Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (6 page)

Among the masses squeezed into the poorly defined Parisian city limits, wigged noblemen wore splendid collar-band waistcoats and polished, buckled, high-heel shoes; the powdered noblewomen were tightly corseted inside brightly colored hooped skirts of the finest imported fabrics, and many of them wore their hair styled in a towerlike fashion—the gravity-defying pompadour style made popular by the madame above all madames, Madame de Pompadour. Aristocrats promenaded on their way to doing positively nothing at all, doing their best to gracefully pass untouched through the masses.

The
petites gens
—the small people: workers, servants, artisans,
shopkeepers—hurried about, fortunate to have jobs. Pickpockets, whores, and beggars in their tattered clothes, often infested with lice, ill and in some cases deformed by disease, assertively targeted their marks. Many nobles traveled in decorative, phone-booth-like sedans carried by servants or in carriages that rolled through the streets with footmen jumping from the carriage rails to shoo off the glut of commoners to make way.

As the rich and poor rubbed against one another, economic and religious friction sparked tensions that the media had lately fanned into flames. Reading had become more than the fad that French aristocracy thought it would be, or rather hoped it would be. For reading meant education and thought, and thereby enlightened challenges to the status quo. In the cafés and salons literate members of the Third Estate drank the “common” wine made from the Gamay grape, and read the papers and pamphlets and works by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Only a year earlier, in 1754, Rousseau had published his essay “What Is the Origin of Inequality Among Men? And Is It Authorized by Natural Law?” In it Rousseau wrote what those who had no voice longed to have heard:

It wasn’t just economic oppression—and oppression was now the word—it was also religious oppression. It was the Catholic
state’s oppression of Protestants. On his deathbed, Louis XV’s predecessor had reaffirmed that Catholicism was the only religion in France. All subjects must kneel before Christ or else be regarded as traitors, and, as was the case for some Protestant pastors, be put to death. Protestant churches routinely were burned to the ground.

Rendered pariahs, the country’s community of Protestants peppered about the country gathered in open secret to worship and rallied one another in their treasonous conviction that they had a right to worship as they saw fit. Meanwhile, priests steadfastly preached the divine right of kings, now the authority of King Louis XV, who not surprisingly held the view that the Huguenots were a lesser species in need of conversion. Louis XV issued laws reinforcing Catholic hegemony, reiterating that only Catholic births, marriages, and deaths were legitimate—legislative genocide.

The Huguenots were not the only religious group feeling persecuted. Nudged by the church, Louis XV launched a political crusade against a Catholic splinter group. The Jansenists believed that God alone, through his mysterious and divine ways, determined who had grace, and that no man, no clergyman, not even the king himself could determine who was forgiven in the eyes of the Lord. As far as the establishment was concerned this was both religious and political heresy. Louis XV supported his bishops who banned Jansenists from receiving Catholic sacraments.

Protestant and Jansenist leaders appealed to their king and more directly to the magistrates of the French law courts, the
parlements
, and in particular, to the most influential of all the law courts, the Parlement of Paris, for equality, or at least some compromise that would allow them to live free, as
citoyens
.
Parlementary magistrates wanted to provide a degree of what amounted to civil rights to accommodate the religious sects. To ease the tensions, the
procureur général
to the Parlement of Paris, Guillaume-François Joly de Fleury, suggested that the king consider recognizing Protestant marriages as civil unions. The reality denied by the monarchy was that Catholics lived quite nicely among Huguenots and Jansenists. Not only that, the Protestants were integral to the day-to-day French economy.

If the king would not reconsider his views for altruistic purposes or for reasons of economic necessity, the magistrates pointed out, there was the growing fear that the disenfranchised groups would coalesce into an uprising. Bloody riots already flared around the country. Passions were especially volatile in the south of France, where Protestant leaders like Crown-defined enemies of the state Pastor Paul Rabaut and Jean-Louis Gibert preached with rhetoric that was becoming more and more militant. Rabaut was of the mind that “the persecution is becoming stronger from day to day; and for quite a while, we have had so many reasons to cry, Lord, save us, for we are perishing.” Gibert was brazenly defiant. He proclaimed that his flock was prepared to “break the bonds of our captivity and uphold our liberty and that of our religion, even at the cost of our lives.”

