution, all so discouraging to the acquisitive eye that cannot keep from looking, so exhausting to the snobbish mind that, like a machine itself, rejects and rejects and rejects and rejects.

  With their heads aching from all they had looked at, they found their way back to the hotel. Tours was very old, and they had expected to like it very much. They had not expected it to be a big modern commercial city, and they were disappointed. But that evening they were given a second chance. They went for a walk after dinner and came upon a street fair all lit up with festoons of electric lights and ready to do business with the wide-eyed and the young, who for one reason and another (the evening was chilly, the franc not yet stabilized) had stayed away. There was only a handful of people walking up and down the dirt avenues, and they didn’t seem eager to part with their money. The ticking lotto wheels stopped time after time on the lucky number, the roulette paid double, but no one carried off a sexy lamp, a genuine oriental rug, a kewpie doll. In this twilight of innocence, nobody believed enough in his own future to patronize the fortunetelling machine. No sportif character drew a bead on the plastic ducks in the shooting gallery. The festooned light bulbs were noticeably small and dim. With no takers, the familiar enticements were revealed in the light of their true age—tired, old, worn out at last.

  “It makes me feel bad,” Harold said. He loved carnivals. “They can’t keep going much longer, if it’s always like this.”

  He stepped up to a booth, bought two tickets for the little racing cars that bump, and entered the sum of twenty francs in his financial diary. Only one other car had somebody in it—a young man and his girl. When Harold and Barbara bumped into them, the young man wheeled around and came at them again with so much momentum that it made their heads jerk. He was smiling unpleasantly. It crossed Harold’s mind that there was something here that was not like the French movies—that they had been bumped too hard because they were Americans. He saw the young man preparing to come at them again, and steered his own car in such a way that they couldn’t be reached. But unless you did bump somebody, the little cars were not exciting. And all the empty ones, evoking a gaiety that ought to have been here and wasn’t, reminded them of their isolation as tourists in a count
ry they could look at but never really know, the way they knew America. They bought a bag of white taffy, which turned out to be inedible, and then stood looking at the merry-go-round, the Ferris wheel, the flying swings, the whip—all of them empty and revolving inanely up, down, and around. The carnival occupied a good-sized city block, and in its own blighted way it was beautiful.

  He said soberly: “It’s as if the secret of perpetual motion that my Grandmother Mitchell was always talking about had been discovered at last, and nobody cared.”

  But somebody did care, somebody was enjoying himself—a little French boy, wide awake and on his own at an hour when, in America at least, it is generally agreed that children should be asleep in their beds. Since he did not have to pay for his pleasure, they assumed that he was the child of one of the concessionaires. They tried to make friends with him and failed: he had no need of friends. Liberty was what he cared about—Liberty and Vertigo. He climbed on the merry-go-round and in a moment or two the baroque animals began to move with a slow, dreamlike, plunging gait. The little boy sat astride a unicorn. He rose in the stirrups and reached out with a long pole for the stuffed rabbit that dangled just out of reach. Time after time, trying valiantly, he was swept by it.

  “I’d take him,” Barbara said wistfully.

  “So would I, but he’s not to be had, for love or money.”

  The merry-go-round went faster and faster, the calliope showed to what extremes music can go, and eventually, in accordance with the mysterious law that says: Whatever you want with your whole heart and soul you can have, the stuffed rabbit was swept from its hook (the little boy received a prize—a genuine ruby ring—and ran off in search of something new) and the Americans turned away, still childless.

  She asked for a five-franc piece to put in the fortunetelling machine. The machine whirred initially and produced through a slot a small piece of cardboard that read: “En apparence tout va bien pour vous, mais ne soyez pas trop confiant; l’adversité est en train de venir. Les morts, les séparations, sont indiqués. Dans les procès vous seriez en perte. La maladie est sérieuse.” She turned and discovered the little French boy at her elbow. Curiosity had fetched him. She showed him the fortune and he read it. His brown eyes looked up at her seriously, as if trying to decide what effect these deaths, separations, and lawsuits would have on her character. She asked him if he would like to keep it and he shook his head. She tucked the cardboard in her purse.