The Chateau (4 page)

She hadn't the slightest objection to their sitting at one of the tables outdoors, in front of the hotel, and before they settled down, he raced back upstairs and got the camera and took Barbara's picture. He managed to get in also the furled blue and white striped umbrella, the portable green fence with geraniums and salvia growing in flower boxes along the top and bottom, and the blue morning-glories climbing on strings beside the hotel door.

“Quel apéritif?” demanded the waitress, when the camera had
been put away. Finding that they didn't know, because they had had no experience in the matter, she took it upon herself to begin their education. She returned with two glasses and six bottles on a big painted tin tray, and let them try one apéritif after another, and, when they had made their decision, urged them to have the seven-course dinner rather than the five; the seven-course dinner began with écrevisses.

“Ecrevisses” turned out to be tiny crawfish, fried, with tartar sauce. There were only two other guests in the dining room, a man and a woman who spoke in such low tones and were so absorbed in each other that it was quite clear to anyone who had ever seen a French movie that they were lovers.

As the waitress changed their plates for the fourth time, Barbara said: “Wonderful food!” The color had come back into her face.

“Wonderful wine,” Harold said, and asked the waitress what it was that they were drinking. The wine was Algerian and had no name, so he couldn't write it down in his little notebook.

When they went up to their room, the images started coming once more. Their eyelids ached. They felt strung on wires.

The street outside their window was as quiet as a cemetery. They undressed and sank sighing into the enormous bed, so like a mother to them in their need of rest.

A
FTER TEN O'CLOCK
there was no sound in the little hotel, and no traffic in the street. The night trucks passed by a different route.

At midnight it rained. Between three and four in the morning, the sky cleared and there were stars. The wind was off the sea. The air was fresh. A night bird sang.

The sleepers knew nothing whatever about any of this. One minute they were dropping off to sleep and the next they heard
shouting and opened their eyes to broad daylight. When they sat up in bed they saw that the street was full of people, walking or riding bicycles. The women all wore shapeless long black cotton dresses. An old woman went by, leading her cow. Chickens and geese. Goats. The shops were all open. A man with a vegetable cart was shouting that his string beans were tender and his melons ripe.

“It's like being in the front row at the theater,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“Wonderful.”

“So do I. Do you think if I pressed this button anything would happen?”

“You mean like breakfast?”

She nodded.

“Try it,” he said with a yawn.

Five minutes later there was a knock at the door and the waitress came in with a breakfast tray. “Bonjour, monsieur-dame.”

“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he said. “Avez-vous bien dormi?”

“Oui, merci. Très bien. Et vous?”

“Moi aussi.”

“Little goat, bleat. Little table, appear,” Harold said as the door closed after her. “Have some coffee.”

After breakfast, they got up and dressed. She packed while he was downstairs paying the bill. The concierge called a taxi for them.

“I hate to leave that little hotel,” she said, looking back through the rear window as they drove off.

“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
.…

S
HORTLY 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 not 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.