Outside the echo chamber of the royal court, the reality had become so intense that in that spring of 1755 the Parlement of Paris refused to ratify Louis XV’s decision to allow the church to ban Jansenists from receiving the sacraments. Taking the position that the king’s policies required the approval of the
parlement
, the magistrates simply packed up and went on strike. In shutting down government business, the magistrates thumbed their noses at the king, also tabled approving his funds, putting a crimp in his debauchery. Louis XV dispatched musketeers to
arrest four of the most vocal opposing magistrates, and he sent two hundred magistrates into exile.

The more steps Louis XV took to centralize his power, the more it fractured. While the French military was at war in several international theaters, by that summer of 1755 he feared a domestic revolt. Louis XV began to hear the protesting voices in his head like a relentless monastic chant, the vibrations of which began to shake his throne and his mental stability.

The king saw traitors where there were none, and trusted aides were there were traitors. As Pompadour’s personal handmaid wrote in her diary, the king had long been “habitually melancholy”; now he began to sense threats from all directions. While some members of the court whispered about paranoia, death was indeed coming for the king. Perhaps at that very moment it was choosing its weapon and path. A plot for assassination was under way.

In his private study, just as he had on matters of foreign affairs, the king turned to the man who had been his friend since they were children; the one person he trusted and respected more than any other; a man who was equally trusted and respected by the
parlement
, by the Protestants and Jansenists, by the French military, and for that matter, by the French people—his cousin, seven years his junior, the Prince de Conti.

During the day, when Conti’s carriage would travel through Paris, pushing through the crowds, his street-level perspective afforded him an intimate view of the volatility of the times. Everyone, everything, it was all right there in the streets of Paris: the people together before him, around him, so tightly mashed together, yet divided. Such that the country maybe could not
stand. The inequity, the resentment, the hate: All of it was seething. He could smell it as plainly as he could smell the raw sewage dumped into the streets. The operative in Louis-François knew that such dissension could be a valuable tool. It could be harnessed; it was a power. He carried these observations with him into the darkness and his secret rendezvous.

The secret meeting had been facilitated by Conti’s aide, Nicolas Monin. Monin had served in the army under Conti and remained by his side when the prince returned to the royal court in the mid-1740s. It was as King Louis XV’s trusted chief of staff that Conti had been empowered to pursue delicate diplomatic missions and persuaded the king to agree that a network of spies was necessary to gather and relay intelligence throughout Europe via codes and other means. Monin had been an integral part of helping Conti build that infrastructure and managing reconnaissance assignments.

Recognizing the extraordinary nature of what was to be discussed that summer evening, Monin arranged for the treasonous appointment to take place down on the waterfront, in an abandoned building on one of the anonymous quays that wind along the banks of the Seine. Inside Conti greeted his visitor, none other than the Protestant pastor and wanted enemy of the state, Paul Rabaut.

It was the second meeting for the two, the first having occurred just a few weeks earlier. There was less of a need for small talk before getting to business. It would have been typically gracious of the prince to thank Rabaut for once again making the long trip from Nîmes to Paris. Rabaut, a man of devout faith and with immense respect for the prince, was always expressing his gratitude to Conti for his continued interest in the Protestant cause.

Because the meeting occurred around the prince’s August birthday, Conti would have had his age and mortality on his mind. Considering the endeavor in which the two of them were engaged, it was reasonable for Conti to wonder if he would live to see his next birthday.

Rabaut had contacted Conti months earlier, at first writing to him care of intermediaries, and then, having been assured that the prince sympathized with the Huguenots, to the prince directly. He had asked the prince if he would lobby the king to reconsider his policies regarding the Protestants. The prince had agreed.

The ostensible reason for the secret discussion now was a status report. The prince shared with Rabaut whatever progress he was making in his private sessions with the king. Rabaut briefed the prince on the state of affairs of the Protestants down south. In short, none of it was going very well. King Louis was unwilling to budge in any meaningful way and the Huguenots only grew more restless.

