Till We Meet Again (14 page)

“Enough! Morton, this time you have gone too far!” she
yelled. “Get this girl out of here this minute, Morton, do you hear me?”

Sheepishly, the most famous magician and hypnotist in France poked his head into the room. “I thought you were alone, beloved. A thousand pardons, Madame. Alice believes she’s a dog. Come along, Alice, there’s a good doggie, come along and don’t bother the nice lady.”

“Sorry, Aunt Marie-France. Morton’s a genius but he behaves like a child from time to time. He means no harm.”

Marie-France’s eyes were wide with shock. “Eve, I can’t leave you in this … this abomination. You must come home with me.”

“Darling Aunt, you ‘can’t leave me,’ you ‘simply will not allow it’—what do you take me for? I am not a little girl you can order around anymore. Do you seriously imagine that I could go back to Dijon and take my place among the eligible debutantes, and wait for some solid citizen to come along and do me the honor of making me his wife? Do you believe that now that I know the glory of singing on the stage of the Olympia I could be content with a life like my mother’s?”

“ ‘Glory’? Vainglory! Conceit! It is odious and ignoble and contemptible, this glory of yours,” Marie-France said violently. “In ten years you’ll realize that you threw away all the important things in life for a momentary caprice. All you can understand now is the sound of cheap applause, the life of the … the gutter.”

Eve rose, her face held tightly in icy fury. “I beg you not to speak of my friends in such terms. Perhaps you had better leave, Aunt Marie-France. It does not suit you to be out of your element.”

The Baronne de Courtizot stood up and walked toward the door. “If you change your mind, if you become rational, Eve, I’ll be at home for the rest of today and tomorrow. After that it will be far too late. Now I have to go back and decide what to tell your poor mother.”

“Tell her the truth. Tell her I’m happy. Ask my parents to come to Paris to see for themselves. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You’re worse than the fool that man took you for,” the Baronne said, and left the room without a backward glance.

The next day, a morning in May, Eve made an appointment with Jacques Charles.

“Two months ago,
Patron
, you told me that I had the potential to become a real star,” she said. “You gave me two days to think about it.”

“I remember,” he said grimly. “I’m surprised that you do.”

“I wasn’t ready. I can’t explain it more honestly than that. But now, if it still interests you …”

“Well …?”

“
I want it!
I’m ready to work with everything I’ve got, twenty-four hours a day, for as long as it takes. Months, years, it doesn’t matter, if you’ll just give me the chance.”

Eve fell silent, looking at the floor, her whole body quivering with an excess of longing. This was what she had been born to do, and she’d probably thrown away her opportunity because it had come at the wrong time. She had still been in love with Alain, still trying to keep their life intact. And after he left her, her spirit had almost been destroyed by his words and his blows. His hatred.

She had failed to grasp the moment and she’d never forgive herself if the producer had lost interest in her because of her lack of ambition. From the instant that Aunt Marie-France had unwittingly shown her how much the world of the stage meant to her, she had realized how unthinkable any other life would be. She thought of nothing now but reclaiming the glowing, distant, infinitely alluring future that Jacques Charles had once held out to her. She belonged to the music hall, and the music hall
must belong
to her.

But the impresario hadn’t answered her. She looked up to where he was seated behind his desk and saw him writing with concentration. Had she been dismissed? He finished writing, laid down his pen and handed her the sheet of paper.

“Here’s your schedule of lessons,” he said. “You’re late for the first one already. Hurry!”

It was a spring of soft winds, a spring of soft clouds, a spring of soft rain, that last heedless spring of the Edwardian era. Eve was far too busy to pay any attention to the weather, much less to the winds of change, as she ran from her lessons in acrobatics, dance and drama to the theater, just in time to put on her makeup before her performance. She no longer had time to read the newspapers, no time for the camaraderie of backstage, the shared meals, the gossip and jokes. She ate
what she could, wherever she could, just so long as it didn’t take too long to chew, and after the curtain rang down she went straight home to her little furnished apartment and fell into bed, too exhausted to dream.

