Leaning toward her mother, Alix said: “I have been telling Barbara and Harold how selfish you are.”
Mme Cestre raised the hearing aid to her ear and adjusted the little pointer. The jovial remark was repeated and she smiled benignly at her daughter.
When she entered the conversation, it was always abruptly, on a new note, since she had no idea what they were talking about. She broke in upon Mme Bonenfant’s observation that there was no one in Rome in August—that it was quite deserted, that the season there had always been from November through Lent—with the observation that cats are indifferent to their own reflection in a mirror.
“Dogs often fail to recognize themselves,” she said, as they all stared at her in surprise. “Children are pleased. The wicked see what other people see … and the mirror sees nothing at all.”
Or when Alix was talking about the end of the war, and how she and Sabine suddenly decided that they wanted to be in Paris for the Liberation and so got on their bicycles and rode there, only to be sent back to the country because there wasn’t enough food, Mme Cestre remarked to Barbara: “My husband used to do the packing always. I did it once when we were first married, but he had been a bachelor too long, and no one could fold coatsleeves properly but him.… It is quite true that when I did it they were wrinkled.”
It was hard not to feel that this note of irrelevance must be part of her character, but once she was oriented in the conversation, Mme Cestre’s remarks were always pertinent to it, and interesting. Her English was better than Alix’s or than Mme Viénot’s, and without any trace of a French accent.
Sometimes she would sit with her hearing aid on her lap, content with her own thoughts and the perpetual silence that her deafness created around her. But then she would raise the hearing aid to her ear and prepare to re-enter the conversation.
“Did Alix tell you that I am writing a book?” she said to her sister as they were waiting for Thérèse and the boy to clear the table for the next course.
“I didn’t know you were, Maman,” Alix said.
“I thought I had told you. It is in the form of a diary, and it consists largely of aphorisms.”
“You are taking La Rochefoucauld as your model,” Mme Bonenfant said approvingly.
“Yes and no,” Mme Cestre said. “I have a title for it: ‘How to Be a Successful Mother-in-Law.’ … The relationship is never an easy one, and a treatise on the subject would be useful, and perhaps sell thousands of copies. I shall ask Eugène to criticize it when I am finished, and perhaps do a short preface, if he has the time. I find I have a good deal to say.… ”
“My sister also has a talent for drawing,” Mme Viénot said. “She does faces that are really quite good likenesses, and at the same time there is an element of caricature that is rather cruel. I do not understand it. It is utterly at variance with her nature. Once she showed me a drawing she had done of me and I burst into tears.”
THURSDAY WAS A NICE DAY. The sun shone, it was warm, and Harold and Barbara spent the entire afternoon on the bank of the river, in their bathing suits. When they got home they found a scene out of Anna Karenina. Mme Bonenfant, Mme Viénot, Mme Cestre, and Thérèse were sitting under the Lebanon cedar, to the right of the terrace, with their chairs facing an enormous burlap bag, which they kept reaching into. They were shelling peas for canning.
Alix was in the courtyard, making some repairs on her bicycle. She had had a letter from Eugène. “He sends affectionate greetings to you both,” she said. “He is coming down to the country tomorrow night. And Mummy asked me to tell you, for her, that it would give her great pleasure if you would stay in the apartment while you are in Paris.”
This time the invitation was accepted.
After dinner, Mme Viénot opened the desk in the petit salon and took out a packet of letters, written to her mother at the château. She translated passages from them and read other passages in French, with the pride of a conscientious historian. Most of the letters were about the last week before the liberation of the city. The inhabitants of Paris, forbidden to leave their houses, had kept in active communication with one another by telephone.
“But couldn’t the Germans prevent it?” Harold asked.
“Not without shutting off the service entirely, which they didn’t dare to do. We knew everything that was happening,” Mme Viénot said. “When the American forces reached the southwestern limits of the city, the church bells began to toll, one after another, on the Left Bank, as each section of the city was delivered from the Germans, and finally the deep bell of Notre Dame. In the midst of the street fighting I left the apartment, to perform an errand, and found myself stranded in a doorway of a house, with bullets whistling through the air around me.” In the letter describing this, she neither minimized the danger nor pretended that she had been involved in an act of heroism. The errand was a visit, quite essential, to her dressmaker in the rue du Mont-Thabor.
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, Mme Viénot rode with Harold and Barbara in their taxi to Blois, where they parted. She went off down the street with an armful of clothes for the cleaner’s, and they got on a sight-seeing bus. They chose the tour that consisted of Chambord, Cheverny, and Chaumont instead of the tour of Azay-le-Rideau, Ussé, and Chinon, because Barbara, looking through the prospectus, thought she recognized in Cheverny the white château with the green lawn in front of it. Cheverny did have a green lawn in front of it but it was not at all like a fairy-tale castle, and Chambord was too big. It reminded them of Grand Central Station. Since they had already seen Chaumont, they got the driver to let them out at the castle gates, and stood looking around for a taxi that would take them to the house of Mme Straus-Muguet’s friends. It turned out that there were no taxis. The proprietor of the restaurant across the road did not know where the house was, and it was rather late to be having tea, so instead they sat for a whole hour on the river bank, feeling as if they had broken through into some other existence. They watched the sun’s red reflection on the water, the bathers, the children building sand castles, the goats cropping and straying, and the next two trips of the ferryboat; and then it was time for them to cross over, themselves, and take the train home.
Though they were very late, dinner was later still. They sat in the drawing room waiting for Eugène and Sabine to arrive.
When they met again at the château, Harold’s manner with Mme Viénot’s daughter was cautious. He was not at all sure she liked him. He and Eugène shook hands, and there was a flicker of recognition in the Frenchman’s eyes that had in it also a slight suggestion of apology: at the end of a long day and a long journey, Harold must not expect too much of him. Tomorrow they would talk.
As Sabine started toward the stairs with her light suitcase, Mme Viénot said: “The Allégrets are giving a large dinner party tomorrow night. I accepted for you.” Then, turning to Harold and Barbara: “My daughter is very popular. Whenever she is expected, the telephone rings incessantly.… You are included in the invitation, but you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”