The Chateau (14 page)

O
N THE WAY HOME
the walking party was caught in a heavy shower and drenched to the skin.

Dressing hurriedly for dinner, Barbara said: “It's so like her: ‘Thérèse will bring you a can—what time would you like it?' and then when seven o'clock comes, there isn't a sign of hot water.”

“Do you want me to go down and see about it?”

“No, you'd better not.”

“Maybe she does it on purpose,” he said.

“No, she's just terribly vague, I've decided. She only half listens to what people are saying. I wouldn't mind if we were on a camping trip, but to be expected to dress for dinner, to have everything so formal, and not even be able to take a bath! Do you want to button me up in back?… I've never seen anyone look as vague as she does sometimes. As if her whole life had been passed in a dream. Her eyelids come down over her eyes and she looks at us as if she couldn't imagine who we were or what we were doing here.”

“M. Carrère likes Americans, but Mme Carrère doesn't. I don't think she likes much of anybody.”

“She likes the Canadian.”

“Does she?”

“She laughs at his jokes.”

“I don't think Gagny's French is as good as he thinks it is. It's an exaggeration of the way the others speak. Almost a parody.”

“M. Carrère speaks beautiful French.”

“He speaks French the way an American speaks English. It
just comes out of him easily and naturally. Gagny shrugs his shoulders and draws down the corners of his mouth and says ‘mais oui' all the time, and it's as if he had picked up the mannerisms of half a dozen different people—which I guess you can't help doing if the language isn't your own. At least, I find myself beginning to do it.”

“But it
is
his language. He's bilingual.”

“French-Canadian isn't the same as French.” He pulled his tie through and drew the knot snugly against his collar. “While you are trying to make the proper sounds and remember which nouns are masculine and which feminine, the imitation somehow unconsciously— M. Carrère's
English
is something else again. His pronunciation is so wide of the mark that sometimes I can't figure out what on earth he's talking about. “ 'ut doaks, 'ut doaks!” And so impatient with us for not understanding.”

“I shouldn't have laughed at him,” Barbara said sadly. “I was sorry afterward. Because our pronunciation must sound just as comic to the French, and they never laugh at us.”

A
T DINNER
, Mme Viénot's navy-blue silk dress was held together at the throat by a diamond pin, which M. Carrère admired. He had a passion for the jewelry of the Second Empire, he said. And Mme Carrère remarked dryly that there was only one thing she would do differently if she had her life to live over again. She let her husband explain. In the spring of 1940, as they were preparing to escape from Paris by car, she had entrusted her jewel case to a friend, and the friend had handed it over to the Nazis. The few pieces that she had now were in no way comparable to what had been lost forever. Even so, Barbara had to make an effort to keep from looking at the emerald solitaire that Mme Carrère wore next to her plain gold wedding ring, and she was sorry that she had listened to Harold when he
suggested that she leave everything but a string of cultured pearls in the bank at home.

Having established a precedent, the Americans were concerned to live it down. They remained in the petit salon with the others, after dinner. The company sat, the women with sweaters and coats thrown over their shoulders, facing the empty Franklin stove. Observing that Gagny smoked one cigarette and then no more, the Americans, not wanting to be responsible for filling the room with smoke, denied the impulse each time it recurred, and sometimes found to their surprise that they had a lighted cigarette in their hand.

While Hector Gagny and M. Carrère were solemnly discussing the underlying causes of the defeat of 1940, the present weakened condition of France, and the dangers that a reawakened Germany would present to Europe and the rest of the world, a quite different conversation was taking place in the mirror over the mantelpiece. Harold Rhodes's reflection, leaning forward in his chair, said to Mme Viénot's reflection: “I am not accustomed to bargaining. It makes me uneasy. But we have a friend who lived in France for years, and she said—”

“Where in France?” Mme Viénot's reflection interrupted.

“In Paris. They had an apartment overlooking the Parc Monceau.”

“The Monceau quarter is charming. Gounod lived there. And Chopin.”

“She said it was a matter of principle, and that in traveling we must keep our eyes open and not be above bargaining or people would take advantage of us … of our inexperience. It was she who told us to ask you to figure the price by the week instead of by the day, but if I had it to do over again, I wouldn't listen to her. I'd just pay you what you asked for, and let it go at that.”

Instead of giving him the reassurance he wanted, Mme Viénot's reflection leaned back among the sofa pillows, with her hand to her cheek. It would have been better, he realized, not to have brought the matter up at all. It was not necessary to bring
it up. It had been settled before they ever left America. In his embarrassment he turned for help to the photograph of the schoolboy on the piano. “What I am trying to say, I guess, is that it's one thing to live up to your principles, and quite another thing to live up to somebody else's idea of what those principles should be.”

“My likeness is here among the others,” the boy in the photograph said, “but in their minds I am dead. They have let me die.”

“The house is cold and damp and depressing,” Barbara Rhodes's reflection said to the reflection of M. Carrère. “Why must we all sit with sweaters and coats over our shoulders? Why isn't there a fire in that stove? I don't see why we all don't get pneumonia.”

“People born to great wealth—”

All the other reflections stopped talking in order to hear what M. Carrère's reflection was about to say.

