The Chateau (43 page)

Harold had the name of a restaurant, and the shortest way to it was an alley so dark and sinister-looking that they hesitated to enter it, but it was only two blocks long and they could see a well-lighted street at the other end, and so they started on, and midway down the alley encountered a scene that made their knees weak—five gendarmes struggling to subdue a filthy, frightened, ten-year-old boy. At the corner they came upon the restaurant, brightly lighted, old-fashioned, glittering, clean. The waiters were in dinner jackets, and the food was the best they had had in Europe. They managed to relegate to the warehouse of remembered dreams what they had just seen in the alley; also the look of considered violence in faces they did not ever want to see again.

T
HE PORTER
who carried their heavy luggage through the Gare Montparnasse informed them that there was a taxi strike in Paris. He put the luggage down at the street entrance, and pointed to the entrance to the Métro, directly across the street. “If you'll just help me get these down into the station,” Harold said. The porter was not permitted to go outside the railway station, and left them stranded in the midst of their
seven pieces of luggage. Though they had left the two largest suitcases here in Paris with the American Express, during their travels they had acquired two more that were almost as big. Harold considered moving the luggage in stages and found that he didn't have the courage to do this. Somewhere—in Italy or Austria or the South of France—he had lost contact with absolutes, and he was now afraid to take chances where the odds were too great. While they stood there helplessly at the top of a broad flight of stone steps, discussing what to do, a tall, princely man with a leather strap over his shoulder came up to them and offered his services.

“Yes,” Harold said gratefully, “we do need you. If you'll just help me get the suitcases across the street and down into the Métro—” and the man said: “No, monsieur, I will go with you all the way to your hotel.”

He draped himself with the two heaviest suitcases, using his strap, and then picked up three more. Harold shouldered the dufflebag, and Barbara took the dressing case, and they made their way through the bicycles and down the stairs. While they stood waiting for a train, the Frenchman explained that he was not a porter by profession; he worked in a warehouse. He had been laid off, the day before, and he had a family to support, and so he had come to the railway station, hoping to pick up a little money. At this moment, he said, there were a great many people in Paris in his circumstances.

At his back there was a poster that read, incongruously:
L'Invitation au Château
. Harold thought of Beaumesnil. Then, turning, he looked up into the man's eyes and saw that they were full of sadness.

Each day, the Frenchman said, things got a little worse, and they were going to continue to get worse. The only hope was that General de Gaulle would come back into power.

“Do you really think that?” Harold said, concerned that a man of this kind, so decent and self-respecting, so courteous, so willing to take on somebody else's heavy suitcases while weighted
down by his own burdens, should have lost all faith in democracy.

They talked politics all the way to the Concorde station, and made their way up the steps and across the rue de Rivoli and past the Crillon and down the narrow, dark, rue Boissy d'Anglas. In the lobby of the Hôtel Vouillemont, the Frenchman divested himself of the suitcases, and Harold paid him, and shook hands with him, and thanked him, and thought:
It isn't right to let him go like this when he is in trouble
, but did let him go, nevertheless, and turned to the concierge's desk, thinking that their own troubles were over, and learned that they were just beginning. They had wired ahead for a reservation but the concierge was not happy to see them. The delegates to the General Assembly of the United Nations, the secretarial staff, the delegates' families and servants—some three thousand people—had descended on Paris the day before, and the Hôtel Vouillemont was full; all the hotels were full. How long did monsieur expect to stay?… Ah no. Decidedly no. They could stay here until they had found other accommodation, but the sooner they did this the better.

So, instead of unpacking their suitcases and hanging up their clothes and having a long hot bath and deciding where to have dinner their first night back in Paris, they went out into the street and started looking for a hotel that would take them for five weeks. Avoiding the Crillon and places like it that they knew they couldn't afford, they went up the rue du Mont-Thabor and then along the rue de Castiglione. They would have been happy to stay in the Place Vendôme but there did not seem to be any hotels there. They continued along the rue Danielle Casanova and turned back by way of the rue St. Roch. Nobody wanted them. If only they'd thought to arrange this in July. If they'd only been able to imagine what it would be like … But in July they could have stayed anywhere.

Early the next morning, they started out again.

Harold removed his hat and with a pleasant smile said: “Bonjour,
madame. Nous désirons une chambre pour deux personnes … pour un mois … avec un—”

“Ah, monsieur, je regrette beaucoup, mais il n'y a rien.” The patronne's face reflected satisfaction in refusing something to somebody who wanted it so badly.

“Rien du tout?”

“Rien du tout,” she said firmly.

He did not really expect a different answer, though it was possible that the answer would be different. Once he had been refused, nothing was at stake, and he used the rest of the conversation to practice speaking French. Within the narrow limits of this situation, he was becoming almost fluent. He even tried to do something about his accent.

“Mais la prochaine semaine, peut-être?”

“La semaine prochaine non plus, monsieur.”

“C'est bien dommage.”

He glanced around the lobby and at the empty dining room and at the glass roof over their heads. Then he considered the patronne herself—the interesting hair-do, the flinty eyes, the tight mouth, the gold fleur-de-lys pin that had no doubt belonged to her mother, the incorruptible self-approval. She was as well worth studying as any historical monument, and seemed to be made of roughly the same material.

“C'est un très joli hôtel,” he said, and smiled experimentally, to see whether just this once the conversation could be put on a personal or even a sexual basis. All such confusions are, of course, purely Anglo-Saxon; the patronne was not susceptible. He might as well have tried to charm one of her half-dozen telephone directories.

