The French House

by Helen Fripp

  ‘Five.’

  ‘That makes it seven years since he promised me, on our wedding night. In Russia we’ll tuck you up in furs and take you on sleigh rides, show you the palaces and towers topped with blue and gold onions.’

  ‘You can’t get blue and gold onions, silly!’

  ‘You can in Russia.’

  François put Mentine on his knee, ruffling her strawberry curls and passed the letter to Nicole, with a trembling hand.

  Moscow is a disaster. It’s rotten to the core, and bad faith is the order of the day. There are at least three people to bribe for every sale and no profits to be made whatsoever in this glittering hellhole. No wonder the palaces are made of gold and amber; all the money is kept for a privileged few. The excess of luxury means that brokers like me, after all costs are deducted, gain nothing. Foreign companies are seen as nanny goats ready for milking. Even if I do secure orders, it is unlikely we will ever get paid. I am sorry, my friend, to write such bad news, especially in a year where the harvest promises no hope for the coming years.

  Louis

  Nicole slumped on the chair next to François. Sending Louis to Russia had been a mistake. Napoléon’s advance across Europe was voracious. Britain and Russia were now allies against the French, and Louis would be caught up in it all. Their sunlit garden was a long way away, but the endless war wouldn’t leave them alone.

  ‘He must stay and keep trying. If anyone can do it, he can. He’s defied the odds a million times and the only alternative is to sell everything up to Moët. You know he’d pay over the odds for anything we’d sell him, he’s so desperate to push us out of the business,’ said François, his angular face pale and delicate as glass, even in the hot sun.

  She would recall Louis immediately, without telling François. Their friend, the man who could charm his way out of any sticky situation, was clearly in danger and she refused to risk his life. England and Russia, their biggest markets, would do anything to thwart France and in particular the trade of one of its proudest exports: champagne. The very thing that was their lifeblood was becoming a casualty of war. She worried François was becoming one, too.

  They had packed Louis off with such hope, riding a wave of stellar sales in Prussia and Austria.

  ‘Forget London,’ François had urged, his blue-green eyes glittering, ‘and those pasty-faced English. There’s a fortune for us in Russia. The palaces are dripping with gold.’

  Louis had ridden off wearing his wolfskin coat and a rogue’s grin, with seventy-five thousand bottles of their finest vintages, pretty much all the stock they had.

  ‘Papa. Are there really blue and gold onions in Russia?’ Clémentine asked excitedly.

  ‘Of course! And orange potatoes and pink peas. Go and find Josette for your lunch. I need to talk to Maman.’ He waved. ‘I love you, je t’aime!’

  ‘Moi aussi, Papa.’

  ‘Never forget it!’

  But Mentine was already skipping to the door.

  ‘We’re not going to Russia, I’m sorry,’ said François.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I promised to take you. I promised to look after you. You should have taken Moët’s offer. Those English are eating out of the palm of his hand and Napoléon will be guzzling Moët’s champagne at his ball tonight.’

  Nicole shook her head. ‘Would Moët have made me laugh? Would he have taken me swimming in the lake, or let me have a hand in his precious vineyards? Don’t consign me to hell with him. I wanted you then, and I want you now.’

  He looked at her in despair. ‘The vineyards are hell now, Babouchette. There’s nothing we can do. The grapes are withered like raisins before we’ve even had a chance to pick them. Louis took all we had with him and half the champagne stock was cloudy when it arrived. It was a gamble and you can’t gamble with nature. It’s beaten us. I should never have sent everything.’

  Cloudy champagne. Every producer’s curse, caused by sediment. It took months of labour to turn bottles in the sand in an attempt to coax out the sediment caused by the yeast, which was essential to the taste and second fermentation, but which left their beautiful creations bleu, cloudy. Thousands of bottles and thousands of hours of labour. They’d tried everything, including releasing the sediment by transversage, pouring the clear wine from one bottle to the other once the sediment was released, but at the expense of the all-important fizz. She shuddered at the memory of the time she’d bought a ‘clarifier’ product from the barrel-supplier, and almost killed one of her top tasters with the poisonous stuff. In that, their business was no different to anyone else’s, but the person who could solve the sediment conundrum with no loss of fizz would be rich, that much was certain.