“—are also born to a certain kind of human deprivation, and soon learn to accept it. For example, those letters that arrive daily, even in this remote country house—letters from my lawyer, from my financial advisors, from bankers and brokers and churchmen and politicians and the heads of charitable organizations, all read and acknowledged by Mme Carrère, lest they tire me (which indeed they would). The expressions of personal attachment, of concern for my health, are judged according to their sincerity, in most instances not great, and a few are read aloud to me, lest I think that no one cares. I am accustomed to the fact that in every Jetter, sooner of later, self-interest shows through. I do not really mind, any more. Music is my delight. When I want companionship, I go to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and look at the porcelains and the period furniture.”

“I used to have a friend—” Mme Bonenfant's reflection said. “She has been dead for twenty years: Mme Noë—”

“Mme Noë?” M. Carrère interrupted. “I knew her also. That is, I was taken to see her as a young man.”

“Mme Noë was fond of saying, and of writing in letters and on
the flyleaf of books: ‘Life is something more than we believe it to be.' ”

“Since my illness,” M. Carrère said, “I have become aware for the first time of innumerable—reconciliations, I suppose one would call them, that go on around us all the time without our noticing it. Again and again, Mme Carrère hands me something just as I am on the point of asking for it. And in her dreams she is sometimes a party to financial transactions that I am positive I have not told her about.… But it is strange that you should speak of Mme Noë. I was thinking about her this very afternoon as I stood looking at that grass-choked garden and that house gutted by fire. She was quite old when I was taken to see her. And she asked me all sorts of questions about myself that no one had ever asked me before, and that I went on answering for days afterward.”

“She had that effect on everyone,” Mme Bonenfant said.

“I remember that she led me to a vase of flowers and we talked.”

“And what did you say?” Barbara Rhodes asked.

“I said something that pleased her,” M. Carrère said, “but what it was I can no longer remember. All I know is that it was not at all like the sort of thing I usually said. And when she left me to speak to someone else, I did not have the feeling that I was being abandoned. Or that she would ever confuse me afterward with anyone else.… She is an important figure in the memoirs of a dozen great men, and reading about her the same question always occurs to me. What manner of woman she was really, if you made no claim on her, if you asked for nothing (as she asked for nothing) but merely sat, silent, content merely to be there beside her, and let her talk or not talk, as she felt like doing, all through a summer afternoon, none of them seem to know.”

“She was frail,” Mme Bonenfant said. “She was worn out by ill-health, by the demands, the endless claims upon her time and energy—”

“Which she must have encouraged,” M. Carrère said.

“No doubt,” Mme Bonenfant said. “By temperament she was
not merely kind, she was angelic, but there was also irony. Once or twice, toward the end of her life, she talked to me about herself. It seems she suffered always from the fear that, wanting only to help people, she nevertheless unwittingly brought serious harm to them. This may have been true but I do not know a single instance of it. For my own part, I am quite content to believe that life is nothing more than our vision of it—of what we believe it to be. Tacitus says that the phoenix appears from time to time in Egypt, that it is a fact well verified. Herodotus tells the same story, but skeptically.”

“At the Council of Nicaea,” M. Carrère said, “three hundred and eighteen bishops took their places on their thrones. But when they rose as their names were called, it appeared that they were three hundred and nineteen. They were never able to make the number come out right; whenever they approached the last one, he immediately turned into the likeness of his neighbor.”

“Before Harold and I were married,” Barbara said, “a woman in a nightclub read our palms, and she said Leo and Virgo should never marry. Their horoscopes are in conflict. If they love each other and are happy it is a mistake.… That's why he doesn't like fortunetellers. I don't think our marriage is a mistake, but on the other hand, sometimes I lie awake between three and four in the morning, planning dinner parties and solving riddles and worrying about curtains that don't hang straight in the dark, and about my clothes and my hair, and about whether I have been unintentionally the cause of hurt feelings. And about Harold, sound asleep beside me and sharing not only the same bed but some of my worst faults.… Does anybody know the answer to the riddle that begins: ‘If three people are in a room and two of them have a white mark on their forehead—' ”

“The answer to the riddle of why I am not married,” Hector Gagny said, “is that I am. And my wife hates me.”

“So did the woman I gave my jewel case to,” Mme Carrère said. “But I didn't know it.”

“She has all but ruined my career,” Gagny said. “She is beautiful and willful and perverse, and in her own way quite wonderful. But she makes no concessions to the company she finds herself in, and I sit frozen with fear of what may come out of her mouth.”

“Do not despair,” Mme Bonenfant said. “Be patient. Your wife, M. Gagny, may only be acting the way she does out of the fear that you do not love her.”

“In the beginning we seemed to be happy, and only after a while did it become apparent that there were things that were not right. And that they were not ever going to be right. I began to see that behind the fascination of her mind, her temperament, there was some force at work that was not on my side, and bent on destroying both of us. But what is it? Why is she like that?”

“Though there was only two years difference in our ages,” Mme Viénot said, “my mother held me responsible for my brother's safety when we were children. I used to have nightmares in which something happened to him or was about to happen to him. When we played together, I never let go of his hand.”

“Maurice was delicate,” Mme Bonenfant said.

“He cried easily,” Mme Viénot said. “He was always getting his feelings hurt. My daughter Sabine is very like him in appearance. I only hope that her life is not as unhappy as his.”

“I see that you haven't forgiven me,” the boy in the photograph said. “I failed to distinguish myself in my studies but I made three friendships that were a credit to me, and I died bravely. It took me almost an hour to kill myself.… Now I am an effect of memory. When you have completely forgotten me, I assume that I will pass on to other places.”

“They say that people who talk about committing suicide never actually do it,” Mme Viénot said. “Maurice was the exception. When his body was brought home for burial we were warned that it would be better not to open the coffin.”