The Chateau Read online

  She did not say—she did not have to say—that it was a privilege they were ill-equipped to enjoy.

  Mme Carrère, quiet in her dress and in her manner, with black eyes and a Spanish complexion and neat gray hair parted in the middle, looked as if she were now ready for the hard, sharp pencil of Ingres—to whom, it turned out, her great-grandparents had sat for their portrait. She sat in a small armchair, erect but not stiff or uneasy, and for the most part she listened, but occasionally she added a remark when she was amused or interested by something. To Harold Rhodes’ eyes, she had the look of a woman who did not need to like or be liked by other people. She was neither friendly nor unfriendly, and when her eyes came to rest on him for a second, what he read in them was that chance had brought them all together at the château, and if she ever met up with him elsewhere or even heard his name mentioned, it would again be the work of chance.

  Unable to say the things he wanted to say, because he did not know how to say them in French, able to understand only a minute part of what the others said, deprived of the view from the train window and the conducted tour of the remnants of history, he sat and watched how the humorous expression around M. Carrère’s eyes deepened and became genuine amusement when Mme Bonenfant brought forth a mot, or observed Mme Carrère’s cordiality to Mme Viénot and her mother, not with the loving eye of a tourist but the glazed eye of a fish out of water.

  He thought of poor George Ireland, stranded in this very room and only fifteen years old. If I could lie down on the floor I’d probably understand every word they’re saying, he thought. Or if I could take off my shoes.

  M. Carrère made a point of conversing with the Americans at the lunch table. They were delighted with his explanation of the phrase “entre la poire et le fromage” and so was Mme Viénot, who said: “I hope you will remember what M. Carrère has just said, because it is the very perfection of French prose style. It should be written down and preserved for posterity.”

  M. Carrère had recently paid a visit to his son, who was living in New York. He had seen the skyscrapers, and also Chicago and the Grand Canyon, on his way to the West Coast. “I could converse with people vis-à-vis but not when the conversation became general, and so I missed a great deal that would have been of interest to me. I found America fascinating,” he added, looking at Harold and Barbara as if it had all been the work of their hands. “I particularly liked the ’ut doaks that are served everywhere in your country.” They looked blank and he repeated the word, and then repeated it again impatiently: “ ’ut doaks, ’ut doaks—le saucisson entre les deux pièces de pain.”

  “Oh, you mean hot dogs!” Barbara said, and laughed.

  M. Carrère was not accustomed to being laughed at. The resemblance to a clown was accidental. “ ’ut doaks,” he said defensively, and subsided. The others sat silent, the luncheon table under a momentary pall. Then the conversation was resumed in M. Carrère’s native tongue.

  Chapter 5

  THE BENTLEY was waiting in front of the house when they got up from the table and went across the hall for their coffee. As the last empty cup was returned to the silver tray, Mme Carrère rose. Ignoring the state of the weather, which they could all see through the drawing-room windows, she helped M. Carrère on with his coat, placed a lilac-colored shawl about his shoulders, and handed him his hat, his pigskin gloves. Outside, the Alsatian chauffeur held the car door open for them, and then arranged a fur robe about M. Carrère’s long, thin legs. With a wistful look on their faces, the Americans watched the car go down the drive.

  As they turned away from the window, Mme Viénot said: “I have an errand to do this afternoon, in the next village. It would make a pleasant walk if you care to come.”

  Off they went immediately, with the Canadian. Mme Viénot led them through the gap in the hedge and down the long straight path that bisected the potager. Over their heads storm clouds were racing across the sky, threatening to release a fresh downpour at any moment. She stopped to give instructions to the gardener, who was on his hands and knees among the cabbages, and the walk was suspended a second time when they encountered a white hen that had got through the high wire netting that enclosed the chicken yard. It darted this way and that when they tried to capture it. With his arms spread wide, Gagny ran at the silly creature. “Like the Foreign Office, she can’t bear to commit herself,” he said. “Steady … steady, now … Oh, blast!”

  When the hen had been put back in the chicken yard, where she wouldn’t offer a temptation to foxes, they resumed their walk. The path led past an empty potting shed with several broken panes of glass, past the gardener’s hideous stucco villa, and then, skirting a dry fountain, they arrived at a gate in the fence that marked the boundary of Mme Bonenfant’s property. On the other side, the path joined a rough wagon road that led them through a farm, and the farm provoked Mme Viénot to open envy. “It is better kept than my garden!” she exclaimed mournfully.

  “In Normandy,” Harold said, “in the fields that we saw from the train window, there were often poppies growing. It was so beautiful!”

  “They are a pest,” Mme Viénot said. “We have them here, too. They are a sign of improper cultivation. You do not have them in the fields in America?… I am amazed. I thought they were everywhere.”

  He decided that this was the right moment to bring up the subject of the double bed in their room.

  “We never dreamed that it would take so long to recover from the Occupation,” she said, as if she knew exactly what he was on the point of saying, and intended to forestall him. “It is not at all the way it was after the Guerre de Quatorze. But this summer, for the first time, we are more hopeful. Things that haven’t been in the shops for years one can now buy. There is more food. And the farmers, who are not given to exaggeration, say that our wheat crop is remarkable.”

