Till We Meet Again (67 page)

On the twentieth of August, General Dietrich von Choltitz
negotiated a surrender, promising not to destroy Paris, as Hitler had ordered him to do, in exchange for an orderly withdrawal of his men. Yet the irrepressible uprising continued, heavier than before. Islands of German troops were attacked by untrained snipers. Resistance newspapers that had been printed underground for years were sold in broad daylight to venturesome passersby, while a thousand yards away the French Forces of the Interior battled for control of the City Hall.

Continental had been taken over by the
Comité de Libération du Cinéma Français
on the nineteenth, and all production shut down. Delphine, who lived so close to the Gestapo headquarters on the Avenue Foch, where a furious battle continued, kept to her house, and found herself utterly alone. Violet, Helene, and Annabelle, too prudent to risk the streets, had deserted their jobs, and the neighbors, who knew no more than she did, had retreated firmly behind the closed shutters of their windows. When she looked out of her own windows she saw no sign of life at all on the empty street.

By the twenty-second, except for a few bottles of wine, there were no provisions at all in the house, not so much as a piece of stale bread. Late in the afternoon of the following day, Delphine was so hungry that she decided she had to chance a trip to the nearby market street and try to find something to eat. She hadn’t shopped for food in years. She wasn’t even sure where the bakery was. She looked for the most inconspicuous clothes she owned, and found a forgotten prewar blue cotton skirt, belted in red, and an old sleeveless white blouse. Instinctively wary of being recognized, she used no makeup and brushed her hair so that it fell in shadowy wings over her face.

As she passed the empty, inexplicably closed guardian’s house, and turned into the main street, she felt exposed and imperiled by the unnatural, surrealistic silence of the neighborhood. Could everyone have left the city, she wondered. Were they being sensible and staying home to wait and see what would happen? Surely they too must have run out of food, or had they had the wisdom to lay in some provisions, no matter how meager?

On the market street, only two shops were open, and Delphine, armed with her ration book, was able to buy two withered turnips, an onion, and three hard rolls. She chewed
one of them hungrily as she scurried home, keeping to the shelter of the buildings and walking as fast as she possibly could without running. Thankfully she turned into the relative security of the Villa Mozart, now frankly racing toward the protection of her own walls. Out of breath, she took the key to the front door from her pocket and had almost inserted it when two men suddenly stepped out from around the side of the house. Fear struck to her heart, for they were tramps, clad in rags, bearded, desperate and terrifying.

“No, please no, don’t,” she whispered, too petrified to scream, looking around frantically for the help that she knew was not to be found. She held out her shopping bag, trying to ward off their menace with the offer of food, but they advanced steadily toward her. She could smell their filth.

“It’s all right,” one of the tramps said hoarsely.

“What?” Delphine shrank away but she knew they had seen the house key in her hand and it was too late.

“Your get-up,” the tramp said, his voice breaking, “simple, patriotic—just right, babe …”

“Armand!”

“… to welcome a soldier … to welcome him home …” He fainted into her arms.

On the twenty-fifth of August, General Omar Bradley ordered two divisions into Paris: the French 2nd under General Leclerc, and the 12th Regiment of the American 4th Division, accompanied by the American 102nd Cavalry Group.

Weeping and cheering, on a flood tide of such ecstasy that it surpassed any individual rejoicing, the citizens of Paris poured out of every building and took to the streets. Bells rang constantly in every church tower, while, at the City Hall, when he was asked to proclaim the existence of the Republic, de Gaulle answered, “The Republic has never ceased to exist.”

Colonel Paul de Lancel was a member of the group that accompanied de Gaulle. He had helped to implement Gustave Moutet’s inspired idea to use the maps from his 1939
Michelin Guide
to assist in the D-Day operations, maps which gave the Allied Forces invaluably detailed information. Paul was unable to get through to Champagne by telephone, for it was still occupied by the Germans. Three days later, as soon as he learned that Patton’s Third Army had liberated Epernay, he borrowed an American jeep and set off to find his parents.