  His spine protruded through his thin jacket. François’ moods swung with the highs and lows of the business and now, he was dangerously low.

  It was then that Nicole made a pact with herself, just as binding as the one she made the day of the revolution when she promised to build her own wealth and to use her power for good. This second one was for François. She didn’t know how, or when, but she would solve the sediment conundrum. It would make them rich and successful, but most of all, the advantage over their competitors would be such that François would never need to worry about their business again.

  ‘We’ll weather one bad harvest,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Of course we will. It’s happened before. Look at me.’ She pressed her palm to his cheek. It was slick with sweat. ‘The black well again? Despair? You can’t see the bottom?’

  ‘I feel terrible.’ He tried to muster a smile for her. ‘But I don’t want you to worry. Not tonight.’

  ‘Go to bed, chéri, you’ll feel better in the morning.’

  ‘No! We’re going to Moët’s ball or he’ll think it’s sour grapes if we don’t. I’ve promised to play the violin and, anyway, I love showing the world you’re mine.’

  Her heart leapt, still, after seven years of marriage. Louis’ letter didn’t mean ruin, just a bad year, like the others.

  Nicole went to her study. She’d prove to François how a bad year was quickly followed by a good one, maybe two, then back the other way again. She unlocked the drawer and pulled out the ledger. He couldn’t argue with the black and red ink. Here, neatly in the thick pages of profit and loss was the cycle of hope and ruin they had faced since the day they had married. She preferred to contemplate it like this. Dispassionate, neatly added up and taken away. No pain, no dashed hopes, just ink on paper.

  She looked back to five years ago. Bottles ruined in the heat: twenty thousand. Losses: thirty thousand francs. Bottles shipped: thirty-five thousand two hundred. Labourers paid: two thousand francs.

  The figures didn’t show the months spent tending the vines, digging the earth, tying the shoots to poles, the blending, nothing of the workers looking for portents in the stars, praying to the harvest saint.

  She turned a couple of pages: 1802. The Treaty of Amiens. Peace with Britain and an opening up of the trade routes again. She, Louis and François had leapt to the violin, loaded their best samples of 1800 vintage champagne into a trunk for Louis and sent him off to London. It was another disaster. Moët had a stranglehold on the market, strutting around all the grand houses, hiding his support for the overthrow of the French aristocracy, playing cards, dancing their mannered dances, shooting a hundred-weight of unsuspecting pheasants out of the sky, handing out phials of his wines.

  ‘It’s a closed world,’ Louis had complained. ‘They’re terrified of the revolution and they look at me like I’m a criminal.’

  That summer, like this one, the sun would not leave them alone. While her sister idled in the sultry heat, boating on the Vesle River with her friends, she and François watched the grapes shrivel on the vines. She had cursed the sun and closed the shutters in the house, dreaming of foggy mornings and dewy grapes.

  She ran her finger down the ledger. Last April was the beginning of their current disaster: seventy-five thousand bottles had set off, bound for Ru
ssia. More than their entire sales for 1804. She left the next entry clear to see how things turned out. It could easily come right yet.

  François peered round the door. ‘Mugging up in your study again, Babouchette?’ He kissed her head and she leant back into his arms, hastily putting her hand over the numbers in the red deficit column.

  ‘Come and get ready,’ said François. ‘We can’t change anything, however hard you stare at the figures. I have something for you. And don’t worry about Mentine, she’s already tucked up in bed. She fell asleep while I told her a story about a young girl with strawberry curls who defied a man with a gun, right here in the cathedral square during the revolution.’ He kissed her. ‘Mentine always look so sublimely peaceful asleep.’

  His about-turn of mood filled her with optimism. Why not start right now?

  ‘Give me ten minutes, I’ll be up!’ she breathed through his kisses.

  She hurried outside and across to the press, filled a box with sand and picked four bottles of champagne that were in second fermentation.

  ‘Don’t touch those ones, they’re nearly ready and you’ll dislodge the sediment!’ scolded Antoine.