While Kaiser Wilhelm II spent twenty days of July relaxing on a pleasure cruise on board his yacht, the
Hohenzollern
, Eve, like everyone else, was wrapped up in her own life. The time bomb that had been ticking away for a month in Belgrade and Vienna went off on the twenty-eighth of July, 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. For the next week the diplomats and military strategists of the great European powers worked at cross-purposes, in an insanely tangled web of downright lies, arrogance, recklessness, incompetence, duplicity, incomplete information and utterly differing intentions, until they finally managed to flounder and stumble, not inevitably but fatally, into a war that no one but a few extreme nationalists had ever wanted. On August fourth, Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe: we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

Marcel, the assistant stage manager, Jacques Charles, and Maurice Chevalier were merely three of the almost four million men mobilized by France in the first weeks of August. The business of the country was paralyzed as every able-bodied man was called up, and trains packed with ill-armed but gay and enthusiastic troops left for military positions every seven minutes.

After the Battle of the Marne, in mid-September, when the French threw back a German approach on Paris, the temporary national euphoria was marked by a reopening of all the theaters, cafés and music halls of the country. However, in that single month two hundred thousand Frenchmen had died, many of them wearing the bright red trousers that dated back to the uniform of 1830 and symbolized the lack of reality with which the country faced what it imagined would be a short, chivalrous and glorious war.

By the end of that first wartime September, both the German and the Allied armies began to dig in to rest and resupply along the Aisne river, in the province of Champagne, creating the trenches that were to become the first fortifications of the Western Front, a front that, for three
years, would move back and forth within ten deadlocked miles, accomplishing nothing but the slaughter of millions of men.

On a low hilltop in Champagne lay the Château de Valmont, the family home of the Vicomtes de Lancel. It was located in the heart of the champagne grape-growing country, on the chalky, heat-retaining north slopes of the Montagne de Rheims, running roughly east to west between Rheims and Epernay, the two major towns of the province.

Valmont, unlike most châteaux in Champagne, had survived the Revolution, invasions and wars. It rose with a fairy-tale-like suddenness from a small but dense wood, proud possessor of three round towers with pointed, tiled roofs. Dozens of rooms with tall, many-paned windows looked out calmly on the semicircular stone terrace where topiary trees in carved stone urns stood as they had done for centuries. Valmont was surrounded by a treasure of vineyards, a portion of the tightly limited area of the world’s surface whose grapes produce the only sparkling white wine with an undisputed right to be called champagne.

Each year the harvest of these grapes, the white Chardonnay, the black Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, proves the existence of one of the greatest mysteries in the history of winemaking, for although Noah planted a vineyard when he got off the Ark, even Noah could not have claimed that he could produce champagne.

Many châteaux throughout France were mere museumlike monuments to a family’s history and, by the beginning of the Great War, had long since lost the vitality of their pre-Revolutionary days. Valmont, on the contrary, had always been a prosperous, bustling, hospitable dwelling. It had seen many changes since the days when the Lancels were loyal to the counts of Champagne as they strove to dominate the kings of France, a conflict that only ended in 1284 when Joan of Navarre and Champagne married the future king of France, Philip the Fair.

In the seventeenth century the Vicomtes de Lancel, like their neighbors, began to produce wine. Beyond the boundaries of their own large vineyards they were surrounded by the small holdings of farmers who sold them the grapes they grew. Soon they made enough champagne to begin to sell it.
By the mid-eighteen-hundreds, the distinctive green bottles bearing the shield-shaped gold label on which the word
Lancel
appeared in large letters with
Château de Valmont
in smaller letters beneath it, had become a
Grande Marque
. Along with Moët & Chandon, Mumm, Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, and a few other great names, chilled bottles of Lancel were a most desired sight at any festival celebrated by civilized men and women.

The present head of the Lancel family, Vicomte Jean-Luc de Lancel, had two sons. The elder, Guillaume, was destined to run the House of Lancel, the younger, Paul-Sebastian, had become a diplomat in the service of the Quai d’Orsay. At the start of hostilities he was barely thirty, the First Secretary of the French Embassy in London, and clearly a man who was bound to rise to the heights of the foreign service.

