The Champagne Girls

by Tessa Barclay

  ‘Well, no,’ Frederic agreed, tapping ash off his cigar and watching it fall neatly into the ashtray. ‘I never saw myself as a … scientific go-between. But it’s interesting, you know. I have private bets with myself, who’s going to chuck his papers in whose face, things like that. Almost as good as horses!’

  As the months passed, the family poured money into the research. But nothing useful emerged. Trials were made in various parts of the world with new compounds, new systems of spraying and of sterilising the soil ‒ to no avail.

  ‘I try to do what you commanded,’ Robert wrote to his father, ‘but the House of Tramont may be about to die after all, my friend. Since you left, after that disastrous harvest that you saw, we have had yet another, with no grapes worth pressing in the Champagne region. We have sold some very important assets, but so far no land ‒ although Gavin is seriously suggesting we uproot the vines and turn to some other product.’

  ‘Courage!’Jean-Baptiste replied. ‘Research may eventually rescue the wine industry. Here on this side of the Atlantic, scientists have discovered wild vines that are immune to the bite of Phylloxera vastatris!’

  Phylloxera vastatris … Well-named! The insect, by laying waste the roots, caused the leaves to become dry and lifeless.

  Wine production had almost come to a standstill. Not only in the north of France, in the region of the fine sparkling wines, but everywhere ‒ Bordeaux, the Rhône, the sherry regions, the Chianti mountain-range of Tuscany, the hill slopes where Hock was produced ‒ all of them were stricken, halting, productive only now and then as the hated creature came and went at will among the vines.

  Yet, against this sombre background, family life went on. Philip Hopetown-Tramont graduated from the university with honours. Tall, slender, he blinked at the world from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. What was he to do with his talents? He could read Greek, was an expert on the literature of the first century BC and especially the drama …

  But what use was he?

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ his mother soothed. ‘When things are better and we have some funds to spare, you can go to Athens perhaps, and help the research on the Greek theatre.’

  ‘Mama, why did you let me waste all that time! And the fees ‒ you should have brought me home and made me earn my keep!’

  The truth was, Alys and Gavin had talked it over and decided the boy was best-placed in the libraries of the Sorbonne, happy and busy. He had no head for business. He wasn’t like Frederic who, after an initial distaste, had proved a great asset. Philip was the kind of young man who would buy a gold watch costing five francs at a fair and be surprised when the gold wore off. He was the kind who believed everybody’s hard luck story.

  But what, actually, was he going to do? They didn’t have the money to send him abroad to do private archaeology, which had been the original intention. Frederic came to the rescue. Among his many friends and acquaintances there was the owner of an erudite journal; Philip was given a post as assistant editor at a minute salary, his job being to read and approve the contributions concerning the classics. He would have rooms in the Paris house, looked after by the small staff that ran the establishment for Netta and Frederic.

  ‘I know very well it’s a do-nothing job,’ Philip sighed to his sister. ‘I ought to be ashamed of being so useless!’

  ‘Darling Phip, if you feel like that, what about me!’ Netta cried. ‘Now that I’ve had to stop and look around, I find the world’s been going to pieces ‒ and I never even noticed!’

  Netta was in a very emotional state. She had had to cancel her debut as a singer, having discovered she was pregnant with her first child.

  At first she had been delighted. It was time she gave Frederic a son, she felt. But the baby signalled its presence by making her desperately sick, not only in the mornings but off and on throughout the day. Her teacher, Alfonsini, had at once forbidden her to go on with her lessons.

  ‘You know how strenuous it is to use the voice properly,’ he scolded. ‘And now you strain the stomach muscles with this continual sickness. No, no ‒ you must stop, you could do serious damage either to the child or yourself. No more lessons, no more singing, until after the baby is born.’

  ‘Maestro, please!’ She didn’t want to give up now. Her first appearance on the concert platform was only a few weeks away.

  ‘No, it is final. You remain silent, my nightingale, until at least three months after your baby is born.’