  ‘We can spare them, and I’ll bet two of them will be cloudy however careful you’ve been,’ she countered, feeling giddy as a schoolgirl.

  Antoine tutted and returned to his work, shaking the bottles one by one and replacing them in the sand.

  Nicole spirited her bottles away to a dark corner in the basement of the house and carefully placed them upside down in the sandbox, stood back and brushed the sand off her hands. This would be her secret – she had no idea how, but she would do it. No matter that a resolution had eluded champagne producers down the ages; she planned to observe, learn, experiment and start again, for François. If she could solve the sediment problem, shorten the time it took to slowly turn and shake the bottles to coax the sediment to the neck of the bottle – riddling, Antoine called it – and make sure every bottle was reliably clear in a shorter time, François would never need to worry again. She imagined his delight at her clever idea, locked the door behind her and ran upstairs to join him.

  François was waiting for her, smiling. ‘Your cheeks are flushed, you’ve been running. Is this one of your schemes? Sit down for a minute and close your eyes, Babouchette.’

  She sat on the bed, closed her eyes tight and felt a heavy package and the rustle of wrapping drop onto her hands.

  ‘Now open them.’

  François was himself again, ready for the ball, unruly hair tamed for the occasion, a striking, long-limbed figure in his embroidered coat and slim trousers. More handsome than ever, she thought proudly.

  Thick paper printed in gold and blue hid the contents of the parcel from her. She tore it open to reveal a red velvet dress, and a box. She picked up the dress first and held it up against her.

  ‘As beautiful as the day I met you. I bought it for you to wear in Russia, but you might as well wear it tonight. Put it on, then open the box.’

  She slipped it on. The red velvet was the same colour as the crimson grapes they found on the day they met. She knew he would think the same.

  ‘Open the box.’

  Inside was a Russian doll that looked remarkably like François. She looked up in surprise.

  ‘Keep opening.’

  The next doll was her. Grey eyes, straight strawberry blonde hair and a red velvet dress, the same as the new one she was wearing. Next was a little Clémentine, with the same colour hair, but curly, and her father’s blue-green eyes.

  ‘It’s us. I love it!’

  ‘Open the little one. There’s more.’

  Inside the smallest doll was a gold chain hung with a filigree insect. She held it up to the light. It was a firefly, intricately enamelled and underneath a yellow gem body, cut so it shattered the candle flame.

  ‘A yellow diamond. A firefly and champagne all mixed up in one rare combination, like you. If I go first, remember me by it. Now get ready, we’ll be late for the ball and it can’t start until the most glamorous couple in Reims arrive.’

  He kissed her and left.

  Josette helped pile her hair up. The necklace glowed like a honey moon on her skin. François made the darkest days into the loveliest.

  At Moët’s mansion in Épernay, torches lit the way, through the grounds to a Petit Trianon, Louis XV’s fashionable classical Greek-style mansion at Versailles, which Moët had built a faithful replica of in honour of his friend Napoléon. And, of course, to honour himself.

  ‘A replica monument for a replica king,’ pronounced François to Jean-Rémy.

  Moët clicked his heels and nodded in reply, François’ sarcasm lost on him. Nicole giggled.

  The first three dances were theirs. The waltz was her favourite. He whispered into her hair and spun her so fast her feet lifted off the ground and she was flying, oblivious to the rest of the world. After that, he was no longer hers. He never was at a ball or party. It was on these vast, glittering stages that François came into his own and she left him to his stories to join the tasting committee for vineyard gossip.

  Since the day of her first tasting committee meeting, she had forged herself a place as something of a novelty, an honorary man, so nobody batted an eyelid when she joined the circle of men, pulling on fat cigars. She lit a thin cigar for herself, crinkling her nose at the unaccustomed smoke.

  ‘Oat is definitely superior to flax to tie the vines,’ pronounced Monsieur Olivier, rolling his burgundy around the glass, checking the legs.

  ‘Oat. No question,’ she agreed. ‘Flax is far too rough on new shoots.’

