Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine by Maximillian Potter Page A

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 Londoncourtesy 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.”

CHAPTER 4
Edmond’s Hope
    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