South of Reims by 4 kilometers lies a small village called Verzenay. Its permanent population is under 500, yet it is famed across the Reims region for its wealth, for Verzenay sits upon Montagne de Reims, renowned for its grands crus. So-called “Montagne de Reims” is, in truth, a swath of hills stretching southwest of the city toward the valley of the Marne. Though its highest point barely reaches 300 meters, the topsoil here contains more clay than the C?te des Blancs, making it better suited to Pinot Noir—exactly the grand-cru fruit required for top-tier Champagne.

  The estate of Comte de Saizia stands in Verzenay; the Comte family owns here over one hundred hectares of vineyards and several wineries. According to Second Lieutenant Penduvas, Comte de Saizia has been eyeing the thousands of hectares of vineyards formerly held by the Church on and around Montagne de Reims.

  A few weeks ago, Comte de Saizia tried to purchase those properties through Mayor Basile, but the Church Asset Management Committee—run by Ouvrard—rejected the attempt. It was not that Ouvrard refused to sell; rather, the Comte’s offer was too low. Paying in depreciated assignats is one thing—they are legal tender—but expecting to acquire vineyards worth ten to twenty times more for a handful of livres was out of the question. True, in Bordeaux and Provence Ouvrard once delighted in buying low and selling high at the Republic’s expense—but times have changed.

  Today, Ouvrard is not merely the prosecutor’s financial surrogate. He runs the Reims branch of the Union Commercial Bank and, concurrently, serves as an administrator in the Reims City Hall, with direct control of the Church Asset Management Committee. In short, second only to one man, and holding real power.

  What Paris wants is hard silver—solid livres—not “gratitude.” As the prosecutor’s treasurer, Ouvrard understands he must squeeze more livres from Church inheritances to keep his employer in the good graces of the National Constituent Assembly and, especially, their allies.

  Accordingly, Ouvrard flatly refused the Comte’s private bribe and ignored his veiled threats. Bottom line: only a proper cash price would close any sale of those dozens of hectares on Montagne de Reims.

  “You’re saying Comte de Saizia tried to bribe you and, failing that, threatened you?” the prosecutor cut in from the swaying carriage as he listened to Ouvrard’s report.

  “Words, nothing more,” Ouvrard replied coolly. Business is business; he was disinclined to magnify the incident. At times, the employer’s methods feel shameless and extreme—hard for a merchant to stomach—though facts keep proving him right.

  “What’s your read?” The prosecutor turned to Second Lieutenant Penduvas. He had no wish for tonight’s party to become a Reims-style banquet of deceit and ambush.

  “From what I have,” Penduvas said, “Comte de Saizia shows no firm links to radical or conservative groupings, nor any abnormal moves. However, his younger son, Conot, did try to organize an anti-government march at Reims University—Barreau, a judge, shut it down. Also…”

  Here, the intelligence officer glanced at Ouvrard before continuing:

  “Also, Conot threatened Monsieur Ouvrard personally—he believes Mayor Basile’s younger daughter, Louise, has an improper attachment to Monsieur Ouvrard.”

  The prosecutor could only smile thinly. Another man with a taste for other men’s fiancées. He himself was no saint; Berthier and Hoche were similar; even the up-and-coming banker Ouvrard was poaching someone else’s bride.

  “Shall we have Captain Chassé’s gendarmes patrol the area as a precaution?” Penduvas proposed.

  The prosecutor nodded without hesitation.

  A minute later, he signed Penduvas’s freshly drafted order and sealed it. The intelligence officer lowered the carriage window and handed the folded dispatch to a waiting guard to rush back to the Reims Gendarmerie.

  “Isn’t this making a mountain out of a molehill?” Ouvrard murmured from his corner of the coach.

  “It’s necessary,” Penduvas answered before the prosecutor spoke. “Anyone who means you harm is, by extension, a threat to the prosecutor himself. You represent him with every word and act.”

  There was more he did not say aloud to Ouvrard. He had already briefed the prosecutor: certain monastery clerics resentful of the Deputy Chief Prosecutor were, under outside instigation, plotting an attempt on Colonel Franck.

  “When we arrive at the Comte’s,” the prosecutor told Second Lieutenant Penduvas, “you stay with Ouvrard. My personal security falls to Second Lieutenant Dumas outside. And issue a pocket pistol to my new aide.”

  Entering the Comte’s grounds, the four-wheeled coach of the Deputy Chief Prosecutor rumbled dully over flagstones padded with fresh snow. After a long, quiet avenue of trees, the carriage circled the great fountain in the forecourt and came to a steady halt. Night had fallen.

  Stepping down, the prosecutor noted dozens of carriages of varied design drawn up to the right of the fountain—surely more than a hundred guests.

