Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  Centuries before French perfume and French fashion had properly organized their foreign sales, the seemingly natural human desire to drink as much champagne as possible, as often as possible, had been cleverly promoted by a group of young Champenois noblemen who owned vineyards at the time of the coronation of Louis XIV in 1666.

  Forming themselves into a group, the Marquis de Sillery, the Duc de Mortmart, the Vicomte de Lancel, the Marquis de Bois-Dauphin and the Marquis de Saint-Evremond, among others, went to Versailles and deliberately set about making their own wines of Champagne the rage at court, for the court alone set the fashion for everything throughout France, from buttons to architecture.

  After a triumphant success at Versailles, they spread out and conquered England, where the demand for champagne soon became so great that it commanded an enormously high price. Their equally enterprising sons and grandsons traveled thousands of miles, to sell champagne to the Grand Dukes of Russia and the founders of the new republic of the United States. Eventually great markets were also established in South America and Australia. A similar vision motivated Monsieur Moët when the armies of Russia, Austria and Prussia invaded Champagne after Napoleon’s retreat at Waterloo. He encouraged looting of his bottles for the officer’s mess on the basis that it would cause the occupying forces to develop a taste for champagne, and as the saying goes, “He who has drunk once will drink again.” When the officers returned home, they became good customers indeed.

  Along with this spirit of marketing and publicity, bred into the vineyard owners, there also developed a most untypically French attitude toward hospitality. There have never been many hotels in Champagne, so, for hundreds of years, the families of the region have received in their own homes or châteaux visitors from every place in the world where champagne is drunk. It is rare indeed that the maker of a great or small mark of champagne dines alone, except during the five cold months of winter.

  “Just listen to this, Jean-Luc,” the Vicomtesse de Lancel said, so excited that she only read every other sentence of Eve’s letter out loud. “… important for Delphine to experience … a world in which tradition plays an important role, in which she has a place as well as a family … clearly impossible in a city as young as Los Angeles … both feel that she’s still young enough … a visit to you could make a crucial difference in her somewhat immature attitudes …”

  “A visit? Of course. When?”

  “Right away! That’s what’s so amazing. The Normandie leaves from New York in three days, and apparently she can fly there in a day or less. It does seem a bit sudden but, well, these young people nowadays.… Eve wonders if we could keep Delphine over for the entire summer—how can she doubt it! Of course it will turn our arrangements upside-down, but I’ll manage somehow. Jean-Luc, we must telephone immediately. What time would it be now in California?”

  “Eleven at night?” he ventured, calculating backwards, but his wife had already disappeared toward the table in the entrance hall where the telephone was kept, rearranging the occupants of the guest rooms in her head as she proceeded at a stately trot. Somewhat immature attitudes, indeed! What did Eve expect from that darling child?

  11

  EVERY well-run private bank needs at least one or more bank officers of a particular and very special sort, men for whom a knowledge of the business of banking is their least important qualification. Like the most accomplished and cultivated of geisha girls in Japan, these bank officers serve to attract a rich clientele, and to keep them faithful by making sure that they continue to be amused and charmed.

  When Bruno de Lancel completed his military service in 1935, he found that it had become necessary to have some sort of job, an annoyingly boring price he had to pay for not being one of his Saint-Fraycourt ancestors, whose only concern had been how to occupy their leisure most pleasantly. Shockingly, he did not seem to possess a private income and he was no longer willing to live with his grandparents.

  However, he discovered quickly that the demands made by the position he soon accepted with La Banque Duvivier Frères were not too unlike those that might have been made on a Marquis de Saint-Fraycourt before the Revolution. It was necessary to hunt as frequently as possible during the season; important to play cards well—but not too well—with the right people in the right clubs; desirable to appear at the opera, the theater, the ballet and the openings of important art exhibitions; essential never to miss a major race meeting at the tracks of France, England, or Ireland; and, it went without saying, out of the question not to be seen at every meaningful social event of Paris society. The bank paid his expenses so that he could engage in these activities, and a small salary as well, plus a commission on any new accounts he brought in.