  She had to bow to his authority. But what with that, and the changes wrought in her by the baby’s presence, she was liable to dissolve in floods of tears at any moment.

  ‘Netta, you at least were doing something that would please the world,’ Philip said, innocently unaware that his family would have been seriously displeased if Netta had actually sung in public. ‘Whereas I … What use am I, really?’

  ‘Oh, you’re useful just by being you, Phip!’

  It was true. People came to him and told him their personal problems. He never knew how to solve them, but he listened with deep attention, always caring and kind in his responses, always anxious and concerned on behalf of the confidant.

  But he was unaware of this virtue. He saw himself as someone who loved a quiet life, who shirked the major issues. And now that he’d become aware of the financial straits of the House of Tramont, he reproached himself as something of a parasite. ‘I’m nothing like as useful as David is going to be,’ he mourned to his sister. ‘You can tell already ‒ he’s got a business brain, that lad!’

  His uncle Robert’s son was now fifteen, taking his studies at the lycée in his stride. Comically, he had done more. By involving himself in the production of a little booklet on how to do well in exams, he had actually made money ‒ not quite enough to pay his school fees, but enough to allow him to return his allowance with lordly indifference.

  ‘But, my boy,’ his father protested, ‘what happens when all the boys in your school have bought a copy of this masterpiece?’

  David raised dark eyebrows. ‘They already have. I’m now selling it in other schools, through an advertisement in the Youths’ Magazine.’

  Robert stifled a laugh. ‘What do your masters think of all this?’

  ‘We-ell, at first they were bothered, because they somehow thought it was a book telling boys how to cheat. But you know. Papa,’ David said with a puzzled shake of the head, ‘that would be pointless. What’s the use of cheating at exams? You end up not having any proper qualifications and of course you’d get nowhere in life.’

  His father didn’t explain that that wasn’t necessarily true. He had a feeling that Netta’s husband Frederic had passed most of his academic tests by cheating ‒ and yet Frederic was doing relatively well in life, thank you. It was true he’d married for money, and the family was now in the process of losing it at a rapid rate, yet Frederic enjoyed himself.

  ‘Shall you let Gaby have copies of the book to sell among the girls at her school?’ he inquired.

  David looked shocked. ‘Certainly not, Papa! That would be a very unkind thing to do.’

  ‘Really? Explain that to me.’

  ‘Well, it would mean an awful lot of young ladies would leave school with certificates saying they were clever ‒ and you know men don’t like clever women, so how would they find husbands?’

  This time Robert couldn’t prevent the laughter that bubbled up. ‘David, you’re a tonic! When things look black in the business, I know I can always find some antidote in your view on life!’

  David pulled down the fronts of his short school jacket and bowed. ‘Always at your service, sir,’ he said. Then, looking a little less pleased with himself and the world in general, he added, ‘Are things so very bad, Papa?’

  ‘Couldn’t be worse. No one seems able to help the wine industry to save its vines.’

  ‘How about these resistant vines in America? Your old friend at Bracanda Norte was to keep you informed.’

  ‘And has done so. But you understand,
David ‒ we cannot make good wine from these nondescript American grapes. So now the viticulturists are experimenting with grafts. We shall have to graft the Pinot grape on to the root of the wild vine ‒ and then wait and see if the graft takes, and if the grapes we get are true Pinot …’

  ‘How long will the tests take?’

  ‘It’s to be hoped they’ll come to a conclusion one way or the other before our money runs out. But don’t you bother your head about that,’ Robert interrupted himself quickly. ‘Life has always had its ups and downs in the winefields.’

  David recounted the conversation to his sister Gaby as they walked to church next morning for the Easter service. ‘Papa says not to worry about it, but you can see it’s on his mind all the time. Now I understand why I didn’t get the Rover Safety Bicycle he promised me for my birthday.’

  Gaby, exquisitely turned out in a pale pink cotton walking suit and the first straw hat of spring, couldn’t take that altogether seriously. ‘You didn’t get the bicycle because Mama thought you’d kill yourself on it,’ she remarked, opening and closing her parasol a little to discourage a hovering fly.

