“Monsieur Chauveau,” he said evenly when Michel answered the door. “I have come to discuss the matter of your treachery.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Michel said, his voice even, but Inès, who had come to the door behind him, could see a flush creeping up his neck. He glanced quickly at her before turning his attention back to Klaebisch.

“You believe I don’t notice what you are doing? What all of you damned Champenois are doing?” Spittle flew from the weinführer’s mouth. “Do you think me a fool?”

“Of course not.”

“But you do not deny falsely labeling inferior bottles bound for Germany.”

The corner of Michel’s lips twitched. “I have made sure to treat the German shipments with all the respect they deserve.”

The men stared at each other.

“Sir,” Inès cut in. “If anything is amiss, it was clearly a mistake. Tell him, Michel!”

Klaebisch tilted his head. “Is this true? You have made a mistake?”

Michel said nothing, and finally the weinführer sighed. “Very well. Perhaps you would like to think about it in prison.”

“No, sir, please!” Inès gasped, but Michel didn’t say a word as the German in uniform put a rough hand on his arm and shoved him toward the doorway.

“It will be all right, Inès,” Michel said over his shoulder as the man hustled him away with Klaebisch following close behind. Inès thought she saw the hint of a smile on Michel’s face for an instant, but then it was gone.

“Please!” Inès called after the weinführer. “He is innocent!”

Klaebisch turned to face her, his face etched with exhaustion. “Madame,” he said, “none of us are innocent anymore.”

In the end, Michel spent just three days in prison in Reims, and he described it afterward as a jolly affair, for the cells were full of winemakers who had been arrested for the same offense.

“Inès,” Michel said on the night he returned to the Maison Chauveau, dark circles under his eyes. “You should have seen it. It made me proud to be Champenois.”

Inès led Michel to the bedroom, and as she slowly unbuttoned his shirt and pulled him toward her, thanking God that he’d made it home safely, she murmured, “But now that you’ve stood your ground, you can go back to making bottles normally, right? You’ve made your point, I think, my darling.”

She leaned in to kiss him, but he pulled away. “Inès, this is only the beginning.”

She stared at him. What had happened to his talk of remaining passive? “But, darling, you’re playing with fire.”

“Yes,” Michel said, his eyes glimmering with something dangerous. “And what was it General de Gaulle said? ‘Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.’ This is our country, my dear, and I will fight for its honor to the end.”

seven

JULY 1941

CéLINE

On the second Thursday in July, Theo and Michel left one morning to attend the annual meeting of the Syndicat Général des Vignerons, the union of winemakers, twenty kilometers south, in épernay. There was word that Maurice Doyard, who represented the region’s growers, had an announcement to make, along with Robert-Jean de Vogüé from Maison Mo?t & Chandon, who represented the champagne houses.

“De Vogüé has some ideas for how to stand up to the Germans without getting ourselves in trouble,” Theo told Céline on his way out the door.

“I hope he’s not advocating anything dangerous,” Céline said.

“I think it is more a matter of figuring out how to deal with Klaebisch as effectively as possible.”

That made Céline feel a bit better, but she knew she wouldn’t relax until Theo and Michel had returned. She kissed Theo goodbye, a perfunctory peck on the lips, and headed for the cellars as the men drove off in Michel’s Citro?n.

Below, Inès was already pulling out barrels from a storage cave and rolling them into the main hall. Since the previous week, inspecting and preparing the barrels for the upcoming harvest had been her main task, an assignment Michel had given her because it kept her busy and took little finesse or skill. Céline hoped that Inès didn’t realize this was her husband’s logic. As the war had dragged on, forcing them together, Céline had begun to feel a bit sorry for Inès, who did seem to be trying to pitch in. Céline couldn’t imagine they would ever truly be friends—Inès was flighty and seemed not to grasp the magnitude of the war at their doorstep—but Céline knew she needed to try harder to be pleasant to the other woman. A sense of lonely desperation seemed to swirl around Inès these days, and at the very least, Céline understood how that felt.

“Where are we?” asked Céline as she approached the storage cave.

Inès wiped her brow; her left cheek was streaked with dirt, her forehead glistening with sweat. “I’m just beginning with these. I’m putting the barrels that need extra attention in the empty cave over there to the left.”

“Good.” Céline tied her hair back and eyed the barrels Inès had already rolled out. “Shall I start with the ones you filled yesterday?” Each day of the inspections, they had to first knock on the barrels to make sure that the echo didn’t sound dull. If it did, the barrel was likely compromised. If the echo pinged instead, as it was supposed to, the barrels were rolled into a cave, where they were washed out and filled with a bit of water. If the water was still there the next day, the barrel was flipped over, to check that the other end was structurally sound, too. It was vital to do this with every barrel, because if any of them had cracked or warped, a great deal of wine could be lost. It was in these vessels that the first fermentation would take place before the wines were moved to bottles to ferment for a second time.