The Chateau (17 page)

W
HEN THE HOUSEHOLD ASSEMBLED
before dinner, Harold saw that the elderly woman who had introduced herself to him earlier in the afternoon was still here, and he was pleased for her sake that she had been asked to stay and eat with them. In that first glimpse of her, standing beside the white columns in the drawing room, she had seemed uneasy and as if she was not sure of her welcome. He sat down beside her now, ready to take up where they had left off. She leaned toward him and confessed that it was the regret of her life that she had never learned English. She had a nephew—or a godson, he couldn't make out which—living in America, she said, and she longed to go there. Harold began to talk to her about New York City, in French, and after a minute or two she shook her head. He smiled and sat back in his chair. Her answering smile said that though they were prevented from conversing, they needn't let that stand in the way of their being friends. He turned his head and listened to what Mme Bonenfant was saying to M. Carrère.

“… To them the entry into Paris was a perfectly agreeable occasion, and they insisted on showing us snapshots. They could see no reason why we shouldn't enjoy looking at them.”

“The attitude is characteristic,” M. Carrère said. “And extraordinary, if you think how often their own country has been invaded.… I had an experience …”

In his mind Harold still heard the children's voices. Mme Viénot addressed a remark to him, which had to be repeated before he could answer it. He noticed that Mme Straus-Muguet was wearing a little heart encrusted with tiny diamonds, on a fine gold chain. So appropriate for her.

M. Carrère's experience was that a Nazi colonel had sent for him, knowing that he was ill and would have to get up out of bed to come, and had then kept him waiting for over an hour in his presence while he engaged in chit-chat with another officer. But then he committed an error; he remarked on the general lack of cultivation of the French people and the fact that so few of them knew German. With one sentence, in the very best
hoch Deutsch
, M. Carrère had reduced him to confusion.

“I have a friend,” Mme Viénot said, “who had a little dog she was very fond of. And the German officers who were quartered in her house were correct in every way, and most courteous to her, until the day they left, when one of them picked the little dog up right in front of her eyes and hurled it against the marble floor, killing it instantly.”

It's their subject, Harold thought. This is what they are talking about, everywhere. This is what I would be talking about if I were a Frenchman.

Mme Straus-Muguet described how, standing at the window of her apartment overlooking the Etoile, peering through the slits of the iron shutter, with the tears running down her face, she had watched the parade that she thought would never end. “Quelle horreur!” she exclaimed with a shiver, and Harold checked off the first of a whole series of mistaken ideas about her. She was not a character out of Turgenev or Chekhov. Her life had not been passed in isolation in the country but at the center of things, in Paris. She had been present, she said—General Weygand had invited her to accompany him to the ceremony at the Invalides, when the bronze sarcophagus of Napoléon II, which the Nazis had taken from its crypt in Vienna, was placed beside the red porphyry tomb of his father, Napoléon I
^er
.

The room was silent, the faces reflecting each in its own way the harsh wisdom of history.

Since she was a friend of General Weygand, it was not likely that she was socially unsure in the present company, Harold
said to himself. He must have been mistaken. He turned to Mme Viénot and explained that they were thinking of going up to Paris with M. Gagny in the morning, and would probably return on Friday. To his surprise, this plan met with her enthusiastic approval. He asked if they should pack their clothes, books, and whatever they were not taking with them, so that the suitcases could be removed from their room during the three days they would be gone.

“That won't be necessary,” Mme Viénot said, and he took this to mean that they would not be charged during their absence, and was relieved that this delicate matter had been settled without his having to go into it. For the first time, he found himself liking her.

She offered to telephone the hotel where they were planning to stay, and make a reservation for them. As she went toward the hall, M. Carrère called out the telephone number. The hotel was around the corner from their old house, he said, and he knew it well. During the war it had been occupied by German officers.

Mme Bonenfant reminded Barbara that there was to be an illumination on the night of July 14, and Harold took out his financial notebook and wrote down the route that Mme Carrère advised them to follow: if they began with the Place de la Concorde and the Madeleine, and then went on to the Place de l'Opéra, and then to the Place du Théâtre Français and the Comédie Française, with its lovely lamps, and then to the Louvre, and finally Notre Dame reflected in the river, they would see all the great monuments, the city at its most ravishing.

They got up and went in to dinner, and something that Mme Straus-Muguet said during the first course made Harold realize at last that she was not a caller but a paying guest like them. He looked across the table at her, at the winking reflections of the little diamond-encrusted heart, and thought what a pity it was that she should have come to stay at the château just as they were leaving.

When the company left the dining room, Mme Straus-Muguet excused herself and went upstairs and brought back down with her a box of
diamonoes
. She asked Harold if he knew this delightful game and he shook his head.

“I take it with me everywhere I go,” she said.

Mme Bonenfant removed the cover from the little round table in the center of the petit salon, and the ivory counters were dumped onto the green felt center. While Mme Straus-Muguet was explaining the rules of the game to Barbara, Mme Viénot captured M. Carrère and then indicated the place beside her on the sofa where Harold was to sit.