  ‘No, it’s not that, I’m sure it isn’t. I think there’s a real problem over money.’ He bent to glance under the parasol, to say the next thing very seriously. ‘There may not be enough to give you a coming-out, Gaby.’

  Gaby’s face lit up. ‘Oh, good!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sick of hearing about coming out!’ she cried. ‘Everybody keeps on about it ‒ the hairdresser, the girls at school, even the teachers …! I don’t think so badly of the older girls because it’s going to happen for them in a year or so. But the rest of us! Honestly, David, it’s sickening! All they think of is their White Ball, and who’ll be offering for them in their first season, and whether the styles are going to be in their favour that year. At the moment they’re all in a state because the wasp waist seems to be going out. That’s to say, those that have got slim waists are bothered. The rest of us don’t care.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with your waist, Gaby,’ said David with brotherly frankness. ‘In fact, I think most fellows would say you were quite attractive.’

  Most fellows would have said a lot more than that. Gaby was not very tall ‒ at thirteen she perhaps had a lot of growing to do. But her features were perfection itself, or so it seemed to those who preferred brunettes. She had an oval face, like the subject in an Italian portrait of the seventeenth century. Her brown eyes were enormous, fringed with thick dark lashes. Her lips were of a rather dark red, against which her white teeth would flash when she laughed.

  And Gaby laughed often. Unlike her mother, whom she physically resembled, Gaby soared and darted along the surface of life like a swallow. She wasn’t shy or nervous ‒ she grasped opportunities for enjoyment or excitement when they came, and used them to the full. She was a true Champagne Girl, even though the fortunes of the Champagne Girls didn’t give reason for as much gaiety as formerly.

  Gaby was a great supporter of her Aunt Netta’s ambitions to be a singer. Of the whole family of Tramonts, she was perhaps the only one who took Netta seriously. In fact, there was a warmer relationship between these two than between Gaby and her mother, for Laura Fournier-Tramont was always a little restrictive to her spirited daughter.

  ‘I look forward so much to the day when Gaby will be out in the world,’ Laura would say to Robert. ‘She needs something to expend all that energy on.’

  ‘My dear, that’s at least four years away.’

  ‘Yes, and meanwhile we must just hope she behaves herself better at school and pays attention to her lessons. Luckily, now that Netta is expecting a baby, she’s a better example to the child.’

  Robert smiled and sighed. ‘It will be good, won’t it, when Netta’s baby arrives. I only wish …’

  ‘What, my love?’

  ‘That Aunt Nicci could have lived to see it. A great-grandchild in the Tramont family … How she would have loved that.’

  The coming of Netta’s baby was the main point of interest for them that year, something pleasant to turn to when the business news continued bad. Yet on the day the child, Pierre, was born, another event occurred which was to have an enormous effect on the family.

  Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a total stranger to them, was arrested on a charge of treason. They had never met him, never heard of him. But he was to shatter their lives.

  Chapter 7

  There had been a meeting of scientists at the house in the Avenue d’Iena, to exchange news and ideas so as to have something to think about over the Christmas holiday. The men were struggling into their heavy surtouts, in preparation to face the biting Paris wind, when the front door burst open.

  Philip Hopetown-Tramont surged in, brandishing a copy of L’Union.

  ‘They’ve done it! They’ve found him guilty!’

  He had come in with so much energy that he jostled some of the visitors. They sorted themselves out, staring at him.

  ‘Who?’ Frederic asked. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Dreyfus! You see how they are ‒ they’ve released it only to conservative rags like this! And three lines, that’s all.’

  ‘May I?’ asked Professor Saurcy. He took the crumpled paper from Philip’s hand, smoothed it out, and read aloud while others came to look over his shoulder.

  ‘Captain Alfred Dreyfus, tried in camera on charges of treason to the state, was found guilty yesterday by a unanimous verdict of senior officers trying the case.’

