The Chateau (13 page)

“Americans love your country,” he said, turning to look directly at the Frenchwoman who was walking beside him. “They always have.”

“I am happy to hear it,” Mme Viénot said.

“The wheat is paid for by taxation.
I
am taxed for it. And everybody assumes that it comes to you as a gift. But there are certain extremely powerful lobbying interests that operate through Congress, and the State Department does things that Americans in general sometimes do not approve of or even know about. With Argentina, and also with Franco—”

“Entendu!” Mme Viénot exclaimed. “It is the same with us. The same everywhere. Only in politics is there no progress. Not the slightest. Whatever we do as individuals, the government undoes. If France had no government at all, it would do much better. No one has faith in the government any more.”

“There is nothing that can be done about it?”

“Nothing,” she said firmly. “It has been this way since 1870.”

As they walked along side by side, his rancor—for he had felt personally attacked—gradually faded away, and they became once more two people, not two nationalities, out walking. Everything he saw when he raised his eyes from the dirt road pleased him. The poppy-infested fields through which they were now passing were by Renoir, and the distant blue hills by Cézanne. That the landscape of France had produced its painters seemed less likely than that the painters were somehow responsible for the landscape.

The road brought them to a village of ten or twelve houses, built of stone, with slate roofs, and in the manner of the early Gauguin. He asked if the village had a name.

“Coulanges,” Mme Viénot said. “It is very old. The priest at Coulanges has supernatural powers. He is able to find water with a forked stick.”

“A peach wand?”

“How did you know?” Mme Viénot asked.

He explained that in America there were people who could find water that way, though he had never actually seen anyone do it.

“It is extraordinary to watch,” she said. “One sees the point of the stick bending. I cannot do it myself. They say that the priest at Coulanges is also able to find other things—but that is perhaps an exaggeration.”

A mile beyond the village, they left the wagon road and followed a path that cut diagonally through a meadow, bringing them to a narrow footbridge across a little stream. On the other side was an old mill, very picturesque and half covered with climbing blush roses. The sky that was reflected in the millpond was a gun-metal gray. A screen of tall poplars completed the picturesque effect, which suggested no special painter but rather the anonymous style of department-store lithographs and colored etchings.

“It's charming, isn't it?” Mme Viénot said.

“Is it still used as a mill?” Harold asked.

“Indeed yes. The miller kept us in flour all through the war. He has a kind of laying mash that is excellent for my hens. I have to come and speak to him myself, though. Otherwise, he isn't interested.”

When she left them, they stood watching some white ducks swimming on the surface of the millpond.

The Canadian said, after quite some time: “Why did you come here?” It was not an accusation, though it sounded like one, but the preface to a complaint.

“We wanted to see the châteaux,” Barbara said. “And also—”

“Mmmm,” Gagny interrupted. “I'd heard about this place, and I thought it would be nice to come here, but I might as well have stayed in London. There hasn't been one hour of hot sunshine in the last five days.”

“We were hoping to rent bicycles,” Barbara said. “She wrote
us that it had been arranged, and then this morning at breakfast she—”

“There are no bicycles for rent,” Gagny said indignantly.

“I know there aren't any in the village,” Barbara said. “But in Blois?”

He shook his head.

“Then I guess we'll have to go by train,” she said.

“It's no use trying to get around by train. It will take you all day to visit one château.”

“But she said—”

“If you want to see the châteaux, you need a car,” he said, looking much more cheerful now that his discouragement was shared.

They saw Mme Viénot beckoning to them from the door of the mill.

“If this weather keeps up,” Gagny said as they started toward her, “I'm going to pack my things and run up to Paris. I've told her that I might. I have friends in Paris that I can stay with, and Wednesday is Bastille Day. It ought to be rather lively.”

“I've just had a triumph,” Mme Viénot said. “The miller has agreed to let me have two sacks of white flour.” The Americans looked at her in surprise, and she said innocently: “I'm not sure that it is legal for him to sell it to me, but he is very attached to our family. I'm to send my gardener around for it early tomorrow morning, before anyone is on the road.”

Instead of turning back the way they had come, she led them across another footbridge and they found themselves on a public road. Walking four abreast, they reached the crest of a long ridge and had a superb view of the valley of the Loire.

Turning to Barbara, Mme Viénot said: “When did you come out?”

“Come out?” Barbara repeated blankly.

“Perhaps I am using the wrong expression,” Mme Viénot said. “I am quite out of the habit of thinking in English. Here, when
a young girl reaches a certain age and is ready to be introduced to society—”

“We use the same expression. I just didn't understand what you meant.… I didn't come out.”

“It is not necessary in America, then?”

“Not in the West. It depends on the place, and the circumstances. I went to college, and then I worked for two years, and then I got married.”

“And you liked working? So does Sabine. I must show you some of her drawings. She's quite talented, I think. When you go to Paris, you must call on her at
La Femme Elégante
. She will be very pleased to meet two of my guests, and you can ask her about things to see and do in Paris. There is a little bistro that she goes to for lunch—no doubt she will take you there. The clientele is not very distinguished, but the food is excellent, and most reasonable, and you will not always want to be dining at Maxim's.”

Harold opened his mouth to speak and then closed it; Mme Viénot's smile made it clear that her remark was intended as a pleasantry.

