Or he would go to the South of France, “to some quiet place,” or to Switzerland, “to some quiet place,” or to Germany, Vienna, Italy, Spain, Majorca, —always “to settle down in some quiet place”—and for what? for what? Why, always, of course, “to write,” “to write”—Great God! “to write,” and even as he spoke the words the old dull shame returned to make him hate his life and all these sterile, vain pretensions of his soul. “To write”—always to seek the magic skies, the golden clime, the wise and lovely people who would transform him. “To write”—always to seek in the enchanted distances, in the dreamy perspectives of a fool’s delusions, the power and certitude he could not draw out of himself. “To write”—to be that most foolish, vain, and impotent of all impostors, a man who sought the whole world over “looking for a place to write,” when, he knew now, with every naked, brutal penetration of his life, “the place to write” was Brooklyn, Boston, Hammersmith, or Kansas—anywhere on earth, so long as the heart, the power, the faith, the desperation, the bitter and unendurable necessity, and the naked courage were there inside him all the time.
Now, having agreed to accompany the Countess on her visit to the Marquise, he suddenly decided to leave Orléans at the same time, spend the night at Blois, and go on to Tours the next day, after visiting Mornaye. And with this purpose he packed his bag, paid his bill at the hotel, and set out on the appointed day with the old woman who for two weeks now had been his self-constituted guide and keeper.
XCV
The village of Mornaye was a small and ancient settlement, similar to thousands of others, situated near the gate of the château from which it got its name. A man was waiting for them at the station with a motor car: they got in and were driven swiftly through the town—a dense cluster of old grey-lemon buildings with tiled roofs, a thatched one here and there, the shops of the village grocer, cobbler, baker, visible through small dormer windows, some farm buildings, a fleeting glimpse of the old cobbled court yard of a barn, some wagons and farm implements—a little universe of life, compact, unbroken, built up to the edge of the road—and then, almost immediately, the gates of the château.
They drove through the gates and down a long and stately avenue of noble trees, and presently came to a halt before the great entrance of the château.
