The Chateau (44 page)

At one o'clock she said: “I'm hungry,” and he said: “Shall we try one more?” The concierge was eating his lunch when they walked into the hotel lobby. The smell of beef casserole pierced the Americans to the heart. It was the essence of everything French, and it wasn't for them.

When they returned to their hotel, the concierge called to Harold. Expecting the worst, he crossed the lobby to the desk. The concierge handed him a letter and Harold recognized Steve Robertson's tiny, precise handwriting. Inside there was an advertisement clipped from that morning's Paris
Herald
. The Hôtel Paris-Dinard, in the rue Cassette, had a vacancy—a room with a bath.

T
HEY MOVED
across the river the first thing Sunday morning, and by lunchtime their suitcases were unpacked and stored away under the bed, their clothes were hanging in the armoire, the washbasin in the bathroom was full of soaking nylon, the towel racks were full, the guidebooks were set out on the rickety little table by the window, and they had all but forgotten about that monotonous dialogue between the possessor and the dispossessed, which began: “Nous désirons une chambre pour deux personnes …”

The hotel was very quiet, there were no other Americans staying there, and they were delighted with the room and the view from their window. They were up high, in the treetops, and could see through the green leaves the greener dome of a church. They looked down into a walled garden directly across the street from the hotel. The room was not large, but it was not too small, and it was clean and quiet and had a double bed and a bathroom adjoining it, and it was not expensive. Fortune is never halfhearted when it decides to reverse itself.

The green dome was in their guidebooks; it was the Church of the Ancient Convent of the Carmelites. During the Reign of Terror, a hundred and sixteen priests had had their throats cut on the church steps, and every morning, in the darkness and the cold just before dawn, Harold was wakened by a bell tolling, so loud and so near that it made his heart race wildly. Barbara slept through it. Leo is sleepy at night and easily wakened in the morning; the opposite is true of Virgo.

When the bell stopped tolling, he drifted off. Three hours later the big breakfast tray was deposited on their laps, before they were wholly awake or decently clothed. Though white flour was illegal, by paying extra they could have, with their coffee, croissants made of white flour. They were still warm from the bakery oven. Through the open window came the massed voices of school children in the closed garden, so like the sound of noisy birds. After they had finished their breakfast they fell asleep again, and when they woke, the street was quiet; the children had been swallowed up by the school. At recess time they reappeared, but the racket was never again so vivid during the rest of the day.

The owner of the hotel sat at a high desk in the lobby, behind his ledger, and nodded remotely to them as they came and went. If they turned right when they emerged from the hotel, they came to a street of religious-statuary shops, which took them into the Place St. Sulpice, with its fountain and plane trees and heavy baroque church. If they turned left, they came to the rue
Vaugirard, which was busier, and if they turned left again, they eventually came to the Palais du Luxembourg and the gardens. Sitting on iron chairs a few feet away from the basin where the children sailed their boats, they read or looked at the faces—narrow, unhandsome compared to the Italian faces they had left behind, but intense, nervously alive. Or they got up and walked, past the palace, between the flower beds, down one of the formal avenues.

In an alley off the Place St. Sulpice they found the perfect restaurant, and they went there every day, for lunch or dinner or both. Harold held the door open for Barbara, and they were greeted as they came in—by madame behind her desk and then by monsieur with his hands full of plates—and went on into the back room, where they usually sat at the same table in order to be served by a waiter called Pierre, who took exquisite care of them and smiled at them as if he were their affectionate older brother. Here in this small square room, eating was as simple and as delightful as picking wildflowers in a wood. They had artichokes and pâté en croûte, green peas and green beans from somebody's garden, and French-fried potatoes that were rushed to their table from the kitchen. They had little steaks with Béarnaise sauce, and pheasant, and roast duck, and sweetbreads, and calf's liver, and brains, and venison. They had raspberries and pears and fraises des bois and strawberry tarts, and sometimes with their dessert Pierre smuggled them whipped cream. They drank Mâcon blanc or Mâcon rouge. They ate and drank with rapture, and, strangely, grew thinner and thinner.

Though there were always people in the Place St. Sulpice, they almost never saw anybody in the rue Cassette. It had not always been so quiet. Walking home one day they saw there wasn't a single house that didn't have pockmarks that could only have been made by machine-gun bullets in the summer of 1944.

They learned to use the buses, so that they could see the upper world of Paris when they went out, instead of the underworld of the Métro. They also walked—down the rue Vaugirard to the
Odéon and then down the rue de l'Odéon to the boulevard St. Germain; down the boulevard St. Germain to the Place St. Germain-des-Prés. Over and over, as if this were a form of memorizing, they walked in the rue Bonaparte and the rue Jacob, in the rue Dauphine and the rue du Cherche-Midi, in the rue Cardinale and the Carrefour de l'Odéon, in the rue des Ciseaux and the rue des Saints Pères, in the boulevard St. Germain and the boulevard Raspail.

In their hurry to move into a hotel that wanted them, they neglected to leave behind their new address. Their first piece of mail, forwarded by the bank, was a letter from Mme Straus-Muguet:

Harold called the convent in Auteuil, and was told that Mme Straus-Muguet had left. Barbara wrote and told her where they were, and that they would be here until the nineteenth of October. She also wrote to Alix, who answered immediately, inviting them down to the country for the week end.

