The Widow Clicquot (13 page)

Then just when Barbe-Nicole thought the market had reached its nadir came another devastating blow, not just for Barbe-Nicole, but for the entire Champagne region. Napoléon had his heart set on the development of the French wine trade. He commanded ministers of state such as Jean-Antoine Chaptal to encourage the industry with scientific reforms, and he was pushing the development of new sugar sources for winemakers. He had nurtured the career of his favorite winemaker, Jean-Rémy Moët, and had listened when his friend complained about policy—although nothing could persuade Napoléon to lift the crushing trade restrictions that he believed would cripple his European enemies and lead to the greater glory of France. Still, in the midst of conquering much of a continent, he had found time for rest and relaxation in the heart of the Champagne, and the superiority of French wine was the source of pride and satisfaction to this self-made emperor. He wanted the winemakers of the Champagne to succeed in particular, and there was no secret about it.

So when the French invaded Russia that June, the czar issued an immediate decree banning the importation of French wines in bottles. Everyone knew that the target was champagne. It alone could not be transported in barrels; if it was, all the fizz would disappear. It was a small yet calculated and personal retaliation. Napoléon had championed the champagne industry. Russia would destroy it. In Reims, a good deal of the resentment was directed at Napoléon himself. In exasperation, Louis declared the emperor “an infernal genie who has tormented and ruined the world for five or six years.”

The borders to the east were now firmly closed, and after a long night spent scouring the account books, filled with mounting despair, Barbe-Nicole knew she had no choice about what she would have to do next. Grim-faced and sorrowful, she broke the news to her salesmen, men who had faced all the discomforts and dangers of the road far from home and, against formidable odds, had brought back a handful of sales even in that dark year. She had no job for them. Only Louis would stay on, and the company of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin faced an uncertain and unhappy future. As Louis put it that year, “The Good Lord is a joker: eat and you will die, do not eat and you will die, and so patience and perseverance.”

By the middle of September, the French army had captured Moscow, but it was not much of a victory. Unable to defeat Napoléon, the czar and his allies had retreated to Saint Petersburg, burning everything in their wake—Moscow included. The streets of the city were deserted. “All the houses of the nobility,” wrote a British witness, “all the ware-houses of the merchants, all the shops…were fired; and…the conflagration raged and rendered Moscow one flaming pile.”

Even Napoléon’s brother Jérôme saw the handwriting on the wall. Jérôme also had a soft spot for Jean-Rémy Moët and his sparkling wine, and he stopped in Épernay on his way to Rome, apparently keen to pick up a few bottles for the road. After ordering six thousand bottles of champagne, all of the
premier cru,
Jérôme lamented that it was so little. “If circumstances were less sad,” he told Jean-Rémy, “I would take double; but I believe the Russians won’t let me drink it.” When Jean-Rémy asked what he meant about the Russians, Jérôme shared with their old friend a state secret. He predicted that the war with Russia would prove a great misfortune.

Jérôme’s prediction was accurate. When Napoléon began marching his troops back to France in the final months of the year, it was a disaster. More than half a million men had been sent to fight in Russia, but only thirty thousand or so made it home. Many died of disease, malnourishment, and the freezing winter temperatures that had made Louis so anxious to avoid a fate in the prison camps of Siberia only a few years before. This meant in 1813 another round of forced recruitments, more taxes, more requisitions.

With Napoléon leading the war abroad, Empress Marie Louise was left to govern France, and when a delegation was sent to offer her the money needed to raise more troops, Nicolas Ponsardin was among them. The reward for his loyalty would be the noble title that he had dreamed of in those long forgotten days before the Revolution. He was awarded that year the honorific of
chevalier,
or knight, and wore proudly the star of the French Legion of Honor. With the help of men like Nicolas, Napoléon had raised another army of half a million war-weary men by midsummer. By October, most of them had been killed in the Battle of Leipzig. This time, the Russians were coming after them. Napoléon crossed the Rhine, within a few days’ march of Reims, with a mere sixty thousand men and prepared to defend the nation.

That autumn, looking eastward, her vineyards now harvested and bare, Barbe-Nicole knew that desperate times were on the horizon. Disaster and destruction were coming. By the end of 1813, the citizens of Reims found that war had come to their doorstep, and Barbe-Nicole’s family was again faced with negotiating a treacherous and frightening political position. Her father, once a revolutionary and republican, had in new times served a new ruler. He had become mayor of the city and a noble baron by imperial decree. If Napoléon fell, there was every chance of Nicolas falling with him. In the aftermath, Barbe-Nicole’s family could lose everything—perhaps even their lives.

