The Chateau (46 page)
“You'll have to look it up,” Barbara said. “The dictionary is in my purse.”
The dictionary was not in the purse but in the desk drawer.
“ âCombler' means âto fill up,' âto overload,' âto heap,' ” he said. “ ââ¦
it is necessary to try to heap my sorrows by a kindness on your part. It is of yourselves to make photographs, tous les deux ensemble, and to send me your photo with dédicace
â
dedication
â
underneath. 19 rue de la Source, that will be a great joy for me, and at Paris there are such good photographers. Make inquiries about them and'
âit could be âépanchez.' ”
“Exaucez,” Barbara said, and read from the dictionary.
“Â âExaucer: to grant, give ear to, answer the prayer of someone.'Â ”
“Â â
 â¦Â
grant the prayer that I make of you. You will be thus with me, in my chamber that you know, and I will look at you each day, and that will be to me a great happiness
.â¦
Thank you in advance!â¦Â I am enchanted that you are going to the Opéra to hear Le Roi d'Ys
â
so beautiful, so well sung, such beautiful music. But to avoid making the queue at the location'
âthe box office, I guess she meansâ
âdo this: go take your two places at the Opéra at the office of the disection
â'Â ”
“That can't be right,” Barbara interrupted.
“ â
 â¦Â
direction,'
then.
âBoulevard Haussman. Enter by the large door which is in back of the Opéra. On entering, at right you will see the concierge, M. Ferari. He will point out the office of M. Decerf or his secretary Nelle'
âno, Mile.â
âSimone cela de ma part. Both are my friends, and you will have immediately two good places à la corbeille'
âBut we have the seats already, and it took exactly ten minutes in line at the box office, and they're the best seats in the opera house â¦Â
âwhere it is necessary to be to see all, salle et scène. I'm writing to M. Decerf by this same courier to reserve you two places, and it is Wednesday morning at eleven o'clock that it is necessary to go there to
take them. In this fashion all will go well and I will be tranquil about you. Servez-vous de mon nom dans tout l'Opéra et à tout le monde
.â¦
In mounting to the premier étage, to the office of M. Decerf (they speak English, both of them) speak to M. Georges, on arriving, de ma part. He will lead you to M. Decerf. I hope I have explained sufficiently the march to follow to arrive à bien, and to all make my good compliments
.â¦
On your arrival in New York I pray you to write me immediately to tell me your voyage is well passed. Such is my hope, and above all do not leave alone in France your Maman Minou, who loves you so much and has so many regrets. But “noblesse oblige” says the proverb, and to the title of president I owe to be at my post. I will send you tomorrow the book of Bethanie Fontanelle's work of the prisons. Perhaps they will go one day to America. I know the
Mauretania,
splendid boat, and I am going to make the crossing with you
â
in my thoughts. Et voilà , mes petits amis â¦Â a long letter that you are going to find too long, perhaps, but I was desirous of writing to you. An idea comes to me: if you have the time Saturday or Sunday to come to Le Mans, a train toward eight o'clock in the morning brings you here at eleven. We will lunch together, and that evening a train takes you to Paris, arriving at nine o'clock.'
That makes seven hours on the train.
âMais c'est peut-être grosse fatigue pour vous. Anyway, at need you may telegraph me at Arnage, Straus, Sarthe. Au revoir, au revoir, mes chéris, je vous embrasse de tout mon cour et vous aime tendrement
.â¦
Madame Minou.'Â ”
He closed the window, and the cries from the school yard became remote.
“Chartres isn't a very big place,” Barbara said thoughtfully. “And there is only one thing that people go there to see. She could probably have found us all right, if she had come. But anyway, I'm not going to Le Mans.”
“The trains may not even be running,” he said. “There is a railroad strike about to begin at any minute. We might get there and not be able to get back. Also, I never wanted to hear
Le Roi
d'Ys
. I wanted to hear
Louise
and they aren't giving it this week.
Le Roi d'Ys
was entirely Mme Straus's idea.”
“I can't bear it!” Barbara exclaimed. “It's so sad.
âUse my name all through the Opéra, and to everybody
.⦠' ”
T
HE BOOK
on the prison work of the Dominican nuns did not arrive, and neither did Harold search out the office of M. Decerf and tell him they already had three tickets for
Le Roi d'Ys
. He could not believe that Mme Straus had written to the manager of the Paris Opéra, any more than he could believe that after a stay of three weeks in Arnage she was in charge of a charity bazaar in Le Mans; or that it is possible for it to rain on the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris and not on the eighth. As the gypsy fortuneteller could have told him, this was perhaps not wise. The only safe thing, if you have an ingenuous nature, is to believe everything that anybody says.
In spite of his constant concern that she dress warmly enough, Barbara caught a cold. They were both showing signs of a general tiredness, of the working out of the law of diminishing returns. There were still days when they enjoyed themselves as keenly as they had in the beginning, but the enjoyment was never quite complete; they enjoyed some things and not others; they couldn't any more throw themselves on each day as if it were a spear. Also, their appetite was beginning to fail. They found that once a day was all they could stand to eat in the little restaurant in the alley off the Place St. Sulpice. They bought bread and cheese and a bottle of wine, and ate lunch in their room, and at dinnertime were embarrassed by the welcome they received when they walked into the back room of the restaurant. Or they avoided going there at all.
Sometimes he dreamed in French. He found, at last, the complete correspondence of Flaubert. In a shop in the Place St.