“Do you think that means we're to pay or are we really invited?” he said.

“I don't know. Do you want to go? I'd just as soon.”

“No,” he said. “I don't want to leave Paris.”

They heard a gala performance of
Boris Godounov
at the Opéra, with the original Bakst settings and costumes. On a rainy night they got into a taxi and drove to the Opéra Comique. The house was sold out but there were folding seats. Blocking the
center aisle, and only now and then wondering what would happen if a fire broke out, they heard
Les Contes d'Hoffman
.

They went to the movies, they went to the marionette theater in the Champs-Elysées. They went to the Grand Guignol. They went to the Cirque Médrano.

“What I like about living in Paris,” he said, “is planning ahead very carefully, so that every day you can do something or see something that you wouldn't do if you weren't here.”

“That isn't what I like,” Barbara said. “What I like is
not
to plan ahead, but just see what happens. Couldn't we do that for a change?”

“All right,” he said. But his heart sank at the thought of leaving anything to chance. The days would pass, would be frittered away, and suddenly their five weeks in Paris would be used up and they wouldn't have seen or done half the things they meant to. He managed to forget what she had said. He waited impatiently for each new issue of
La Semaine de Paris
to appear on the kiosks, and when it did, he studied it as if he were going to have to pass an examination in the week's plays, concerts, and movies. They did not understand one word in fifty of Montherlant's
La Reine Morte
, and during the first intermission he rushed out into the lobby to buy a program; but they were in France, the rest of the audience did not need a résumé of the plot, the program was not helpful.

At Cocteau's
Les Parents Terribles
the old woman who opened the door of their box for them came back while the play was going on and tried to oust them from their seats in order to put somebody else in them. With one eye on the stage—the mother was in bed with a cold, the grown son was kneeling on the bed, he accused, she admitted to remorse, incest was in the air—Harold fought off the ouvreuse. They were in their right seats, and indignation made him as eloquent as a Frenchman would have been in these circumstances. But by the time the enemy had retired and he was free to turn his attention to the play, the remarkable love scene was over.

Barbara went off by herself one morning, while he stayed home and wrote letters. When she came back, she reported that she had found a store with wonderful cooking utensils—just the kind of thin skillets that were in Mme Cestre's kitchen and that she had been looking for for years.

“I would have bought them,” she said, “except that I decided they would take up too much room in the luggage.… Now I'm sorry I didn't.”

“Where was this shop?” he asked, reaching for his hat.

She didn't know. “But I can find my way back to it,” she said.

It was a virtuoso performance, up one street and down the next, across squares and through alleys, beyond the sixth arrondissement and well into the fifth. At last they came on the shop she was searching for. They bought four skillets, a nutmeg grater, a salad basket, some cooking spoons, a copper match box to hang beside the stove, and a paring knife. In the next street, they came upon a bookshop with old children's books and Victorian cardboard toy theaters. They bought the book of children's songs with illustrations by Boutet de Monvel that was in the bookcase of the red room at Beaumesnil. While Barbara was trying to decide between the settings for
La belle au bois dormant
and
Cendrillon
, he said suddenly: “Where did Sabine sleep while we were occupying her room?”

“In the back part of the house, probably. Why?”

“Or one of those dreary attic rooms,” he said. “It's funny we never thought about it at the time. Do you think she minded our being in her room?”

That evening while Barbara was dressing, he gave M. le Patron the number of the apartment in the rue Malène and waited beside the bed, with the telephone held to his ear. The phone rang and rang. But she's too thin, he thought, watching her straighten the seam of her stockings. She isn't getting enough rest.…

Reaching into the armoire, she began pushing her dresses
along the rod. She could hardly bear to put any of them on any more.

“Mme Viénot's affectionate manner with you I took at the time to be disingenuous,” he said. “Looking back, I think that it wasn't.”

The cotton print dress she had bought in Rome was out of season. The brown, should she wear, with a green corduroy jacket? Or the lavender-blue?

“I think she really did like us. And that we totally misjudged her character,” he said.

She chose the brown, which had a square neck and no sleeves, and so required the green jacket. “We didn't misjudge her character.”

“How do you know?”

“From one or two remarks that Alix made.”

“They do not answer,” M. le Patron said.

In her letter Alix had said that she would be coming back to Paris soon, but a week passed, and then two, and there was still no answer when they called the apartment in the rue Malène. One morning they made a pilgrimage to the Place Redouté and stood looking affectionately around at the granite monument, the church, the tables piled on top of each other in front of the café, the barber shop. Standing in the rue Malène, they saw that all the windows of Mme Cestre's apartment were closed, and the shutters as well. “Shall we go in and ask when they are coming back?” Barbara said.

Mme Emile shook hands cordially but had no news. They were all away, she said. Monsieur also. She did not know when they were returning.

“Do you think she wrote and the letter got lost in the mails?” Barbara asked as they were walking toward the bus corner.

“I don't know,” he said. “I don't think so. Perhaps their feelings were hurt that we didn't accept the invitation to come down to the country.”

“We should have gone,” Barbara said with conviction.

“But then we would have had to leave Paris.”

“What do you think really happened?”

“You mean the ‘drame'? They lost their money.”