  “Roughly two hundred,” Penduvas whispered after slipping back with a tip-bought list. “The city’s notables and beaux mondes. Besides you, the guest of honor appears to be a bishop passing through Reims on his way to the Austrian Netherlands.”

  “Another émigré,” the prosecutor said with a faint smile. Since the Decree on the Clerical Oath, senior clergy had been fleeing toward the frontiers in droves; many had even gone to Rome to beg the Pope and the Curia to intervene against France’s ‘persecution’ of churchmen.

  He beckoned the towering Second Lieutenant Dumas, who had been about to follow the coachman to the servants’ quarters. “You’re the deputy chief prosecutor’s aide. Don’t stray.”

  The Black officer looked embarrassed. “I’ve a small score with the Comte’s family.”

  “I know,” the prosecutor said, clapping his shoulder. “The Comte’s son mouthed off at you; you knocked out two of his teeth; Colonel Brice expelled you from Reims. If the fool tries it again, you have my leave to put him down—hard. Understood?”

  “Understood!” Dumas grinned from ear to ear. Serving a swaggering chief didn’t seem so bad.

  Once it was clear the Comte bore ill will toward the prosecutor and his men, courtesy was no longer required. The peaceful entry into Reims had been too tranquil; perhaps people had forgotten the enforcer’s reputation. Time, then, to kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  A master of ceremonies in fine livery hurried up to welcome the Deputy Chief Prosecutor—but Ouvrard held him back until the last orders to the two officers were given. Only then did the man deliver his patter and lead the party inside.

  In the antechamber, the prosecutor and Ouvrard shed their black cloaks. The two officers consented to hand their pistols to a footman but kept their sabers and the tiny pistols hidden under their waistcoats. An usher guided them up a bright stair into a gilded ballroom—music, flowers, Champagne, dancing, laughter, fine pastries, dignitaries, and all the handsome faces of Reims in one tableau.

  At the doorway, the usher drew breath to proclaim their names, but the prosecutor stopped him: Boccherini’s minuet was underway, one of his few musical indulgences—the swaying grace and poised figure of that Italian tune took him back to his first and only concert with his parents. On cue, Second Lieutenant Dumas lifted the usher by the back and deposited him in a corner; soft-hearted Ouvrard tossed the man a louis d’or and a hush-gesture by way of apology.

  The ballroom blazed with light. White candles burned rose-yellow in the tiers of crystal chandeliers, their reflections raining down from the ceiling. On the dais to the left, the musicians played with feeling—flute’s quick tremolo, horn’s mellow call, violin’s clear singing tone—sending the melody floating over the floor.

  In the center, lines of ladies and gentlemen danced with courtly poise. To a minuet from Versailles, every step, gesture, and figure followed strict form: ladies to show composure and high breeding; gentlemen, a cavalier’s grace.

  The prosecutor had little patience for such prinked-up courtliness and was not shy about saying so. He preferred the unbuttoned joy of the waltz—looser limbs, freer time—but Reims’s conservative nobles abhorred that “licentious” German import, all close bodies and entwined arms, fit only, they sniffed, for libertine Paris and Marseilles.

  Along the sides, guests clustered—clinking glasses, chatting, jostling for a view, or hurrying to find friends—so the aisles grew tight, women’s skirts and hats brushing men’s black coats and tails.

  No sooner had the prosecutor descended than the host, Comte de Saizia—an urbane city noble in his fifties with keen eyes—came forward, his law-student son Conot at his side. A footman followed with a tray of tall flutes.

  “Welcome, Monsieur le Vice-Procureur,” the Comte said, offering a glass.

  They drank together, exchanging air-light pleasantries—weather, Champagne, the harvest—studiously avoiding Church, assets, and Paris. The Comte invited the deputy chief prosecutor to speak privately, but he had already noticed his son’s rudeness: Conot glared at the prosecutor’s two attendants—the man courting his beautiful fiancée (Ouvrard), and the Black soldier who had knocked out his teeth, now promoted to Second Lieutenant.

  Sensing danger, the Comte excused himself and hauled Conot to a side parlor. “Are you mad,” he hissed, “to lose your composure in public?”

  He cut off the boy’s protest with a low warning. “I know your grudges. But those men serve André Franck, the true master of this city. Unless you want our family to share Bishop de Talleyrand’s misfortune, you will forget the past.”

  When the son slunk away, the Comte sighed. A door to the study opened; a bishop in black with a purple mozzetta slipped in.

  “He’s here?” the bishop whispered.

  The Comte nodded, shut the door that faced the ballroom, and muffled the music.

  “When do you strike?” the bishop pressed.

  “Not tonight,” the Comte snapped. “If you think I’ve done too little, go do it yourself—kill the blasphemer with your own hands.”

  Rebuked, the bishop turned back into the study and vanished as if he had never been there. The Comte sagged onto a sofa, chest heaving like a drowning man snatching one last breath.

