The Chateau (18 page)

She tried, anyway. She thought very carefully and then said: “I think it's not far from the Louvre.”

They went into the Métro station, and there he found an electrified map and began to study it.

Also, she thought, when she was here before, it was with her father, who had an acutely developed sense of geography and
never got lost in strange cities, any more than in the woods. Instead of trying to figure out for themselves where they were, they always stood and waited for him to make up his mind which was north, south, east, and west. As soon as he had arrived at the points of the compass, he started off and they followed, talking among themselves and embroidering on old jokes and keeping an eye on him without difficulty even in crowds because he was half a head taller than anybody else.

Harold pushed a button, lights flashed, and he announced: “We change trains at Bastille.”

With a sense that they were journeying through history, they climbed the steps to the platform. They were delighted with the beautiful little toy train, all windows and bright colors and so different from the subway in New York. They changed at Bastille and got off at Louvre and came up out onto the sidewalk. The big forbidding gray building on their left was the Louvre, Barbara was positive, but there was no dancing in the street in front of it. A short distance away, they saw another building with a sign
Louvre
on it, but that turned out to be a department store. It was closed. All the shops were closed. Paris was as empty and quiet as New York on a Sunday morning. They listened. No sound of distant music came from the side streets. Neither did a taxi. Their suitcases grew heavier with each block, and at the first sidewalk café they sat down to rest. A waiter appeared, and Harold ordered two glasses of red wine. When he had drunk his, he got up and went inside. The interior of the café was gloomy and ill-lit, and he was glad he had left Barbara outside. It was clearly a tough joint. He asked if he could see the telephone directory and discovered that there was more than one, and that they were compiled according to principles he didn't understand, and in that poor light the Hôtel Vouillemont did not seem to be listed in any of them. So he appealed to the kindness of Madame la Patronne, who left the bar untended and came over to the shelf of telephone books and looked with him.

“The Hôtel Vouillemont?” she called out, to the three men who were standing at the bar.

“In the rue Boissy d'Anglas,” Harold said.

“The rue Boissy d'Anglas …”

“The rue Boissy d'Anglas?”

“The rue Boissy d'Anglas.”

One of them remembered suddenly; it was in the sixteenth arrondissement.

“No, you are thinking of the rue Boissière,” the waiter said. “I used to help my cousin deliver packages for a shop in the sixteenth arrondissement, and I know the quarter well. There is no Hôtel Vouillemont.”

The three men left their drinks and came over and started thumbing through the telephone directories. The waiter joined them. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “Here it is. The Hôtel Vouillemont … It's in the rue Boissy d'Anglas.”

“And where is that?” Harold asked.

The waiter peered at the directory and said: “The eighth arrondissement. You got off too soon. You should have descended at Concorde.”

“Is that far from here?”

They all five assured him that he could walk there.

“But with suitcases?”

“In that case,” Madame said, “you would do well to return to the Métro station.”

He shook hands all around, hesitated, and then took a chance. It didn't work; they thanked him politely but declined the invitation to have a glass of wine with him. So his instinct must have been wrong.

“Is there any way that one can call a taxi?” he asked.

The waiter went to the door with him and showed him which direction they must go to find a taxi stand. Harold shook hands with him again, and then turned to Barbara. “We should have descended at Concorde,” he said, and picked up the suitcases. “It's miles from here.”

The taxi driver knew exactly where the Hôtel Vouillemont was, and so they could sit back and not worry. They peered through the dirty windows at Paris. The unfamiliar streets had familiar names—the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the rue Marengo. They caught a glimpse down a long avenue of the familiar façade of the Opéra. The arcades of the rue de Rivoli were deserted, and so were the public gardens on the other side of the street. So was the Place de la Concorde. The sky over the fountains and the Egyptian obelisk was cold and gray. The driver pointed out the American Embassy to them, and then they were in a dark, narrow street. The taxi stopped.

“He's made a mistake,” Barbara said. “This isn't it.”

“It says ‘Hôtel Vouillemont' on the brass plate,” Harold said, reaching for his wallet. And then, though he disliked arguments, he got into one with the taxi driver. Mme Viénot had said he must refuse to pay more than the amount on the meter. The driver showed him a chart and explained that it was the amount on the chart he must pay, not the amount on the meter. Harold suggested that they go inside and settle the matter there. The driver got out and followed him into the hotel, but declined to help with the suitcases. To Harold's surprise, the concierge sided with the driver, against Mme Viénot.

Still not sure they hadn't cheated him, he paid the driver what it said on the chart and turned back to the concierge's desk. If it turned out that the concierge was dishonest, he was not going to like staying at the Hôtel Vouillemont. He studied the man's face, and the face declined to say whether the person it belonged to was honest or dishonest.

While he was registering, Barbara stood looking around her at the lobby. She could not even say, as people so often do of some place they knew as a child, that it was much smaller than she remembered, because she didn't remember a thing she saw. She wondered if, all these years, she could have misremembered the name of the hotel they stayed in. It was not until they were in the elevator, with their suitcases, that she knew suddenly that
they were in the right hotel after all. She remembered the glass elevator. No other hotel in the world had one like it. It was right out in the center of the lobby, and it had a red plush sofa you could sit down on. As they rose through the ceiling, the past was for a moment superimposed on the present, and she had a wonderful feeling of lightness—as if she were rising through water up to the surface and sunshine and air.