Before long, Conti began ever so softly exploring Rabaut’s interest in an armed uprising. The prince wanted to know just how united Rabaut’s parishioners were. He asked if they had access to arms. They did. He asked if they would they be willing to use them. Rabaut suspected they would. The prince wondered how often Rabaut or any of his colleagues communicated with their Huguenot brethren in England. More specifically, the prince was keenly interested in whether the Protestant leadership had any communication with the British military or government.

Indeed, the Protestants were communicating with England. It was likely that Conti already had some knowledge of this, as he had his own well-established lines of communication to London
courtesy of the Secret du Roi network. The prince also had an idea, which he was now softly floating to his Protestant contacts like Rabaut: a nationwide Protestant uprising triggered by an English invasion on the southwestern coast of France.

Agents involved on both sides of the English Channel had begun to call the plan the “Secret Expedition.”

T
he thing about fate is that you never see it coming.

Of course, you can plan and work toward a goal, but that all-encompassing raison d’être, that’s another story. Whether it turns out that it is all God’s plan, or, as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre put it, that “we are all condemned to be free,” Sartre was right about this much: “existence precedes essence.” It’s only after one has lived and discovered destiny, or maybe surrendered to it, that the obviously significant moments of the inevitable trajectory can be appreciated. But no small boy has such thoughts or ponders his calling.

So on a spring morning in 1947, when he accompanied his grandfather on one of his weekly visits to the family’s Domaine, eight-year-old Aubert de Villaine was merely along for the ride.

Edmond Gaudin de Villaine was scheduled to arrive at the Domaine in the village of Vosne at his usual time of 10 a.m. The drive from Moulins, the village where they lived, typically took two hours, but often they traveled to Vosne the night before. On that day—one of the very few days Aubert would ever make the trip with his
grand-père
—they had arrived a few minutes early.

For Edmond, a former military man, punctuality was a necessary form of respect. He did not want to prematurely disturb Monsieur Louis Clin and the Madame Geneviève Clin, who lived at the Domaine, managed the winery’s day-to-day affairs, and, first and foremost, tended the vines. When little Aubert and Edmond arrived at No. 1 Rue Derrière le Four—tucked in the bend of the cobblestone street, shaped like a boomerang and no wider than an alley—they stood at the winery’s large red iron gates until Edmond’s watch showed precisely the hour. Only then did he press the buzzer.

Madame Clin greeted them. The wife of a retired army officer, she was as fiercely particular as any commanding officer her husband had ever known. Everyone in Vosne knew not to test Madame Clin’s commitment as the Domaine’s sentry. Each day she would walk the vineyards, inspecting the border stones of the Domaine’s holdings, and God help any neighbor she caught “mistakenly” moving any of those stones and encroaching on the Domaine’s sacred soil.

“
Bonjour
,
Madame Clin
,” Edmond said. “
Comment vas-tu?
”

“Bonjour, Monsieur de Villaine. Très bien. Très bien.”

She ran her hands along the front of her skirt, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles.

Although they had known each other for years, Edmond and Madame Clin addressed one another with a warm formality informed by Old World French etiquette and great mutual respect. Edmond valued the Clins’ service and unwavering dedication to the Domaine. As tough as Madame Clin was, she had a wink in her and softened around Edmond. She knew what he had endured and she understood what the Domaine meant to him. It was a legacy that had come to him by way of a great love and loss.

In 1906, Edmond had married Marie-Dominique-Madeleine Chambon, the woman he thought would be the only love of his life. Marie-Dominique was from a family of wealth and prominence, a status derived from her great-grandfather Jacques-Marie Duvault-Blochet.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Duvault-Blochet had ascended to a position of political influence and become a titan of Burgundy’s wine industry. He was elected to the Conseil Général de la Côte d’Or, the department’s governing body, and was regarded as the most influential proprietor of the best vineyards in the region. All 329 of his acres of vines were considered among the top-growth vineyards in the region.

His power and his vineyard holdings were not things he had aristocratically waltzed into. On the contrary, what Duvault-Blochet, a barrel-chested man of integrity and grit, owned he had acquired by being, as one family member wrote, “a nervy old man” unafraid of risk and, for that matter, death.