The Canadian, Mme Carrère, Mme Bonenfant, Barbara, and Mme Straus-Muguet sat down at the table and commenced playing. The game, a marriage of dominoes and anagrams, was agreeable and rather noisy. M. Carrère excused himself and went upstairs to read in bed.

Mme Viénot, reclining against the sofa cushions with her hand to her temple, defended the art of conversation. “The young people of today are very different from my generation,” she said, setting Harold a theme to develop, a subject to embroider, as inclination or experience prompted. “They are serious-minded and idealistic, and concerned about the future. My daughter's husband works until eleven or twelve every night at his office in the Ministry and Suzanne sits at home and knits for the children. At their age, my life was made up entirely of parties and balls. Nobody thought about the future. We were having too good a time.”

She sat up and rearranged the pillows. Her face was now disturbingly close to his. He shifted his position.

“My nephew maintains that we were a perverted generation,” Mme Viénot said cheerfully, “and I dare say he is right. All we cared about was excitement.… ”

Though he was prevented from going toward the gaiety in the center of the room, he was aware that Mme Carrère had
come out of her shell at last and, pleased with the extent of Barbara's vocabulary, was coaching her.

“I'm no good at anything that has to do with words,” the Canadian said mournfully. “When something funny happens to me, I never can put it in a letter. I have to save it all up until I go home.”

Mme Bonenfant was slower still, and kept the others waiting, and had to be shown where her pieces would fit into the meandering diagram. Mme Straus-Muguet was quick as lightning, and when Barbara completed a word, she complimented her, seized her hand, called her “chérie,” taught her an idiom to go with the word, and put down a counter of her own—all in thirty seconds.

“M
ME
C
ARRÈRE
loves words,” Barbara said later as she was transferring four white shirts from the armoire to an open suitcase. “Any kind of abstraction. Anything sufficiently intellectual that she can apply her mind to it. When we started to play that game she became a different person.”

“I saw that she was. Gagny asked us to have lunch with him on Thursday at a bistro he goes to. He said it was quite near our hotel.”

“Did you say we would?”

He shook his head. “I left it up in the air. I wasn't sure that was what we'd most want to be doing.”

“Did you enjoy your conversation with Mme Viénot?”

“It was interesting. I had a different feeling about the house tonight. And the people. I'm glad we decided not to leave.”

“So am I.”

“All in all, it's been a nice day.”

“Very.”

He pulled the covers back and jumped into bed.

“They seemed very pleased with us when I said we were thinking of going up to Paris.… As if we were precocious children who had suddenly grasped an idea that they would have supposed was too old for us.”

“I expect they'd all like to be going up to Paris in the morning,” Barbara said.

“Or as if we had found the answer to a riddle. Or managed to bring a long-drawn-out parlor game to an end.”

T
HE
C
ANADIAN
did not appear at breakfast, and Mme Viénot did not offer any explanation of why he was not coming, but neither did she appear to be surprised, so he must have spoken to her. Either his threats had been idle and he had no friends in Paris who were waiting for him with open arms, or else he was avoiding a long train journey in their company. If he was, they did not really care. They were too lighthearted, as they sipped at their peculiar coffee and concealed the taste of the bread with marmalade, to care about anything but their own plans. They were starting on a train journey across an entirely new part of France. They were going to have to speak French with all kinds of strangers, some of whom might temporarily become their friends. They were going to change trains in Orléans, and at the end of their journey was Paris on Bastille Day. They could hardly believe their good fortune.

The taxi was old, and the woman who sat behind the wheel looked like a man disguised as a woman. Mme Viénot stood in the open doorway and waved to them until they were out of sight around the corner of the house. As the taxi turned into the public road, they looked back but they could not see the house from here. He felt the bulge in his inside coat pocket: passports, wallet, traveler's checks. He covered Barbara's gloved hand with
his bare hand, and leaned back in the seat. “This is more like it,” he said.

“J
UST WHERE
is the Hôtel Vouillemont?” Harold said when they were out in the street in front of the Gare d'Austerlitz.

Barbara didn't know.

He managed to keep from saying: “How can you not know where it is when you spent two whole weeks there?” by saying instead: “I should have asked Mme Viénot.” But she was aware of his suppressed impatience with her, and sorry that she couldn't produce this one piece of helpful information for him when he, who had never been to Europe before, had got them in and out of so many hotels and railroad stations. Actually she could have found it all by herself, simply by retracing her steps. It was the only way she ever found her way back to some place she didn't know the location of. Back through three years of being married to him, and two years of working in New York, to the day she graduated from college, and from there back to the day she sat watching her mother and Mrs. Evans sewing name tapes on the piles of new clothes that were going off with her to boarding school, and then back to the time when the walls of her room were covered with pictures of horses, and so finally to the moment when they were leaving the Hôtel Vouillemont to go to the boat train—which was, after all, only what other people do, she thought; only they do it in their minds, in large jumps, and she had to do it literally.