  ‘Oh, that’s bad,’ muttered Saurcy, ‘that’s very bad …’

  ‘What’s the punishment for treason? Is it still the guillotine?’

  ‘My dear fellow, surely we’re not so inhuman as to behead people ‒’

  ‘But what’s he done?’ ventured Leneuf, at a loss. ‘Have we ever heard what he’s supposed to have done?’

  ‘No, and you never will!’ cried Philip, his mild blue eyes flashing behind his rimmed glasses. ‘The whole thing’s been carried out under cover ‒ you can tell it’s a put-up job!’

  ‘Now, now, Phip,’ Frederic soothed. ‘Calm down, calm down. Gentlemen, I believe some of you have hackney carriages waiting.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes of course …’

  With murmurs of ‘Bad business’ and ‘I’m afraid I don’t really know what it’s all about’ the gentlemen took their leave. While they did so, Philip’s father emerged from the sitting room where the informal meeting had been held. He had in his hands the notes he’d gathered up from the various chairs.

  ‘What’s all the uproar about?’ he inquired. ‘Oh ‒ hello, Phip, you’re home early?’

  ‘Come in and calm down,’ Frederic said, ushering them all into the warm sitting room. ‘We don’t want to alarm Netta ‒ she’s upstairs with the baby, it’s his bedtime, you know.’

  Gavin smiled to himself at this aspect of Frederic as a family man. Surprising what a three-month-old son could do to a man …

  But his own fully-grown-up son was in the sitting room, divesting himself of his outdoor coat as if he were having a fight to the death with it. ‘I can’t believe it! Where’s the justice if a thing like this can happen?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Alfred Dreyfus,’ Frederic said by way of explanation. He went to the side-table, where he poured a glass of the wine left over from the refreshments offered to the scientific group. ‘Here, drink this. You look as if you need it ‒ though why you should be in such a state over Alfred Dreyfus, I’m damned if I know!’

  Philip accepted the wine, gulped down a mouthful. ‘You don’t understand, Frederic! Half the journalists in Paris are up in arms about this!’

  The other men exchanged an amused glance. Philip was hardly a journalist. Yet since taking up the post with the Scholarly Chronicle, he had mixed with a different set of people. The reporters on the magazine, those sent to take shorthand notes at intellectual meetings, came from all walks of life and were used to staying in cont
act with men on newspapers and gossip magazines.

  Intense interest had been aroused by the charges brought against Captain Dreyfus. The newspaper world naturally expected to be given some details. But nothing of the sort. A great clamp had come down, like an iron hand. Nothing was released, nothing was even allowed to be hinted at in the press.

  Journalists became annoyed and resentful. They had a right to know what was going on. They expected to learn more at the trial.

  But then came the announcement that the court martial was to be held in secret. Well … perhaps that followed, since Dreyfus had been charged with passing on documents to the German High Command. Presumably national security was involved. But there were always ways of getting to know what went on in a courtroom.

  Not in this case. The trial lasted two days, ending yesterday, December 22nd. The usual privates and sergeants and military clerks, normally very bribable, had refused every inducement. The word among the Paris pressmen was that they seemed scared to death.

  Why the intense secrecy? Why so much anxiety over the trial of a nonentity serving as a fetch-and-carry officer on the general staff?

  There seemed to be two answers to the questions. Either Captain Dreyfus had done something extremely damaging to the safety of the French nation, or he could say something to the detriment of some important officer or minister if the evidence were published.

  Depending on which half of the Paris press you represented, you could choose your view. The conservatives decided that Dreyfus was a traitor of the very worst kind. The radicals were sure the government were involved in some monstrous cover-up. Presumably the verdict would give at least some explanation of what had been going on and, the radicals insisted, if Dreyfus were not acquitted it would be a crime against French justice.

  Philip, always apt to take up lost causes and befriend lame dogs, had been muttering for some time that something bad was being done to Alfred Dreyfus. The whole thing was demonstrably unfair. The censorship over press speculation only showed that the government were afraid to come out in the open with their charges because they knew they were absurd.