Family legend has it that Duvault-Blochet once made a business trip to London in the midst of a cholera epidemic. Within a matter of days, he contracted the disease. The manager of his hotel quarantined him in the cellar and summoned a doctor. After examining the patient, the doctor whispered his prognosis to the manager. Thinking that the Frenchman would not understand him, the physician said, “He’s done for—too bad, because he’s got a constitution of iron.” The doctor did not realize that Duvault-Blochet also had acquired a mastery of
anglais
. Irritated by such underestimation of his fortitude, Duvault-Blochet called for a pail of boiling water, a steel brush, and soap. He set about scrubbing himself until he bled, until he was cured.

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, wine prices plummeted. Cellars throughout the Côte d’Or were filled
to capacity, magnificent wines without buyers, and Duvault-Blochet had made a daring gamble. He had put up for credit all he had to his good name for a loan for 10 million francs and he had bought up just about all of the vineyards in the Côte d’Or. His vineyard empire included considerable patches of jewels like Richebourg, Grands Échézeaux, and Échézeaux. It was very informed speculation. In 1854, after three years of record-low wine production, prices soared. Duvault-Blochet was in a position to make the greatest vineyard acquisition of his or anyone’s life.

In November 1869, he purchased the Romanée-Conti vineyard. By then, he was eighty years old and even the iron man had come to accept he was mortal. Although he knew he would not have much time left to enjoy the prestige of Romanée-Conti, he had not been able to resist the opportunity to own it, and passed it along with the rest of his estate to his children and their children. Among them were Marie-Dominique. She did not, however, inherit her great-grandfather’s genetics.

In 1909, Edmond and Marie-Dominique had their first son, Henri, Aubert’s father. He was a healthy baby, a rather plump berry, in fact, and the birth was without any complications. A year later, Marie-Dominique was again with child. She and her unborn contracted diphtheria. The child, Jean, was born and survived thanks to Edmond’s mother, who cared for the baby while Edmond did what he could for Marie-Dominique.

Whenever Edmond wasn’t caring for his gravely ill family, he was tending to the family’s vineyards. When he married into Duvault-Blochet’s legacy, Edmond did not have much in the way of viticulture experience. He did, however, recognize the value of the vineyards Duvault-Blochet had assembled.

In the wake of Duvault-Blochet’s death in 1874, his holdings
had been divvied among the family, some of whom were inclined to sell off the vineyards to the highest bidder—family or not. Edmond could not abide the fractionalization of the family’s holdings. He formed a partnership with his brother-in-law, Jacques Chambon. Together they strategized; they appeased and bought out cousins in order to keep the vineyards united in the family, equally divided between the two of them, under one domaine—a domaine that Edmond named after its crown jewel, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC).

Because Jacques had no desire to manage the day-to-day running of the Domaine, in 1911 Edmond became something of a father for the third time. He took on the role of
gérant
, director, of the family’s vineyards. Edmond did not view the responsibility as a job; it was more of a sacred duty.

To help him manage the DRC, he hired a retired army officer. On paper, Monsieur Clin was an odd choice to be sure. Clin didn’t know much more than Edmond about tending vines. Edmond, however, went on instinct. He liked that Clin had been an organized, disciplined, and committed French army officer. Clin was a man who had done everything in his power to protect the men on his watch. Edmond astutely sensed that Clin would apply the same dedication to the vines. What’s more, Edmond had rightly gotten the impression that in the unlikely event Monsieur Clin would ever slack, Madame Clin would smooth out his wrinkles.

In the summer of 1914, with baby Jean still weak and Marie-Dominique even weaker, the Domaine’s grapes were ripening into what promised to be a spectacular harvest. Balancing all this, Edmond undoubtedly realized, would test him in ways he didn’t imagine. Then something more unexpected occurred and Edmond had to leave it all behind.

The Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife had
been fatally shot on a stone bridge in Sarajevo. The assassination, triggered by long-festering tensions, galvanized alliances in what everyone thought would be “the war to end all wars,” and Edmond went off to defend his country against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. About a year into his deployment, Edmond received notice that his wife had died, at the age of thirty-two.