He had been able to snatch only a few hours with Delphine. When she flung open the door in answer to his unannounced ring, the power of her welcome had all but knocked him off his feet. Her emotion was absolute, yet somehow secondary, and when she led him quickly upstairs to meet Armand Sadowski, Paul looked no further for the reason for her happiness.

Delphine was as light and fragile as swansdown, yet he could see that she was nursing her returned soldier and his friend, a Norman named Jules, tirelessly, sending the women of her household scurrying everywhere in the neighborhood to unearth ingredients to make soup that she fed spoonful by spoonful to the tall, terribly thin, terribly weary man who lay a prisoner in her bedroom, not allowed to do anything but eat and rest.

“Was she this bossy at home?” Armand Sadowski had asked Paul de Lancel, insisting, as one man to another, that, weak as he was, he had the strength to shave himself.

“Yes,” Paul had answered, “but her basic intentions were always good.” He fell at once into an easy relationship with this man of whose existence he had just learned. Delphine had wanted Armand to tell Paul of his escape, but the only thing Sadowski could say was, “We had dumb luck …” before he drifted off to sleep. Later Delphine told Paul the meager details Armand had given her of his escape from the vast Schweinfurt ball-bearing factory, where he had worked for years, preserved from death by the German need for slave labor. During one of the repeated American bombings of the enormous factory, Sadowski and his pal Jules, who, like Armand, had picked up a smattering of the German language, dressed in the uniforms of dead German guards and made their perilous way by foot through Germany and across the border into France.

They had been almost invisible, protected by the vast confusion of war and the presence of mobs of millions of refugees made homeless by round-the-clock Allied bombing. Once back in French territory, they had been helped by peasants and bands of local Resistance members, who gave them clothes to wear.

Passed from one link of the Resistance chain to another, they had made a painfully slow trip toward Paris, hiding from German patrols that might have demanded their nonexistent papers. “It wasn’t luck, Father, it was a miracle,” Delphine
said, towering in her love for Armand, and Paul had realized that his frivolous, flighty, willful daughter had disappeared forever into a woman of twenty-six whose strength he had yet to measure.

Paul managed to get a brief message to Eve in London that Delphine was safe and well before he set off, very early, on the road to Champagne. The journey took longer than he had expected, for at every village his jeep was stopped and acclaimed by excited crowds, as if he were a fairy-tale hero riding on a dragon. It was afternoon before Paul found himself at the great door of the Château de Valmont. He hesitated a minute before jumping down, remembering a conversation with Eve in 1938, after Munich, when he had decided, as casually, as foolishly as if the world had nothing but time, to wait to visit France until the next spring. Consular business had forced him to postpone that intended spring visit for a few months, and then, while the world stood by in helpless disbelief, his country had plunged into the long, dark, terrible night of the Occupation.

It had been more than a decade since he had last stepped onto the soil of Champagne, but Paul knew there must be something seriously wrong at Valmont, for he had driven past the unimaginable sight of empty vineyards in which no one, not even a child, was at work. The front door hung open on its stout hinges, and not a soul had come forward to see who had driven through the gates.

Paul crossed the threshold of his childhood home, and ran directly to the kitchens, the heart of the house, without finding anybody. Rapidly he searched the reception rooms and finally the bedrooms, without success. The château was as silent and empty, as untouched and unchanged, as if it had been bewitched, yet all the rooms showed signs of recent human habitation. Clearly it had not been occupied by the Germans. He returned to the front door and had been standing there for a minute, deeply disturbed, when he saw a long line of black-clad men and women approaching slowly on foot. An old woman detached herself from the file and ran clumsily toward him.

“Monsieur Paul, is it you?” she cried urgently, her creased face turned up toward him, almost as if she were hoping it would be someone else. “Is it truly you?” He recognized Jeanne, the housekeeper, who had been a plump young maid
in the house when he was growing up, more than forty years ago.

“Jeanne, Jeanne, my dearest Jeanne, of course it’s me! What’s happening, why is the château empty?
Where are my parents?”

“We come from the churchyard. We buried your mother today, Monsieur Paul,” she said, and burst into tears.

“And my father—where, Jeanne, where?” he asked, although he knew the answer from her streaming eyes.

“It’s more than two years since he left us, may God rest their souls.”