“Nous aurions été très contents ici,” he said, with a certain pride in the fact that he was using the conditional past tense.

“Ah, monsieur, je regrette infiniment qu'il n'y a rien. L'O.N.U., vous savez.”

“Oui, oui, l'O.N.U.” He raised his hat politely. “Merci, madame.”

“De rien, monsieur.” The voice was almost kind.

“Nothing?” Barbara asked, when he got outside. She was standing in front of a shop window.

“Nothing. This one would have been perfect.” Then he studied the shop window. “That chair,” he said.

“I was looking at it too.”

“It would probably cost too much to ship it home, but we could ask, anyway.” He put his hand to the door latch. The door was locked.

They started on down the street, looking for the word “hôtel.” The weather was sunny and warm. Paris was beautiful.

In the middle of the morning, they sat down at a table under an awning on a busy street, ordered café filtre, and stretched their aching legs. Barbara opened her purse and took out the mail that they had picked up at the bank but not taken the time to read. They divided the letters between them. It was not a very good place to read. The noise was nerve-racking. Every time a big truck passed, the chairs and tables and their two coffee cups shook.

“Here's a letter from the Robertsons,” she said.

“Are they still here?” he asked, looking up from his letter with interest.

Among the American tourists whom the Austrian government had billeted at a country inn outside Salzburg because the hotels in town were full of military personnel there was an American couple of the same age as Harold and Barbara and so much like them that at first the two couples carefully avoided each other. But when day after day they ate lunch at the same table and swam in the same lake and took the same crowded bus into Salzburg, it became more and more difficult and finally absurd not to compare notes on what they had heard or were going to hear. The Robertsons had no hotel reservations in Venice, and so Harold told them where he and Barbara were staying. And when they got to Venice they were welcomed in the hotel lobby by the Robertsons, who had already been there
two days and showed them the way to the Piazza San Marco. With the mail that was handed to Harold at the American Express in Rome there was a note from Steve Robertson: he and Nancy were so sorry to miss them, and they must be sure and go to the Etruscan Museum and the outdoor opera at the Baths of Caracalla. The note that Barbara now passed across the table contained the name and telephone number of the Robertsons' hotel in Paris.

He finished reading the mail that was scattered over the table and then said suddenly: “I don't think we are going to find anything.”

“What will we do?”

“I don't know,” he said. He signaled to the waiter that he was ready to pay the check. “Close our suitcases and go home, I guess.”

After lunch they started out again. There was only one small hotel in the neighborhood of the Place Redouté and it was full. Rien, monsieur. Je regrette beaucoup. They tried the Hôtel Bourgogne et Montana, the Hôtel Florida, the Hôtel Continental. They tried the Hôtel Scribe, and the Hôtel Métropolitain, and the Hôtel Madison. The Hôtel Louvre, the Hôtel Oxford et Cambridge, the Hôtel France et Choiseul … Rien, monsieur. Je n'ai rien … rien du tout … pas une seule chambre pour deux personnes avec salle de bains, pas de grand lit … Absolument rien … And all the while in his wallet there was that calling card, which he had saved as a souvenir. Used properly, the card of M. Carrère would have got them into any hotel in Paris, no matter how crowded. He never once thought of it.

From their room in the Hôtel Vouillemont, Harold called the Robertsons' hotel. The voice that answered said: “Ne quittez pas,” and then after several minutes he heard another voice that was like an American flag waving in the breeze. “Dusty? How wonderful! You must come right over! It's our last night in Paris, we're taking the boat train in the morning, and what could be more perfect?”

The Robertsons' hotel was on the other side of the river, in the rue de l'Université, and as Harold and Barbara walked up the street from the bus stop, they saw Steve coming to meet them. He was smiling, and he embraced them both and said: “Paris is marvelous!”

“If you have a place to lay your head,” Harold said.

They told him about the trouble they had been having, and he said: “Let's go talk to the proprietor of our hotel. We're leaving in the morning. I'm sure you can have our room. You'll love it there, and it's dirt cheap.” The proprietor said that he would be happy to let them have the Robertsons' room, but for one night only. So they went on upstairs.

“Oh, it's just marvelous!” Nancy said as she kissed them. “We've had the most marvelous two weeks. I know it's a terrible thing to say but neither of us want to go home. We're both heartsick at the thought of leaving Paris. Wasn't Rome wonderful!”

The Robertsons had friends who were living here and spoke perfect French and had initiated them into the pleasures of the Left Bank. They took Barbara and Harold off to have dinner at a place they knew about, where the proprietor gave the women he admired a little green metal souvenir frog, sometimes with a lewd compliment. He was considered a character. The restaurant was full of students, and Harold and Barbara felt they were on the other side of the moon from the Place Redouté, where they belonged.

Saturday morning, Harold came down in the elevator alone, and, avoiding the reproachful look of the concierge as he passed through the lobby on his way to the street door, went to the Cunard Line office to see if their return passage could be changed to an earlier date, and was told that they were fortunate to be leaving as soon as the middle of October; the earliest open sailing was December first.

“I think it's a sign,” Barbara said.

“We might as well take what we have,” he said. “While we have it.”

They got into a taxi and went back to the Left Bank and fanned out through the neighborhood of St. Germain-des-Prés—the rue Jacob, the rue de l'Université, the rue des Saints Pères, the rue des B eaux-Arts … The story was always the same. Their feet ached, their eyes saw nothing but the swinging hotel sign far up the street. Harold had tried to get Barbara to stay in their room while he walked the streets, but she insisted on keeping him company.