  ‘Quite right, Madame Clicquot. And what, may I ask, is your opinion on the best rose to indicate greenfly?’

  He passed her the decanter of burgundy. Ten years old at least, deliciously earthy with notes of leather, cherry and mushrooms.

  As she sipped, a man in a blue coat edged with gold braid appeared and bowed to the group. His dark fringe was cut high above his forehead and hung square below his ears in tresses oreille de chien, dog’s-ear style, with a pigtail at the back. His skin was a sallow yellow and his deep-set eyes had a penetrating, feverish gaze.

  ‘May I join you, gentlemen?’ The man turned to Nicole and bowed again. ‘And lady?’

  ‘Oui, bien sûr.’ Monsieur Olivier stubbed his cigar and scrambled for a suitable chair for the leader of all of France, General Napoléon. It had been rumoured he would be in attendance.

  Everyone shuffled down one place.

  Napoléon sucked on a fat cherry, his favourite fruit, apparently.

  ‘I hear you messieurs are the best producers in these parts,’ he addressed them with a winning, radiant smile.

  They rushed to introduce themselves. Nicole kept quiet. Being a woman and going unnoticed occasionally served her well – it was his bloody wars that were at the heart of her troubles today.

  The committee, her committee, were rapt. Not content with meddling in the whole of Europe, there was apparently nothing Napoléon didn’t know about winemaking. What he didn’t know could be answered in the pamphlet he had commissioned, Chaptal’s L’art de faire, gouverner et perfectionner le vin. A copy was handed to her, as if it was the Holy Bible itself. Chemistry had been elevated over centuries of knowledge handed down from family to family and the feel of the terroir, watching the sky for the weather. She flicked through. Some of it did make sense. To control some of the processes, mitigate some of the elements of chance would certainly change things for her and François, especially if she succeeded with her riddling experiment. However much she disliked the man, he had done his homework.

  Polished buttons and a sash interrupted her thoughts. Napoléon was standing right over her. ‘You are absorbed in Chaptal instead of dancing, Madame…?’

  She held out her hand for him to kiss.

  ‘Madame Clicquot. I don’t agree with all of it, but some of it isn’t bad for a chemist.’

  ‘And how would you know so much, may I ask, Madam
e Clicquot?’ he asked, amused.

  ‘I have a hand in winemaking with my husband. Method and chemistry might help the uninitiated, but there is no substitute for an instinct for the terroir, the grape on your tongue, the soil between your fingers.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that I am uninitiated?’

  The committee looked on in horror.

  ‘You must be very busy with your wars. Leave the wine to the experts.’

  Monsieur Olivier let out an involuntary harumph at her audacity. Some of the others turned away to disassociate themselves.

  ‘Of which you are the leader?’ continued Napoléon provocatively.

  ‘One of them.’

  He laughed. ‘You would have loved my old aunt Geltruda. She tended the vines with her own hands and taught me to love them.’ He took her hands. ‘Tsk-tsk, as rough as hers, and so young.’

  ‘Working hands. Stupid to be trapped in drawing rooms full of painted dolls.’

  He winked at the committee. ‘Gives you boys a run for your money? These are tiny hands and that’s good in a woman. My aunt had to work the land. I take it you don’t?’

  ‘I choose to.’

  ‘A good revolutionary woman’s place is to produce strong sons and beautiful daughters for our great republic. You’re too delicate for field work, Madame Clicquot. Leave it to your husband. Enchanté.’

  He sauntered off, surrounded by the committee, who were now his enthusiastic acolytes.

  If you ever return, you will be drinking my champagne and thanking me for it, Nicole projected to his back.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ a dark-haired woman who had been listening from behind the committee whispered in her ear. ‘A general has to be a complete arse if he’s going to win. It goes with the territory. Believe me, I know men better than anyone. I’m trying to avoid that one over there.’ She pointed to a red-faced soldier. ‘Mind if I join you? Just keep talking.’ She slumped into a chair and fanned herself. She was barefoot, a ring on every toe, with very short hair and a thin red ribbon around her neck. She held out her hand. ‘Thérésa Tallien.’