  “Does that mean there will be white bread?” he asked.

  “I presume that it does,” Mme Viénot said. “You dislike our dark bread? Coming from a country where you have everything in such abundance, you no doubt find it unpalatable.”

  Ashamed of the abundance when his natural preference was to be neither better nor worse off than other people, he said untruthfully: “No, I like it. We both do. But it seemed a pity to be in France and not be able to have croissants and brioches.”

  They had come to a fork in the road. Taking the road that led off to the right, she continued: “Of course, your government has been most generous,” and let him agree to this by his silence before she went on to say, in a very different tone of voice: “You knew that in order to get wheat from America, we have had to promise to buy your wheat for the next ten years—even though we normally produce more wheat than we need? One doesn’t expect to get something for nothing. That isn’t the way the world is run. But I must say you drive a hard bargain.”

  And at that moment Hector Gagny, walking a few feet behind them, with Barbara, said: “We’re terribly restricted, you know. Thirty-five pounds is all we can take out of England for travel in a whole year, and the exchange is less advantageous than it is with your dollars.”

  What it is like, Harold thought, is being so stinking rich that there is no hope of having any friends.

  Walking along the country road in silence, he wondered uneasily about all the people they had encountered during their first week in France. So courteous, so civilized, so pleasant; so pleased that he liked their country, that he liked talking to them. But what would it have been like if they’d come earlier—say, after the last excitement of the liberation of Paris had died down, and before the Marshall Plan had been announced? Would France have been as pleasant a place to travel in? Would the French have smiled at them on the street and in train corridors and in shops and restaurants and everywhere? And would they have been as helpful about handing the suitcases down to him out of train windows? In his need, he summoned the driver of the empty St. Malo-St. Servan bus who was so kind to them, the waitress in the hotel in Pontorson, the labor
er who had offered to share his bottle of wine in the train compartment, the nice woman with the little boy, the little boy in the carnival, M. Fleury and his son—and they stood by him. One and all they assured Harold Rhodes solemnly in their clear, beautiful, French voices that he was not mistaken, that he had not been taken in, that the kindness he had met with everywhere was genuine, that he had a right to his vision.

  “Americans love your country,” he said, turning to look directly at the Frenchwoman who was walking beside him. “They always have.”

  “I am happy to hear it,” Mme Viénot said.

  “The wheat is paid for by taxation. I am taxed for it. And everybody assumes that it comes to you as a gift. But there are certain extremely powerful lobbying interests that operate through Congress, and the State Department does things that Americans in general sometimes do not approve of or even know about. With Argentina, and also with Franco—”

  “Entendu!” Mme Viénot exclaimed. “It is the same with us. The same everywhere. Only in politics is there no progress. Not the slightest. Whatever we do as individuals, the government undoes. If France had no government at all, it would do much better. No one has faith in the government any more.”

  “There is nothing that can be done about it?”

  “Nothing,” she said firmly. “It has been this way since 1870.”

  As they walked along side by side, his rancor—for he had felt personally attacked—gradually faded away, and they became once more two people, not two nationalities, out walking. Everything he saw when he raised his eyes from the dirt road pleased him. The poppy-infested fields through which they were now passing were by Renoir, and the distant blue hills by Cézanne. That the landscape of France had produced its painters seemed less likely than that the painters were somehow responsible for the landscape.

  The road brought them to a village of ten or twelve houses, built of stone, with slate roofs, and in the manner of the early Gauguin. He asked if the village had a name.

  “Coulanges,” Mme Viénot said. “It is very old. The priest at Coulanges has supernatural powers. He is able to find water with a forked stick.”

  “A peach wand?”

  “How did you know?” Mme Viénot asked.

  He explained that in America there were people who could find water that way, though he had never actually seen anyone do it.

  “It is extraordinary to watch,” she said. “One sees the point of the stick bending. I cannot do it myself. They say that the priest at Coulanges is also able to find other things—but that is perhaps an exaggeration.”

  A mile beyond the village, they left the wagon road and followed a path that cut diagonally through a meadow, bringing them to a narrow footbridge across a little stream. On the other side was an old mill, very picturesque and half covered with climbing blush roses. The sky that was reflected in the millpond was a gun-metal gray. A screen of tall poplars completed the picturesque effect, which suggested no special painter but rather the anonymous style of department-store lithographs and colored etchings.

  “It’s charming, isn’t it?” Mme Viénot said.

  “Is it still used as a mill?” Harold asked.

  “Indeed yes. The miller kept us in flour all through the war. He has a kind of laying mash that is excellent for my hens. I have to come and speak to him myself, though. Otherwise, he isn’t interested.”

  When she left them, they stood watching some white ducks swimming on the surface of the millpond.

  The Canadian said, after quite some time: “Why did you come here?” It was not an accusation, though it sounded like one, but the preface to a complaint.

  “We wanted to see the châteaux,” Barbara said. “And also—”

  “Mmmm,” Gagny interrupted. “I’d heard about this place, and I thought it would be nice to come here, but I might as well have stayed in London. There hasn’t been one hour of hot sunshine in the last five days.”