  Even if Bruno had wanted, in this June of 1936, to spend more than a few minutes now and then at the Duvivier bank, it would have been difficult, given the demands of his position. The three Duvivier brothers were delighted with him. He was more than worth what he cost them; already he had attracted a number of new customers with whom they could not personally have hoped to make contact.

  A bonus they had not anticipated to its fullest value in hiring Bruno was his bachelorhood. It doubled his worth, the youngest Duvivier brother reflected. “Tripled,” replied the eldest. The middle brother, as usual, thought they were both wrong: “Lancel’s worth is incalculable until he marries. Then we will have to reassess it.”

  Would he pick a girl whose relatives and connections would come from the same unfortunately reduced financial circumstances as the Saint-Fraycourts? Would he deign to marry money, but from outside his own world? Or, best of all for the bank, would he manage to make an alliance with an heiress who also came from a great family, an heiress whose parents might reasonably expect her to marry someone as rich as she?

  While the Duviviers pondered the ultimate results of their investment in Bruno, they had, unknown to them, an ally in the Marquise de Saint-Fraycourt, who never spent a day in which she did not ask herself the same questions. The only party to Bruno’s eventual marriage who had almost no concern about the success of the affair was Bruno himself. He was too certain of his entitlement to the ideal wife to worry about the future. Whoever she would be, since he was now only twenty-one, she would still be in a convent somewhere, learning whatever girls learned in convents.

  Bruno knew the one essential thing about the girl he would marry, the only absolute on which he would insist: she must come to him with the assurance that she would inherit land. Money would never be enough. For enough land, a great deal of land, family land, Bruno would have been content to marry the devils daughter … as long as the devil was French. The Saint-Fraycourts had lost their ancient lands and most of their income in the crash of the Banque de l’Union Financière in 1882. The Lancel land would be divided among Bruno and his father’s wife and other children.

  Although it was reassuring, from a financial point of view, to know that one day, in the far future—for Uncle Guillaume and his father both came from stock who lived to a great age—he would share in the income of Lancel champagne, the vineyards could never belong to him alone. Therefore, as some men must marry money, he must marry land. He hungered to possess forests and fields and a château of his own, hundreds and hundreds of hectares over which he would walk and ride as sole and undisputed master.

  Meanwhile, there were such a pressing number of appointments in his daily life that he actually had difficulty in carving aside precious time in which to go to his shirtmaker and choose new cloth for his shirts, time to visit his shoemaker, time to have a new dinner jacket fitted.

  Nevertheless, there were things that even the best of valets couldn’t do for him, Bruno thought, as he stood impatiently while his tailor adjusted a shoulder seam. Sabine de Koville came into his mind, and he smiled faintly to himself. She was quite perfect in her way, once she had instructed him so precisely where her way led.

  Yes, she had done him a great service when he was only seventeen and had not yet had a wom
an, Bruno mused, and he still continued to see her from time to time, for her needs were uncomplicated and direct. Perhaps he would take tea with her today. Perhaps not. There were many other women, less simple than Sabine in their requirements, equally gifted and equally … piquant. How he enjoyed each fresh surprise women could offer: the deliciously squalid fancies of a prince’s daughter; the thirst for punishment of a high-minded mistress of a literary salon; and Sabine de Koville, who could only respond to the orders of a servant. Degradation was his hobby.

  After Bruno’s first experience with his school friend’s mother, he had discovered in a short time that he was not just the classic case of an adolescent being seduced by a woman of the world. His deepest sexual preference, indeed his only sexual preference, was for women in their late thirties and early forties. He couldn’t understand why a man would eat a green apple, if ripe fruit was available. A horse, perhaps, might, at the limit, be chosen unschooled, so that he could be broken in to one’s own requirements.

