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.
&n
bsp; 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.
THEY 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:
Sunday
Dear Little Friends:
What a disappointment! I passed by your hotel a little while ago and you had taken flight this very morning. But where? And how to rejoin you? Have you returned to the country? In short, a word guiding me, I beg of you, for I am leaving for Sarthe for six days, and I had so much hoped to spend this past week with you. Well, that’s life! But your affectionate Minou is so sorry not to see you, and fondly embraces you both!
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 lobb
y 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?”