Paul turned away. The empty vineyards, the deserted château, had already whispered the truth to him. It was ever thus when the entire population of Valmont was burying one of its number. But he had dared to hope that it was not one of his parents. Jeanne plucked at his sleeve.

“Monsieur Paul, at least Monsieur Bruno is alive, remember that,” she said, trying to comfort him.

“Bruno …” He turned and searched the crowd who stood around, waiting to greet him, their sorrow mingled with surprise at the novel sight of a French officer in uniform. “Yes, Bruno—why is he not here?”

“He left right after the funeral. He said he had business in Paris but he’d be back tonight. He’s fine, Monsieur Paul, he’s been here in safety since the Armistice began. It was a cruel time, such an evil long time … the worst time I can remember … I can’t begin to believe it’s over. Come inside, Monsieur Paul, and I’ll find you something to eat, you must be hungry.”

“In a while, Jeanne, thank you. First … I must go to the churchyard.”

After Paul returned from a silent hour’s vigil by the graves of his parents, he spent hours driving around the roads that bordered the Lancel vineyards, stopping whenever he saw workers to greet them and ask about their welfare. At fifty-nine, in the uniform he had worn since he joined de Gaulle in 1940, Paul de Lancel was a fine-looking man; his thick blond hair was now gray, but his carriage was upright, his massive body as vigorous as ever, his glance resolute and skeptical at the same time, calmly commanding. Many of the workers had never seen him before. Paul had not been back in Champagne, except during a few vacations, since the First
World War began, thirty years earlier. However, many of the older workers remembered him as a young man, and every one of them of every age gave him a hero’s welcome, for he was a Lancel returning to his home, and none of them had ever worked for anyone but a Lancel, nor had their fathers or their fathers’ fathers.

Paul picked up scraps of news as he talked in the vineyards: the managements of Moët & Chandon and Piper-Heidsieck had been completely taken over by the Germans in early 1944; during the past years, many employees and heads of other houses had been arrested by the Gestapo for anti-German activities; several hundred local Resistance members had been murdered or deported; massive Allied bombing at Mailly had destroyed the entire Von Stauffen division that had been concentrated there before the invasion of Normandy; there had been even more destructive Allied bombing at Rilly, where the Germans had stored V-2 rockets in the tunnel that ran through the Mountain of Rheims. Only ten days ago an entire train, heavily loaded with champagne, had left Rheims, bound for Germany. Now throughout the province of Champagne a shortage of bottles had developed, but, as each of the workers was quick to tell him, during the past three years the district had produced harvests of exceptional quality. They all agreed that the vineyards had greatly suffered during the war, the invasion had damaged many vines, no replanting had taken place, but look, Monsieur Paul, just look at the ripening grapes—were they not a fine sight? The Liberation harvest would be a good one.

Yes, by God, yes, Paul thought, Champagne had survived another war, for its people were utterly indomitable, with a strength to which he responded so deeply that he found tears filling his eyes as he watched them busily weeding by hand around the delicate stumps of the vines, uncomplainingly completing the next-to-last of the twenty-seven obligatory tasks that ensured the harvest. Yesterday they had been liberated, this morning they had buried his mother, whom they had loved all of their lives, but this afternoon, as always, the cultivation of the vines came before all else. They were obstinate, determined, courageous, the only vine tenders in France to have continued to persevere so far north. Without their attachment to the land called Champagne, the wine called champagne would have long since ceased to exist, for it can only be produced in a cold climate.

Paul had dinner with Jeanne in the kitchen, and afterwards he spent hours alone, smoking, ruminating, wandering about the château that now, with the death of Anette de Lancel, had become his responsibility.

He had never dreamed that it would be Bruno who would be the strength of the family, Bruno who must have been staunch and valiant indeed to have stepped into the role his grandfather had filled for so long, and to have managed to hold the vineyards, the House of Lancel, and the château on a steady path throughout the difficulties of the past four years. He owed his son a great deal, he realized with rising happiness. How could he have so underestimated the boy? Was it now possible that he and Bruno, at long last, united as father and son, would work together in the great job of rehabilitation of the vineyards which lay ahead?