Ethel Merman, Mother Teresa...and Me. Tony Cointreau
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was getting late so Richard and I crept into the house, carefully relocked the front door, and tiptoed back into bed before Mother could discover that she had been disobeyed.
I was usually a shy little boy but on my first day at Château Brillant I enjoyed meeting the head gardener, Auguste, who had started working at the château at the age of sixteen. He and his wife, Maria, a plump red-faced woman who ruled the kitchen, had lived and worked on the property for almost fifty years.
In New York I was never allowed into the kitchen but Maria instantly welcomed me into her domain. She chatted with me while she supervised a kitchen staff of four, who cooked for as many as thirty people a day on an immense woodburning stove. The intricacies of the old-fashioned ways were all that she knew.
Maria told me that during the war, the gardeners and servants had all been forced to stay on at Château Brillant to care for the Germans, who had taken over the château. My grandparents had moved into what had been my parents’ home, three kilometers away in Angers. Once a week the Germans allowed them to come and retrieve food from the garden.
During one of our afternoon chats, while Maria prepared seemingly endless vegetables for the evening meal, she gave me a real insight into the heroism of the farmers who had lived and worked on my grandmother’s farms surrounding Château Brillant during the Second World War.
On a beautiful spring day just before the liberation of France, a young American soldier slipped into the area without being caught. The farmers all knew about it and hid him in various places around their farms. The Nazi soldiers suspected his presence in the neighborhood, and gathered up all the families who lived on the farms. Among those courageous folks were, of course, Maria and Auguste. Mothers, fathers, children and grandparents were lined up against the long white wall across the road from the large gates of Château Brillant.
The Germans aimed their guns at the line of people and demanded, “Where is Johnnie?”—the name they used for any American soldier.
No one said a word. I could imagine it must have been difficult for them even to breathe, knowing the ruthlessness and cruelty of the Nazi regime they had lived under since 1940.
These brave and simple people remained silent as the German soldiers cocked their rifles and demanded once again, “Where is Johnnie?”
Just as they were prepared to annihilate whole families, an elderly grandmother dropped to her knees, with tears streaming down her tired cheeks, and pleaded with the soldiers.
“Please, we have no idea where the American might be. Please, don’t kill my babies. Take me, if you must, but we know nothing about the American!”
For some inexplicable reason, the commander called a halt to the execution and allowed the farmers and their families to go back to their homes in peace.
And the Nazis never found “Johnnie.”
On the other hand, shortly after I heard Maria’s heart-wrenching story, I was having tea with my grandmother and a lady friend of hers when the lady began telling us about the hardships that she had endured during the occupation.
“My dear,” she told us, “you won’t believe the horrors we lived through because of the sales Boches! [Dirty Germans!] Can you imagine, I had to eat the skin of the Camembert cheese!”
My grandmother wanted to choke me when I spoke up and said, “It really doesn’t sound nearly as terrifying as some of the other war stories I’ve heard.”
I was asked to leave the room.
When the Americans reached Angers in the summer of 1944, General Patton and his soldiers fought the Germans on our land. Many of the Germans fought from the safety of the château but were soon outnumbered. The next morning when my grandparents entered the gates they were elated to see dozens of American soldiers asleep in the fields next to the house. They approached to greet the men with open arms before they realized that they were all dead. In the château they found General Patton, in what would later be my bedroom, mapping out his next military strategy.
By 1947, the only traces left of the Germans were the bullet holes and, in one of the two living rooms, bloodstains where one of the Germans had been shot in the leg and had bled on the flowered tapestry loveseat. Every summer Maman Geneviève would bring out a bucket of water and soap and try to scrub away the bloodstains, but she refused to ever have the bullet holes in the boiserie and mirrors repaired.
At Château Brillant some of the fears I had experienced in Paris began to disappear. Once we arrived in the country, I knew that my mother would not be going out at night without me. My grandmother’s château would be a self-contained world where we would only visit other members of the family in the surrounding countryside, together.
Although the surroundings were everything a child could dream of, there were two things that less than thrilled me. In the evenings, after dinner, we would sit out back on the terrace and watch flocks of birds overhead. My nocturnal visits with the family outside ended abruptly when I discovered that these were not birds, they were bats. The other fear I developed at that time was when I went to my room one night, looked in the mirror, and saw a huge spider on my neck. From then on, this slightly neurotic child had to search his room with a fine-toothed comb every evening before he would climb in bed. Each article in the room, including paintings, had to be thoroughly inspected, front, side, and back, to be sure that there were no creepy-crawlies in the vicinity.
One night, a bat got into Château Brillant. Maman Geneviève captured it—I don’t know how—and I saw her place it in a glass dome on the mantel over the fireplace in my bedroom. I was both horrified and angry and told her that I would not sleep with that creature in my room, and insisted that she take it away.
In Paris, I had been so concerned with losing my mother that I had given little thought to Maman Geneviève, a strong-willed woman who at an early age had learned to wield her power for her own advantage. She had offered me scant comfort in my moments of fear and panic in Paris, but at Château Brillant, she became a force to be reckoned with.
My grandmother, Geneviève Cointreau, had been born into a small family of newly acquired wealth and privilege. Maman Geneviève and her brothers, Louis and André, were the only heirs of Edouard and Louisa Cointreau, who had built the family liqueur business into a major enterprise.
In the 1890s, Geneviève Cointreau had married Maurice Mercier, a well-known artist who created stained glass windows (some seventy years later, in the cathedral in which her funeral was held, the light on her coffin was filtered through the stained glass windows that he had made). They had two sons, Jean and Jacques (my father).
In 1906, when Jacques was four and his brother Jean was six, their father died, leaving Maman Geneviève alone, with two little boys to bring up.
Jean was determined to be an artist—art was his life—and he had a long and successful career. Watercolors, flowers, children’s books, posters, movie posters, Cointreau posters, stained glass windows for a cathedral in France—he did it all, and worked until he died, at the age of ninety-five.
My father wanted to be a surgeon, but when he graduated from school, he was the only direct descendant of Edouard Cointreau of his generation who was old enough to enter the family business, and so he did.
My father’s uncles, Louis and André Cointreau, who had acted as surrogate fathers, groomed my father for a career in the Cointreau company, and his uncle Louis took him around the world with him as they promoted the liqueur on an international basis. From the beginning André and Louis insisted that it was important for business reasons that Jacques add his mother’s maiden name, Cointreau, to his father’s name, Mercier, thus becoming Jacques Mercier-Cointreau.
It was around this time that Maman Geneviève met Dr. Henri Coullaud, a General in the French Army who was a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur, and had been awarded the Croix de Guerre. He was living on not much more than an army salary when he asked for her