Edmond had come to accept grieving over fallen soldiers. That was war. But to return home, a thirty-three-year-old widowed father of two motherless sons—that was a hell he had never fathomed. Yet he carried on, very much in a spirit that would have made Monsieur Duvault-Blochet proud, fully dedicated to raising his two sons and safeguarding the Domaine his wife had left him. He couldn’t save her, but he could ensure that the Domaine was protected.

“And how are the
enfants
?” Edmond asked Madame Clin.

Coming along just fine, Monsieur de Villaine, she said. You will see. She spoke like a proud parent. She tussled Aubert’s hair.

Naturally, there was some talk about Edmond and Aubert’s trip from Moulins. Because the Domaine then rarely earned a profit and in fact was a money pit, it was necessary for the de Villaines to continue to work their considerable cattle farm in Moulins, for income to subsidize the winery.

Edmond had a routine when he came to the Domaine: First, he visited the stables. As far as little Aubert was concerned, the horses were the best part of his visits to the Domaine. They reminded him of the American West and the cowboys that so fascinated him. He had thought of cowboys, too, every time
he had seen U.S. soldiers riding out of France after rescuing his country from the Germans.

That spring marked two years since the end of World War II, and the Germans’ surrender to Allied forces among the war-ravaged champagne vineyards in Reims, the largest city on France’s Western Front. Little Aubert admired the spirit and grit of the heroic Americans.

In the Domaine’s stable, the horses that tugged equipment and carts to and from the vineyards were massive, muscular beasts. Yet gentle. Aubert saw the tenderness in their eyes when they bowed their heads toward him for an apple slice, when they nuzzled their snouts against his cheek. Petting them, the boy smelled that aroma of horse and earth.

His grandfather’s favorite was the one called Coquette. Aptly named, she would seem to bat her eyelashes, always flirting for the last piece of fruit, which his grandfather would always nod for little Aubert to go ahead and feed to her. Edmond would shrug as if to say,
What Coquette wants Coquette gets
.

The horse lapped up the fruit, lips and tongue tickling the boy’s palm. Aubert giggled and looked up to Edmond, who delicately placed his hand on the back of his grandson’s neck—his way of communicating to Aubert that it was time to leave the horses, and of showing his grandson how much he loved sharing this place with him.

Next they would go to the Domaine’s small office, heated by a coal furnace, and Edmond and Monsieur Clin would discuss bookkeeping and other pressing matters of the moment. Then it was to the cellar to taste the most recent vintage from the barrel.

Edmond encouraged Aubert to take a taste. The boy took a sip and thought it was so terrible that he dumped his glass onto
the ground. Edmond gave him a gentle slap on the wrist and told him to never throw out a drop of wine; it was too precious.

Then Edmond would walk to the vineyards to inspect the vines. Normally Edmond’s inspection of the vines was perfunctory. But extraordinarily unfortunate events had lately transpired and his grandfather had a special interest in checking on the
enfant
vines.

As Edmond and Aubert walked west on the dirt road from the centuries-old stone hamlet into the vineyards behind the Domaine, Aubert could smell the fragrance of honey sweetness that came with flowering. Behind them, the bells in the pointed steeple of the Église St.-Martin chimed, each gong softly lingering into the next, until there were no more. It was as if Burgundy, after an interminably long winter, one that had seemingly stretched over several seasons, years of war, was at long last awakening to a spring of new beginnings. Now things would be able to grow. No more attacks. No more dying. At least, this was Edmond’s hope.

On either side of the dirt road they walked was the first vineyard they came upon, Romanée-St.-Vivant. They kept walking. Straight ahead, over the brim of the slightly rising road, Aubert could see the top of the white stone cross, and beyond that the hillside of the
côte
, which the holy men in pointed hoods so long ago had dubbed the “Slope of Gold.” It, too, was covered in green. In some of the vineyards the rows were stitched in parallel to the hillside; in other vineyards the rows zippered straight up and down the face of the hill. A patchwork of oddly shaped
climats
of uniform misdirection.