  “We were hoping to rent bicycles,” Barbara said. “She wrote us that it had been arranged, and then this morning at breakfast she—”

  “There are no bicycles for rent,” Gagny said indignantly.

  “I know there aren’t any in the village,” Barbara said. “But in Blois?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then I guess we’ll have to go by train,” she said.

  “It’s no use trying to get around by train. It will take you all day to visit one château.”

  “But she said—”

  “If you want to see the châteaux, you need a car,” he said, looking much more cheerful now that his discouragement was shared.

  They saw Mme Viénot beckoning to them from the door of the mill.

  “If this weather keeps up,” Gagny said as they started toward her, “I’m going to pack my things and run up to Paris. I’ve told her that I might. I have friends in Paris that I can stay with, and Wednesday is Bastille Day. It ought to be rather lively.”

  “I’ve just had a triumph,” Mme Viénot said. “The miller has agreed to let me have two sacks of white flour.” The Americans looked at her in surprise, and she said innocently: “I’m not sure that it is legal for him to sell it to me, but he is very attached to our family. I’m to send my gardener around for it early tomorrow morning, before anyone is on the road.”

  Instead of turning back the way they had come, she led them across another footbridge and they found themselves on a public road. Walking four abreast, they reached the crest of a long ridge and had a superb view of the valley of the Loire.

  Turning to Barbara, Mme Viénot said: “When did you come out?”

  “Come out?” Barbara repeated blankly.

  “Perhaps I am using the wrong expression,” Mme Viénot said. “I am quite out of the habit of thinking in English. Here, when a young girl reaches a certain age and is ready to be introduced to society—”

  “We use the same expression. I just didn’t understand what you meant.… I didn’t come out.”

  “It is not necessary in America, then?”

  “Not in the West. It depends on the place, and the circumstances. I went to college, and then I worked for two years, and then I got married.”

  “And you liked working? So does Sabine. I must show you some of her drawings. She’s quite talented, I think. When you go to Paris, you must call on her at La Femme Elégante. She will be very pleased to meet two of my guests, and you can ask her about things to see and do in Paris. There is a little bistro that she goes to for lunch—no doubt she will take you there. The clientele is not very distinguished, but the food is excellent, and most reasonable, and you will not always want to be dining at Maxim’s.”

  Harold opened his mouth to speak and then closed it; Mme Viénot’s smile made it clear that her remark was intended as a pleasantry.

  “I think I told you that my daughter became engaged last summer? After some months, she asked to be released from her engagement. She and her fiancé had known each other since they were children, but she decided that she could not be happy with him. It has left her rather melancholy. All her friends are married now and beginning to have families. Also, it seems her job with La Femme Elégante will terminate the first of August. The daughter of one of the editors of the American Vogue is coming over to learn the milieu, and a place has to be made for her.”

  “But that doesn’t seem fair!” Barbara exclaimed.

  Mme Viénot shrugged. “Perhaps they will find something else for her to do. I hope so.”

  The road led them away from the river, through fields and vineyards and then along a high wall, to an ornamental iron gate, where the Bentley was waiting. The gatehouse was just inside, and Mme Viénot roused the gatekeeper, who came out with her. His beret was pulled down so as to completely cover his thick gray hair, and he carried himself like a soldier, but his face was pinched and anxious, and he obviously did not want to admit them. Mme Viénot was pleasant but firm. As they talked she indicated now the lane, grown over with grass, that led past the gatehou
se and into the estate, now the car that must be allowed to drive up the lane. In the end her insistence prevailed. He went into the gatehouse and came out again with his bunch of heavy keys and opened the gates for the Bentley to drive through.

  The party on foot walked in front of the car, which proceeded at a funeral pace. Ahead of them, against the sky, was the blackened shell of a big country house with the chimneys still standing.

  It looks like a poster urging people to buy war bonds, Harold thought, and wondered if the planes were American. It turned out that the house had been destroyed in the twenties by a fire of unknown origin. At the edge of what had once been an English garden, the chauffeur stopped the car, and M. and Mme Carrère got out and proceeded with the others along a path that led to a small family chapel. Inside, the light came through stained-glass windows that looked as if they had been taken from a Methodist church in Wisconsin or Indiana. The chapel contained four tombs, each supporting a stone effigy.

  With a hissing intake of breath Mme Viénot said: “Ravissant!”

  “Ravissant!” said M. and Mme Carrère and Hector Gagny, after her.

  Harold was looking at a vase of crepe-paper flowers in a niche and said nothing. The chapel is surely nineteenth-century Gothic, he thought. How can they pretend to like it?

  The effigies were genuine. Guarded by little stone dogs and gentle lap lions, they maintained, even with their hands folded in prayer, a lifelike self-assertiveness. Looking down at one of them—at the low forehead, the blunt nose, the broad, brutal face—he said: “These were very different people.”

  “They were Normans,” Mme Viénot said. “They fought their way up the rivers and burned the towns and villages and then settled down and became French. He’s very beautiful, isn’t he? But not very intelligent. He was a crusader.”