  But a woman? How much more agreeable to take them when they had already discovered what they craved most deeply and secretly. In ten cases out of ten they weren’t satisfying their inadmissible needs with their husbands. How simple it was to give them their fantasies and watch them become utterly obedient, the proudest of them often the most submissive to his will.

  It was a combination as undemanding as it was convenient, for, with the almost impossible demands of a job like his, Bruno reflected, he most certainly had not so much as a minute for courtship. Happily, his own unappeasable appetite, for well-tended flesh that was past the awkwardness and ignorance of youth, coincided with such a large and easily available supply. He couldn’t understand his friends who spent time and money running after girls as if they possessed something worth having. How could any intelligent man prefer his meat unseasoned?

  “Hello, Bruno,” a voice said behind his back.

  “Guy—I can’t move. I should be finished soon,” Bruno answered. He had an appointment for a lunchtime tennis game with Guy Marchant, a relatively recent friend. Now Guy, Bruno thought, would be able to try to explain the attraction of young women, for he was always falling for one or another of them, but it was not a question Bruno could ask, for it would betray too much of his own private arrangements.

  “What do you think of Schmeling beating Joe Louis by a knockout yesterday?” Guy asked, drawing up a chair. He was a tall and skinny young man with a pleasantly lopsided smile and clever eyes.

  “I wasn’t surprised, were you?” Bruno replied. “Actually, I don’t much care about boxing. Next month I’m going over for Wimbledon—why don’t you come along? Gottfried von Gramm, Fred Perry—you shouldn’t miss it.”

  “I’ll see if I can get away from the office,” Guy answered. “It isn’t always possible.”

  “Monsieur de Lancel, if you please, turn a few inches toward me,” the fitter requested, reaching for more pins. Bruno turned and found that he was facing himself squarely in the mirror. He gave himself a quick, perfunctory glance, devoid of vanity. He knew perfectly well what he looked like, and he had no need to reassure himself by checking the mirror as so many men did. That women found him extraordinary was gratifying, but hardly surprising. The fact that something about the way his features were put together made men trust him—that, yes, that was important.

  Bruno had found, to his surprise, that he liked the banking business, or rather that he liked making money, and certainly banking was among the few gentleman’s ways to that end. When he started with Duvivier Frères he had done so because it was necessary to have an occupation. His first successes at attracting new clients to the firm had occurred almost by themselves; on a squash court, during a hunt weekend near Tours, after a thoroughbred auction at Newmarket.

  The commissions from these clients had given him his first taste of economic freedom. He had found a flat to his liking in a vast private house on the Rue de l’Université. It belonged to a distant cousin who, like so many others, had recently lost most of his money in the Bourse and had been forced to convert half of his home into flats with private entrances. More commissions, which Bruno now sought with alert foresight, soon paid for a housemaid, the best of tailors, the services of a valet, and the first two horses he’d ever owned.

  Now, in the year since he’d joined the bank, he had grown seriously ambitious. He realized that although there was a great deal of money to be made without venturing beyond his own class, there was far more money in that busy world which lay utterly outside the strict and immutable limits of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in that wealthy bourgeois world of Guy Marchant, who sat tapping his foot, impatient to be on the tennis court.

  Attracting that kind of money was a matter of accepting invitations, or rather of provoking invitations, that would not normally be extended to him because of who he was, Bruno thought, as the tailor, with maddening precision, pinned a perfect cuff. It entailed acting in a way that made him seem more accessible, a little less of a standoffish aristocrat, than people anticipated; in picking out older men who would never, under any circumstances, have set foot in his Grandmother Saint-Fraycourt’s salon; and in unbending toward them ever so slightly, so that their wives dared to issue an invitation that they normally would not have tendered for fear of being rebuffed.

  These first invitations were always, he noticed, for large, formal gatherings, the sort of invitations that could, in theory, be refused without making the would-be hostess feel as if she had presumed. When Bruno accepted them, his hosts were flattered and, encouraged by their wives, grew more bold.