Their room was warm, and when they turned on the faucets in the bathroom, hot water came gushing out of the faucet marked
chaud
. They filled the tub to the brim and had a bath, and dressed, and went off down the street to have lunch at a restaurant that Barbara remembered the name of: Tante Louise. Like the glass elevator, the restaurant hadn't changed. After lunch they strolled. Harold stopped at a kiosk and bought a map-book of Paris by arrondissements, so that he wouldn't ever again be caught not knowing where he was and how to get to where he wanted to go. They looked in the windows of the shops in the rue St. Honoré, full of beautiful gloves and scarves, and purses that probably cost a fortune.

They were in Paris at last, and aware that they should have been happy, but there was no indication anywhere that Paris was happy. No dancing in the streets, no singing, no decorations, no flags, even. They discovered the Madeleine and the American Express and Maxim's, none of which gave off any effervescence of gaiety, and finally, toward the end of the afternoon, they gave up searching for Paris on Bastille Day, since it appeared to be only an idea in their minds, and went back to their hotel.

That evening, before it was quite dark, they set off to see the illuminations. They were encouraged when they saw that the streets had begun to fill up with people. They went first to the Place de la Concorde, and admired the light-soaked fountains and the flood-lighted twin buildings. With lights trained on it, the Madeleine, at the end of the rue Royale, no longer looked
quite so gloomy and Roman. They were about to start off on the route that Mme Carrère had recommended, when a skyrocket exploded and long yellow ribbons of light fell down the sky. So, instead, they joined the throngs of people hurrying toward the river. For half an hour they stood in the middle of the Pont de la Concorde, looking now at the fireworks and now at the upraised, expectant French faces all around them. Bouquet after bouquet of colored lights exploded in the sky and in the black water. They decided that, rather than retrace their steps, they would reverse the directions Mme Carrère had given them. This turned out to be a mistake. They rushed here and there, got lost, doubled back on their route, and wasted a good deal of time changing trains in the Métro. And they never did see the lighted lamps of the Comédie Française.

At one o'clock, exhaustion claimed them. They were lost again, and a long way from home. They asked directions of a gendarme, who hurried them into a Métro station just in time to catch the last train back to Concorde.

T
HE ADDRESS
of the editorial officers of
La Femme Elégante
turned out to be a courtyard, and the entrance was up a short flight of steps. They gave the receptionist their name and, as they waited for Sabine Viénot to appear, Harold's eyes roamed around the small foyer, trying to make out something, anything, from the little he saw—nobly proportioned doors with heavy molding painted dove gray, nondescript lighting fixtures, and dove-gray carpet. When Mme Viénot spoke of her daughter's career, her tone of voice suggested that she was at the forefront of her profession. But then she had showed them some of her daughter's work—thumbnail sketches of dress patterns buried in the back of the magazine. The girl who came through the
doorway and shook hands with them was very slight and pale and young, with observant blue eyes and brown hair and a high, domed forehead, like the French queens in the
Petit Larousse
.

Harold started to explain who they were and she said that she knew; her mother had written to her about them. “You can speak English if you prefer,” she said. “I speak it badly but—They are all well in the country?”

Barbara nodded.

“I'm afraid you haven't had very nice weather. It has been cold and rainy here, also. You arrived in Paris when?”

“Yesterday,” Barbara said.

“But we didn't see any dancing in the streets,” Harold said. “Last night at midnight we saw a crowd of people singing and marching in the square in front of Notre Dame, but they were Communists, I think. Anyway, there was no dancing.

“In Montmartre you would have seen it, perhaps,” the French girl said. “Or the Place Pigalle.”

They couldn't think what to say next.

“Mother has written how much she enjoyed having you with her,” the French girl said.

“We are returning to Brenodville tomorrow,” Harold said, “and your mother asked us to let you know the train we are taking. She thought you might also be intending to—”

“I may be going down to the country tomorrow,” the French girl said thoughtfully. “I don't know yet.”

“We're taking the four o'clock train,” he said. “Your mother suggested that we might all three take one taxi from Blois.”

“That is very kind of you. Perhaps I could telephone you tomorrow morning. You are staying where?”

“It's quite near here, actually.” He tore a leaf out of his financial diary, wrote down the name of their hotel, and held it out to her. She glanced at the slip of paper but did not take it from him. They shook hands, and then she was gone.

Standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the flow of traffic to
stop so they could cross over, he said: “I thought at first she was like her mother—like what Mme Viénot was at that age. But she isn't.”

“Not at all,” Barbara said.

“Her voice made me realize that she wasn't.”

“She has a lovely voice—so light. And silvery.”

“She has a charming voice. Something of the French intonation carries over into her English, of course. But it's more than that, I think. It's an amused voice. It has a slight suggestion of humor, at no one's expense. As if she had learned to see things with a clarity that—that was often in excess of whatever need there was for seeing things clearly. And the residue had turned into something like amusement.”

“But she didn't ask us to lunch.”

“I know.”

They went to the Guaranty Trust Company and were directed to the little upstairs room where their mail was handed to them.

“So what do we do now?” Barbara asked when they were outside again.

He looked at his watch. They had spent a considerable part of their first twenty-four hours in Paris walking the streets. He was dog-tired, his feet hurt, and Notre Dame in daylight faced the wrong way. For the moment, they were satiated with looking, and ready to be with someone they knew, it didn't matter how slightly, so long as they could talk about what they had seen, ask questions, and feel that they were a part of the intense sociability that they were aware of everywhere around them. Paris on the day after Bastille Day was not a deserted city. Also the sun was shining, and it was warm; it was like summer, and that lifted their spirits.