Sulpice he saw a beautiful book of photographs of houses on the Ile St. Louis, but it cost twenty dollars and he did not buy it. Their American Express checkbook was very thin, and he had begun to worry about whether they were going to come out even.
Barbara saw a silk blouse in the window of a shop in the rue Royale, and they went inside, but she shook her head when the clerk told her the price. The clerk suggested that, since they were Americans, all they had to do was get their dollars changed on the black market and then the blouse would be less expensive, but Harold delivered a speech. “Madame,” he said, “j'aime la France et je ne prends pas avantage du marché noir.” The clerk shook hands with him and with tears in her eyes said: “Monsieur, il n'y a pas beaucoup.” But she didn't reduce the price of the blouse.
Barbara's cold got worse, and she had to go to bed with it. Harold stopped at the desk and asked if her meals could be sent up to her until she was feeling better. The hotel no longer served meals, but M. le Patron and his wife ate in the empty dining room, and so he knew that what he was asking for was possible, though it meant making an exception. One of the ways of dividing the human race is between those people who are eager to make an exception and those who consider that nothing is more dangerous and wrong. M. le Patron brusquely refused.
Burning with anger, Harold started off to see what could be done in the neighborhood. Their restaurant was too far away; the food would be stone-cold by the time he got back with it; and so he tried a bistro that was just around the corner, in the rue Vaugirard, and the bartender sent him home with bread and cheese and a covered bowl of soup from the pot-au-feu. It was just the kind of food she had been longing for. After that, he ate in the bistro and then took her supper home to her. Shopping for fruit, he discovered a little hole-in-the-wall where the peaches were wrapped in cotton and where he and the proprietress
and her grown daughter discussed seriously which pear madame should eat today and which she should save till tomorrow.
He kept calling the apartment in the rue Malène and there was never any answer. It was hard not to feel that there had been a concerted action, a conspiracy, and that the French, realizing that he and Barbara had got in, where foreigners are not supposed to be, had simply put their heads together and decided that the time had come to push them out. It was not true, of course, but that was what it felt like. And it wasn't wholly not true. Why, for example, didn't Alix write to them? She knew they were only going to be here eight days longer, and still no word came from her; no message of any kind. Was she going to let them go back to America without even saying good-by?
The next morning, as if someone at the bank were playing a joke on them, there was a letter, but it was from Berlin, not Brenodville. It was an old letter that had followed them all around Europe:
Dear Mr. Rhodes:
A few days before, we returned to Berlin, only our friend Hans got clear his journey to Switzerland at the consulate in Baden-Baden. And now I want to thank you and Mrs. Rhodes once more, also in the name of my wife and of my children. You can't imagine how they enjoyed the oranges and the chocolate and the fishes in oil and the bananes, etc; many of these things they never saw before. They begged me to send you their thanks and their greetings and a snapshot also “that the friendly uncle and the friendly aunt from America may see how we look.” (I beg your pardon if the expression “aunt” in U.S.A. is less usual than in Germany for a friend of little children.)
In Paris I was glad that I could report you over the circumstances under which we are living and working. But I am afraid that we saw one side only of the problem. We came from a poor and exhausted country into a town that seemed
to be rich and nearly untouched by the war. And personally we were in a rather painful situation. So it could happen that we grew more bitter and more pessimist than it is our kind.
We told you from the little food rationsâbut we did not speak from all the men and women who try to get a little harvest out of each square foot bottom round the houses or on the public places. We did not speak from the thousands who leave Berlin each week end trying to get food on the land, who are hanging on the footboards or on the buffers of the railway or wandering along the roads with potatoes or corn or fruit. We did not speak from all those who are working every day in spite of want of food or clothes or tools. And we did not speak from the most important fact, from all the women who supply their husbands and their children and know to make something out of a minimum of food and electricity and gas, and only a small part of all these women is accustomed to such manner of living by their youth.
To me it seems to be the greatest danger in Germany: on the one side the necessity to live under rather primitive conditionsâon the other side the attempts of an ideology to make proletarians out of the whole people with the aim to prepare it for the rule of communisme. A people within such a great need is always in the danger to loose his character, to become unsteady. And the enticement from the other side is very dangerous.
And another point seems important to me: there are two forms of democracy in Germany, the one of the western powers, the other of communisme in the strange form of “Volksdemokratie.” It is not necessary to speak about this second form, but also the first is not what we need. The western democracy may be good for the western countries. Also the German people wants to bear the whole responsibility for his government, but it is not prepared to do so. It is very dangerous to put it into a problem that it cannot solve. Our people needs some decades of political education (but it does not need instructors which try to feed it with their own ideas and ideologies) and in the meantime it ought to get a strong governent of experts assisted by a parliament with consultative rights only. German political parties incline to grow dogmatical and intolerant and radicalâeven democratical partiesâand it is necessary to diminish their
influence in administration and legislative and, later on, specially in foreign affairs.
I am sure that my opinion is very different from the opinion of the most Germans but I don't believe in the miracle of the majority.
Dear Mr. Rhodes, I suppose you are smiling a little about my manner of torturing your language, but I am sure that you hear what I want to say and that you will not be inconvenienced by the outside appearance.
May I ask you for giving my respects to Mrs. Rhodes?
Would you allow me to write you then and now.
Always your faithfully
Stefan Doerffer.
“Let's see the picture of the children,” Barbara said when he had finished reading the letter to her.