Reborn on the Chateau

This morning I woke up in the blue box built into an attic that I am to inhabit for the next three months. Perhaps Madame Schmidt** deigned to paint it blue for the color’s soothing, mind-clearing properties, and out of the need for those properties in an isolated town of about 200 residents and no grocery store.

What I mean is that I feared I might go crazy here, and maybe other interns have, or maybe they haven’t, because their walls were painted blue.

It was really only yesterday that I realized that the next three months of my life are going to be defined by a routine so routine that I may have reason to fear the onset of insanity. I mean this in the best way possible, of course. I spent the last two months working in Paris, you see, and my new environment is about as far away from my old one as I could get. But since the way I stumbled upon this job was all rather fateful, I knew this new job would be a great (and very likely altering in ways I don't know yet) experience. And it will be, so long as I figure out ways to stay sane (I think this space is bound to be one).

But while I am still relatively lucid, let me recount my day yesterday as the new intern at the Chateau Hugo Merliers, a four-star hotel niched away off of one of the Burgundy wine trails, which exists in part to promote the very fine wine label of the same name. I arrived here from Paris almost one week ago.

It is around 7:30 that I wake up in my bitty blue room. The sun is up and shining through my singular, two-pane window, which is almost at floor level and dressed in curtains made of the lace that Madame Schmidt seems to prefer. Madame Schmidt, an ageless blonde originally from Germany with a predilection for doilies, is the director of the Chateau. It is her cavernous attic that she has partially walled off to create the two intern bedrooms (there is always an intern at the hotel and another working in the wine cave attached to the hotel), both painted the same pacific blue, adjoined by a small bathroom.

So when I exit my room, it is into the total darkness that you might expect in a gigantic attic space. I descend two flights of stairs ending in Madame Schmidt’s (and it is always Madame Schmidt, never Luise) foyer, go into and out of the garage, locking the massive door with a key attached to a tiny wooden wine bottle (this, like many things given to me by Madame Schmidt, is labeled with my name).

Standing on Rue St Denis, I am less than 25 seconds from my workplace. I turn the corner and walk about 30 meters to arrive at the Chateau’s regal wrought iron front gate. Even from the street, it is hard to distinguish Madame Schmidt’s house from the Chateau. And that’s appropriate, since she has told me time after time that she thinks of the place as her home.

“And that is why,” she says, “I like to see the edges aligned on my napkin stacks, and why and the salt and pepper shaker on the breakfast table must match. D’accord, ma grande?”

All right, big girl? There is always a playful little trill on these last few words.

And Madame is actually quite good-humored, even giggly, in her tiny German way. On the day I arrived, I left my toiletries in the trunk of Madame Canneaux’s (who runs the wine cave) car. The morning I was able to retrieve them, Madame Schmidt was thrilled.

“Oh how pretty you are now!” she said. “You found all of your things? Your hair brush too? It’s a good thing since I only like good-smelling people.”

But, anyways, my workday starts in the kitchen at 9 am, where the service of the petit dejeuner is in full procedure. Inès is the master of ceremonies in the kitchen realm, and has clearly been working miracles in that space for years uncountable. She is tiny (everyone is tiny), dark haired, and slightly hunch-backed. She likes to hack her throat when she’s irritated, which is fairly often, as it is she who takes the drink orders, she who cooks and serves the omelettes, she who loads the dishwasher and froths the milk and grinds the citrus and mops the floor.

Or at least she was all of those things until I arrived to help out a bit. Since I have not yet been deemed worthy of serving the clientele (this is a level of honor which takes at least one month in service to reach), my duties in the kitchen are basically limited to dishwashing, clearing the grand breakfast table of dirty dishes, and then more dishwashing. Although I have also insisted on making a few café au laits, and yesterday, Inès asked me to scramble a single egg for a small child. I think she likes me.

Freedom from the kitchen comes around 1 pm, which means lunchtime for the entire kitchen staff, and we all defrost our Tupperware from the staff refrigerator and sit down at the kitchen table (“we” includes Inès, Thérèse the receptionist, Sophie the 21 year old maid, and Monsieur Thibaut, who is a kind of rolling stone in his late 50s who moves around France from seasonal job to seasonal job. Last night he returned from his day off quite drunk and regaled me with his life philosophy [When a door is shut, don’t force it. When a door is open, enter. A wise Jew once told him this, he pointed out. And furthermore, everything you need to know is in your head, not in books]. He inhabits the other intern attic room since the wine intern commutes from her flat in Dijon). The staff is also entitled to whatever is leftover from breakfast, including the breads, cheeses, hams, fruits, juices, coffee, and so on – all of excellent quality (everything that is saveable is saved here, something I am really delighted about and proud of. We only throw away that which has been touched to somebody’s mouth, and even then sometimes Madame Schmidt will save scraps for her tiny dog Teddy).

I mostly sit and listen to everyone talk. People gossip and complain and laugh and talk about the infuriating washing machine and how long it takes them to smoke cigarettes (Monsieur Thibaut smokes his in less than one minute flat, otherwise he will get too relaxed and it will be impossible to return to work). One lunch I told them how that in Russia the cigarettes are made shorter and with more intense tobacco so that people can be outside in the freezing cold with their cigarettes for a shorter amount of time. Thérèse laughed at that. She seems to be Madame Schmidt ’s protégé, and it’s been hard to get a read on both of them. Almost everyone here speaks to me like a child, which is annoying, and endearing only in the case of Madame Schmidt . Probably because I am new and relatively very young and my French is very imperfect and some days it is even bad.

Yep, seven months in France, and some days I cannot manage to pronounce the word for doctor. Frustrating. But unless I am chatting up American guests or teaching swearwords to Joey, the 30-year-old night receptionist who is soon to be a dad, I speak virtually zero English here. This is by far the most immersive environment I have been in the past year, so I think these last three months in France are going to bring me as close to fluency as I could have hoped for anywhere.

I have several hours to kill between lunch and my PM shift, and I have been going for runs. On Wednesday, the sky was cloudy as it had rained that morning, and air was cold. The mountainside was saturated and exploding with wildflowers and new grass. I hiked up one side of the mountain valley and ran along the perimeter at the top. I came down the other side and, as I was running through a wide clearing in the mossy trees, I came upon a chapel. It was encrusted in the forest that surrounded it, covered in fungus and vines and other wet stuff. The door was made of aluminium and its edges were rusting. I looked inside through the punched-out window in the shape of a cross and saw names in marble, and fresh flowers.

As it was nearing 4 pm (I go back on the job around 5), it was time to return to the Chateau. I walked down the spiral steps leading up to the chapel and turned around and took a good look at the thing, with its tiled roof and rusting cross, slowly disappearing into the rain-soaked forest. It was then that I realized that I am probably the hapless heroine of some dark French fairy tale set in a 300-year-old chateau. This explains why Madame Schmidt seems to be immortal, how Inès is likely a kind-hearted witch, and why I live in an attic.

So maybe the inevitable craziness à la Jack Nicholson/The Shining is merely a part of the twisted plot, narrated by Teddy... or something. Time will tell. Meanwhile, I have my PM duties to attend to. Must go place chocolates on pillows and clean bathtubs and sit with my book in the wood-panelled office covered in photos of Mr. Merliers standing with Zsazsa Gabor and the Reagans and various Swiss officiaries. More to come then, and photos too.

**all names have been changed