The Winemaker's Wife(104)
But she already knew she would remain in Champagne, at least for a while. It was as if it was what the universe had intended all along. Just when she had lost all sense of belonging in the city that had been hers, a new place had come along, a place that was always meant to be her home. It was like a gift from heaven—and perhaps it really was. Liv tried to imagine Michel, the grandfather she had never known, and Céline, the grandmother whose tiny infant had been ripped from her arms as she was carted off to an unspeakable fate. Were they looking down on her now? Did her return to the Maison Chauveau bring them some peace? What about her own father, who had never known this place at all?
The first thing Liv did when she came on board was to ask the Maison Chauveau’s webmaster to update the champagne house’s site with a short history of what had happened on this property, the abbreviated story of three lives—those of Michel, Céline, and a young woman named Inès who had lived to become an old woman named Edith. Liv hoped to one day honor all three of them in a much larger way, but beginning to speak the truth about the past felt like a start.
In the next few weeks, Liv met with the chef de cave, Jacques Cazal, and the director of business operations, Sylvie Vaillant, and she decided to come on as a sort of apprentice to both of them so she could begin to learn the business. “I’m not sure I’ll be any good at this,” Liv said to Jacques, a sixty-something man with sparkling brown eyes who had been running the winemaking operations for more than thirty years. “Maybe I’m fooling myself.”
“You know,” said Jacques with a smile, “two hundred years ago, there was another woman not far from here by the name of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin who was faced with a similar situation. Her husband had died, and suddenly, at the age of twenty-seven, she was faced with the question of whether she could follow in his footsteps and keep his champagne house alive.”
“And did she?”
“Well, her husband was a man named Fran?ois Clicquot. And when he died, she became known as the Widow Clicquot, or the Veuve Clicquot. She pioneered new practices in the champagne-making process, became one of the richest women of her time, and grew her company into one of the most well-known champagne brands in the world. You may have heard of it.”
Liv laughed. “So she did all right for herself.”
“I would say so. It took her many years, and there were ups and downs, but this land was in her blood, and she had the passion for it. There’s no doubt that you, too, have the magic of this place coursing through your veins. I think that if you work hard and truly commit yourself to learning your heritage, perhaps you will be surprised at what you can accomplish here. And as long as you’ll have us stay on, Sylvie and I will be happy to teach you everything we can. We love this place, too, and we all want it to continue being successful.”
After Liv had gone to New York to pack up her apartment and returned to Champagne to move into the small caretaker’s cottage on the Maison Chauveau property—which had been boarded up so long that it still contained some of Céline Laurent’s belongings—there was a call one day to Julien’s office, from a reporter at the French newspaper Le Monde, saying that a reader had tipped her off to the brief historical paragraph that had recently appeared on the Maison Chauveau’s website and asking if she might come out for an interview. With the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Reims looming, she thought it would be the perfect time for a story about how the American grandchild of three heroes of the Resistance—Michel Chauveau, Céline Laurent, and Inès Chauveau—had come home to France to honor her family history.
Liv agreed, and when the piece was published a week later in the Sunday paper, it not only brought a rush of new business to the Maison Chauveau, it answered questions Liv hadn’t even known she had. The reporter had dug deeper into the pasts of Michel, Céline, and Inès, and Liv learned that Michel had always lived on this land but had briefly considered leaving to become a scientist before his own father died. Inès had come from Lille with her best friend, Edith Thierry, who had married restaurateur Edouard Thierry, and they, in turn, had introduced her to Michel.
The reporter had tracked down details of Michel’s death; he had been executed by a German firing squad in March 1943 without a trial after becoming a suspect in the murder of a German officer named Karl Richter. After the war, there had been rumors that Michel had been betrayed by a French collaborator named Antoine Picard, who was known to frequent the restaurant of Edith and Edouard Thierry. Picard had been tried and found guilty of collaboration and sentenced to death in the days after the liberation of Reims. He had died not far from where Michel’s body had fallen.
Céline had been shipped to Auschwitz, where, probably unbeknownst to her, her father and grandparents had been sent, too. All of them perished there. Céline’s husband, Theo, had gone south, ultimately settling in Burgundy, where he remarried soon after he learned that his first wife had died. He had one son and died in 1960 of cancer. The reporter found his son, who said that in his final days, all his father talked about was the Maison Chauveau.
But, the newspaper article had concluded, though their lives were lost, those who once walked the caves of the Maison Chauveau had been heroes whose sacrifices forever shaped the region, and, indeed, France. The story included the tale of Samuel’s rescue, and recently declassified details about the way the Thierrys, Céline Laurent, and Michel Chauveau had helped the Allies, from hiding munitions in the cellars to passing information along to British spies. And Inès Chauveau, who eventually took on the name of Edith Thierry, had been a member of an armed group in central France that had helped liberate the country. She had, astonishingly, become a munitions expert, and a woman whose nickname in the forest was La Beauté Intrépide, the Intrepid Beauty, for her fearless, almost reckless pursuit of all Nazis. Even though she had lived to the age of ninety-nine, the reporter wrote, a piece of her had died with the others during the war, and in that way, she was a martyr of the Resistance, too.