“I think I told you that my daughter became engaged last summer? After some months, she asked to be released from her engagement. She and her fiancé had known each other since they were children, but she decided that she could not be happy with him. It has left her rather melancholy. All her friends are married now and beginning to have families. Also, it seems her job with
La Femme Elégante
will terminate the first of August. The daughter of one of the editors of the American
Vogue
is coming over to learn the milieu, and a place has to be made for her.”

“But that doesn't seem fair!” Barbara exclaimed.

Mme Viénot shrugged. “Perhaps they will find something else for her to do. I hope so.”

The road led them away from the river, through fields and
vineyards and then along a high wall, to an ornamental iron gate, where the Bentley was waiting. The gatehouse was just inside, and Mme Viénot roused the gatekeeper, who came out with her. His beret was pulled down so as to completely cover his thick gray hair, and he carried himself like a soldier, but his face was pinched and anxious, and he obviously did not want to admit them. Mme Viénot was pleasant but firm. As they talked she indicated now the lane, grown over with grass, that led past the gatehouse and into the estate, now the car that must be allowed to drive up the lane. In the end her insistence prevailed. He went into the gatehouse and came out again with his bunch of heavy keys and opened the gates for the Bentley to drive through.

The party on foot walked in front of the car, which proceeded at a funeral pace. Ahead of them, against the sky, was the blackened shell of a big country house with the chimneys still standing.

It looks like a poster urging people to buy war bonds, Harold thought, and wondered if the planes were American. It turned out that the house had been destroyed in the twenties by a fire of unknown origin. At the edge of what had once been an English garden, the chauffeur stopped the car, and M. and Mme Carrère got out and proceeded with the others along a path that led to a small family chapel. Inside, the light came through stained-glass windows that looked as if they had been taken from a Methodist church in Wisconsin or Indiana. The chapel contained four tombs, each supporting a stone effigy.

With a hissing intake of breath Mme Viénot said: “Ravissant!”

“Ravissant!” said M. and Mme Carrère and Hector Gagny, after her.

Harold was looking at a vase of crepe-paper flowers in a niche and said nothing. The chapel is surely nineteenth-century Gothic, he thought. How can they pretend to like it?

The effigies were genuine. Guarded by little stone dogs and
gentle lap lions, they maintained, even with their hands folded in prayer, a lifelike self-assertiveness. Looking down at one of them—at the low forehead, the blunt nose, the broad, brutal face—he said: “These were very different people.”

“They were Normans,” Mme Viénot said. “They fought their way up the rivers and burned the towns and villages and then settled down and became French. He's very beautiful, isn't he? But not very intelligent. He was a crusader.”

There was no plaque telling which of the seven great waves of religious hysteria and tourism had picked the blunt-nosed man up and carried him all the way across Europe and set him down in Asia Minor, under the walls of Antioch or Jerusalem. But his dust was here, not in the desert of Lebanon; he had survived, in any case; the tourist had got home.

“What I brought you here to see,” Mme Viénot said, “is the
prieuré
on the other side of the garden. I don't know the word in English.”

“Priory,” Barbara said.

“The same word. How interesting!”

While they were in the chapel, it had commenced to sprinkle. They hurried along a garden path. The garden still had a few flowers in it, self-sown, among the weeds and grass. Except for the vaulting of the porch roof, the priory looked from the outside like an ordinary farm building. The entrance was in the rear, down a flight of stone steps that M. Carrère did not attempt. He stood under the shelter of the porch, leaning on his cane, looking ill and gray. When they were around the corner of the building, Harold asked Mme Carrère if the expedition had been too much for him and she said curtly that it had not. Her manner made it as clear as words would have that, though he had the privilege of listening to M. Carrère's conversation, he did not know him, and Mme Carrère did see that he had, therefore, any reason to be interested in the state of her husband's health. He colored.

The key that Mme Viénot had obtained from the gatekeeper they did not need after all. The padlock was hanging open. The two young men put their weight against the door and it gave way. When their eyes grew accustomed to the feeble light, they could make out a dirt floor, simple carving on the capitals of the thick stone pillars, and cross-vaulting.

Barbara was enchanted.

“It is considered a jewel of eleventh-century architecture,” Mme Viénot said. “There is a story— It seems that one of the dukes was ill and afraid he would die, and he made a vow that if he recovered from his sickness he would build a prieuré in honor of the Virgin. And he did recover. But he forgot all about the prieuré and thought of nothing but his hawks and his hounds and hunting, until the Virgin appeared in a dream to someone in the neighborhood and reminded him, and then he had to keep his promise.”

The interior of the building was all one room, and not very large, and empty except for an object that Harold took for a medieval battering ram until Mme Viénot explained that it was a wine press.

“In America,” he said, “this building would have been taken apart stone by stone and shipped to Detroit, for Henry Ford's museum.”

“Yes?” Mme Viénot said. “Over here, we have so many old buildings. The museums are crammed. And so things are left where they happen to be.”

He examined the stone capitals and walked all around the wine press. “What became of the nuns?” he asked suddenly.

“They went away,” Mme Viénot said. “The building hasn't been lived in since the time of the Revolution.”

What the nuns didn't take away with them other hands had.
If you are interested in those poor dead women
, the dirt floor of the priory said—
in their tapestries, tables, chairs, lectuaries, cooking utensils, altar images, authenticated and unauthenticated
visions, their needlework, feuds, and forbidden pets, go to the public library and read about them. There's nothing here, and hasn't been, for a hundred and fifty years
.