On August first, 1914, the first day of the call to arms, ignoring the opportunity afforded to diplomats to stay out of the fighting, he had volunteered. Now a captain, Paul de Lancel left behind his young wife, born Laure de Saint-Fraycourt, a frail Parisian beauty of twenty-two, who was awaiting the birth of their first child.

She had implored him not to leave her. “The child will be born in another five months and everyone says that this stupid war must surely be over before then,” Laure de Lancel had said, weeping with weakness and fear. “I beg you, stay with me—I need you here.”

However, Paul felt compelled to go to war at once. He knew that France would need every man she had in order to face the German armies that had been mobilized with massive efficiency and a staggering superiority in numbers as well as armament.

The weaving patterns of approaching battle had been observed by Paul de Lancel, from his diplomatic post. He knew that the French General Staff was riddled by a complex of superiority. The idea that the courage, dash and ardor of the French soldier, the ordinary, brave
poilu
, must count for more than mere fighting power, was an article of faith in the minds of professional army men. But Paul, unlike the average Frenchman, entertained serious doubts that élan alone would win the day. However, like every other human being in that unsuspecting summer of 1914, he had no suspicion of what lay in store.

Paul de Lancel was a complex man. He often wondered if
he would have been happier if an accident of birth had made him the wine grower of the family rather than a diplomat. Certainly, as his mother, Anette de Lancel, often told him, he looked as if he should be out working in the vineyards rather than sitting behind a desk, for Paul was a massive man, both tall and wide-shouldered, with the powerful muscles of someone who worked with his hands. His blond hair looked as if it had been bleached by the sun while he labored. Although his dark blue eyes were the Lancel eyes, as deep-set as those in the family portraits that hung throughout the château, and he had the prominent Lancel cheekbones, the rest of his face was not marked by the fine Lancel bone structure, nor did he have any trace of the red hair that appeared, generation after generation, in the family. Paul’s big and well-shaped nose lacked the Lancel slenderness, and his handsome mouth and chin had a vigorous and uncomplicated simplicity.

Nevertheless, Paul de Lancel’s turn of mind was so questioning that he frequently wished he could deal with nothing more subtle than the simple preoccupations of the sun and the rain. Indeed, a grape grower and wine producer must wake up each day to worry about the weather, but since there is nothing he can do about it, a sort of resignation and philosophy is forced to reign in his mind, a condition that, it seemed to Paul, had a great deal that was blessedly solid and comforting to recommend it.

A diplomat, on the other hand, had an obligation to become a professional cynic, for without a cautious, double-thinking mind-set to protect him, he would be in danger of becoming a constant dupe, and worthless to his country. Paul de Lancel was not able to tell himself of any single verity in the world that he was absolutely certain of, except his love for France and his love for his wife. Of the two, he was forced to admit that his love for his country was stronger.

Eve, jolted by the mobilization, had decided not to return to the Olympia, which had reopened under the direction of Beretta, the former conductor of the orchestra, and Léon Volterra, who had saved an uncanny number of sous while selling programs in the lobby of the Olympia. Her personal ambitions would have to wait until this war was over, she decided.

If Jacques Charles could serve in the army, so would she,
in her fashion. As soon as it was organized, Eve joined
Le Théâtre aux Armées de la République
and became one of the many entertainers who traveled to the various battlegrounds to give shows for the soldiers. Some of them, like Charles Dullin, performed in the actual trenches dug on the Lorraine front. Eve attached herself to a group founded by Lucien Gilly, one of the comics at the Olympia.

In 1915, a year after the Battle of the Marne, a new offensive began in Champagne. Joffre, the ever over-optimistic general, proclaimed to his troops,
“Votre élan sera irrésistible!”
and the men marched, in spite of downpouring rain, to the sound of fifers and bands playing the
Marseillaise
. Ten days later a hundred and forty-five thousand Frenchmen lay dead and no strategic advantage had been gained.