  His youth was a priceless asset. One could invite a twenty-one-year-old Vicomte de Saint-Fraycourt de Lancel when one would not invite, not dream of inviting, an older member of that aristocracy of the Ancien Régime. Bruno’s commissions fattened. Of his many invitations, those he decided to encourage were for intimate dinners, yachting trips, weekends in the country; invitations that gave him the opportunities for which he was hunting. Soon Bruno’s salary was ridiculously small in comparison to his income from his commissions.

  Guy Marchant, whom he had met less than six months ago, was the only son of Pierre Marchant, who owned the most prosperous newsreel business in France, Marchant Actualités. It had worldwide distribution and was larger than Fox-Movietone, Pathé Journal and Eclair-Journal combined.

  Bruno had first become acquainted with Monsieur and Madame Marchant at the Polo Club in the Bois. Soon he had met Guy, who was only three years older than he, yet already deeply involved in the day-to-day running of the vast family enterprise.

  He was a fairly good sort, Guy, Bruno had decided, the kind of well-educated and shrewd product of the upper middle class who could eventually, by marriage—for of course that was the only way—rise up to the lower reaches of the upper classes. By the time he was fifty, he might expect to have a daughter who had married a man with a good title, even an excellent one, if that was what he wanted. His grandson could be born an aristocrat.

  Guy Marchant was as much a part of the future as Bruno himself, and the two of them had become friendly, although not in the way Bruno would always reserve for the boys with whom he had gone to school. There had as yet been no placement of the Marchant funds in the Duvivier bank, and Bruno thought the better of the Marchants for this. Had they rushed to do business with his employers, as so many others had done, he would have found Guy less attractive, less worthwhile cultivating. The Marchants actually expected him to associate with them for themselves. That, in itself, was worthy of some grudging respect. It showed, if nothing else, a sense of self-worth.

  “Bruno, how long will you be?” Guy asked, looking at his watch.

  “Will you be finished soon, Monsieur?” Bruno asked the tailor impatiently.

  “All in good time, Monsieur de Lancel,” the tailor answered impassively. Another man who knew his own value, Bruno realized, and resigned himself to the expenditure of another quarter hour.

  It was mid-July, and in her bedr
oom at the Château de Valmont, Delphine sat on the floor of the best guest room, surrounded by the contents of an enormous wardrobe trunk that had arrived only an hour earlier. Margie, faithful Margie, in a futile gesture of comfort, had packed up all of Delphine’s evening clothes and sent them on by boat Delphine ransacked the trunk, pulling out gown after gown, cloak after cloak, holding them lovingly up to her, and then placing them carefully on the carpet in a pinwheel of sumptuous colors and fabrics. In their hundreds of years of cultural superiority, the clever French had never managed to invent the closet; her armoire was already over-crammed, and there was no place to hang her dozens of evening clothes.

  The trunk was completely unpacked now, and Delphine, filled with a growing grief, opened one of her evening bags and peeked inside. She found a lace handkerchief, a black and silver compact for loose powder, a pearl-headed pin that had once held a corsage at her shoulder, two quarters, a Coty lipstick, a book of matches from the Trocadero, and one of her many cigarette cases. Reverently, as if she were looking at relics of a dead civilization, she took out the objects and placed them in her lap, brooding over them as her melancholy grew. She opened the cigarette case and found a single wrinkled Lucky Strike. She rolled it lovingly in her fingers, sniffed it, and then, remembering that her door was locked, she lit the cigarette on a Trocadero match, inhaled deeply, and promptly burst into tears.

  The familiar act brought it all back: the dance music that filled the air; the delicious flirting, always just on the edge of being dangerous; the first sip from a cold cocktail glass; Margie’s conspiratorial wink; the sound of dice; the croupier’s bark; and oh, the excitement, that breathless diet of excitement to which she had become accustomed, knowing that one wild, gay evening would be followed by another, that nothing would ever be humdrum or predictable.