  Back in the hall, the prosecutor leaned against a velvet damask and chatted with Mayor Basile—while the mayor’s daughter, Louise, cast moon-eyed looks past him at the handsome Ouvrard. Petite, fair-skinned, in a crimson silk gown with a Grecian coiffure—an archetypal girl-next-door’s finery.

  From the mayor, the prosecutor learned that Prosecutor Hubert had slipped away to Paris.

  “Word came at noon,” Basile explained in haste. “An uncle in Paris died last night, and Hubert is the only kin in France to manage the funeral.”

  The prosecutor nodded, noncommittal. Whether the excuse was true would be tested soon enough; his instincts said there was more to it.

  To be fair, he had been generous with the three Reims notables who had switched sides. Aside from quarantining Colonel Brice—the National Guard commander—for a time, he had not gutted the powers of Mayor Basile or Prosecutor Hubert, nor meddled openly with Reims City Hall or the district prosecutor’s office. He had even argued, over Chief Provincial Prosecutor Thuriot’s objections at the Marne Commune, to absolve all three of past offenses.

  The return expected was discipline—no shadow games. Brice and Basile were tolerable; Hubert, less so. Intelligence had flagged a campus speech in which Hubert hinted that the Deputy Chief Prosecutor was fashioning Reims into his own “kingly city.”

  It was true enough: he was building a dictatorship in Reims. Had Hubert accused him to his face, he would neither deny it nor lose his temper. But tossing such lines to impressionable students? That nettled him.

  So he ordered City Hall—through Ouvrard—and the Church Asset Management Committee to strip Hubert of half the Church-asset allotment due to him as a local official. Judge Barreau publicly scolded Hubert for indecorous speech at Reims University and forced a written apology to the faculty and students.

  He would have left it there, but Hubert bolted to Paris. If it was flight, so be it—no need to hound him. If, however, Hubert joined a plot against him, then Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, even Saint Petersburg would not be far enough.

  “Send word to Prosecutor Hubert,” he told Basile quietly, “that he is to return and sign back in within seventy-two hours of the funeral. Otherwise, at next month’s meeting of electors I shall recommend naming a new district prosecutor.”

  After the peaceful entry of the Champagne Composite Regiment, the Paris Commune had pressed him to restore elections in Reims. Of the 50,000-plus townsfolk and nearby farmers, fewer than 8,000 “active citizens” (age 25+ and paying five livres of direct tax over twelve months) qualified as voters. From them, at a ratio of 1:200 (often ranging 1:100–1:300), roughly 400 electors were to be chosen.

  In practice, turnout cratered. Reims mustered barely a quarter of its theoretical electors—just over one hundred. That was not bad; elsewhere the figure fell to one-sixth or even one-eighth; Paris, at one point, sank to one-tenth. From these electors came the heads and first deputies of City Hall, the district prosecutor’s office, the police, and the National Guard.

  Before last Christmas, he had already set the Gendarmerie and Intelligence to work. Of 105 electors, over seventy were now loyal to—or quietly aligned with—the prosecutor’s camp, giving him airtight control of Reims, clean in form and hard to fault in law.

  The mayor’s smile turned brittle. Before he could plead again for his friend, the prosecutor was already moving across the floor.

  Wherever he went, people stepped up to pay court or bowed aside. Ladies dipped in curtsy; gentlemen doffed their hats. The prosecutor walked among them like a returning king—fielding greetings from old acquaintances, answering with a nod or a word, never so haughty as to snub.

  From the crowd came Berthe Desmont with his father, and Pierre Flon with his father-in-law; the prosecutor exchanged a few patient sentences with each, then moved on toward his true objective.

  “Look, Alice—does that orphan from the convent truly think himself the uncrowned king of Reims?” a heavyset matron whispered behind her fan.

  “And isn’t he?” Alice smiled, eyes fixed on him. “A word from André Franck and you are either in heaven or in hell. Can’t you see everyone vying for his favor?”

  “Dream on,” the matron snorted. “He wouldn’t glance at you. Your poor bosom’s already drooping. Look—he’s heading to the Marquise de Demo?!”

  Past thirty, the Marquise de Demo? was forever the picture of salon chic in public—today a pale-green splendor that flattered her clear cheek, bowed head, and gleaming hairpins, with a bare shoulder white as satin. She sat on a long bench, chatting with a knot of familiar grandes dames, blissfully unaware of the currents tightening around her.

  Notes:

  beaux mondes: A French term meaning fashionable high society—the city’s elite circles of nobles, wealthy families, and social tastemakers.

  louis d’or: A widely used French gold coin of the ancien régime, often treated as a standard unit of high-value money.

  mozzetta: A short, buttoned shoulder cape worn over the cassock by Catholic clergy, especially bishops and other prelates.