O
n the eve of the new year in 1813, Barbe-Nicole certainly had plenty of champagne on hand, but this abundance was part of the reason that she had so little to celebrate.

She was glad to see 1813 fade into history. Sales of her wine had been down again that year—down, as she could not help but recognize, a staggering 80 percent since 1805, the year of François’s untimely death and her decision to take up running the business. Travel across the continent had become hopelessly unprofitable and increasingly dangerous, and the business was floundering. There was no way to put a positive spin on it. She must have wondered whether the financial risk that she had taken and all the years of hard work were worth the emotional strain. The company was failing, and she knew that the businessmen of Reims—perhaps even her father—would say that this was why women should not run trading houses.

When the bells of the great cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims rang in the new year, the bitterness in the winter air matched her mood precisely. For Barbe-Nicole could not have been in high spirits when she considered either the year that was passing or the prospects of what was to come. As everyone in Reims understood, the war was edging closer. Napoléon had once said that the countryside of the Champagne would make a perfect battlefield. In this last desperate year, when he still ruled an empire greater than any since Roman times, he would test that hypothesis.

For Barbe-Nicole, his arrival was particularly unwelcome. Already, one could see evidence of the amassing troops in the countryside. If the conflict dragged on, as it had a way of doing, come spring there would be no regular work in the fields or in the vineyards, a grim prospect for anyone whose hopes and fortunes were invested in a harvest. By January, the distant echo of cannon fire resounded faintly through the cobbled streets of Reims, and shopkeepers sweeping the pavement in the bright air would stop to listen solemnly.

No doubt recollecting her own childhood and the frightening escape from the abbey of Saint-Pierre-les-Dames at the height of the Revolution, she hurriedly fetched Clémentine from her convent school in Paris. Clémentine was now fourteen—only a year or two older than Barbe-Nicole had been when the Revolution began—and Barbe-Nicole remembered watching that earlier political upheaval through the cracks of a shuttered window, in hiding. She knew something of what it meant to live in turbulent times and had no intention of trusting her daughter to the care of strangers or even cousins in the midst of a war.

By the end of January, the echoes of cannon fire and horse hooves were no longer faint, and Barbe-Nicole knew it was only a matter of time before there would be troops of one fashion or another in the streets of Reims, looking for food and supplies and shelter and, she had no doubt, as much wine as they could get their hands on.

If her cellars were looted, she would never be able to recover. It would be the end of her business and of the dream that she and François had shared in those first years of their marriage, when life seemed to hold for her such different possibilities. She was sick with worry over the fate of the wine made in that legendary year of the comet, the 1811 vintage, which tasted like dry honey and was slowly turning a light golden hue in the coolness of her cellars. It was a wine destined for greater things than rough soldiers intent on a night’s oblivion. It was a wine destined to make her famous, and Barbe-Nicole had some inkling of it. So, in advance of the troops, she ordered her workmen to begin sealing the entrance to her cellars. The wine would wait out the war in uninterrupted darkness.

The arrival of the troops was indeed a certainty. Napoléon was engaged in a bloody contest with the allied coalition in the countryside that stretched just beyond Reims, and it was in the wet, cold landscape of his familiar boyhood Champagne that an empire was to slip from his grasp at last. He would not relinquish it readily. The French routed the Russian and Prussian armies in the village of Montmirail, and the defeated troops retreated to Reims. As evening came, the streets of the city were filled with the ominous sound of metal striking stone and horses and the footfalls of fifteen thousand cold and weary men, dreaming of their homes to the east. The occupation had begun.

Listening from her offices, Barbe-Nicole could hear the chaos in the streets and the loud voices ringing out and the occasional chorus of martial song with words she could not understand. She was waiting for the knock that she knew would come, the knock demanding that she release cases upon cases of wine. Whether they would pay for it was another matter. She surely knew by now that three hundred thousand allied soldiers had taken up residence in occupied Épernay and immediately looted Jean-Rémy’s cellars. Before the war was over, he would lose more than half a million bottles of champagne.

In despair, she told her cousin in Paris, Mademoiselle Gard—to the family, simply Jennie—that she anticipated the worst. “Everything is going badly,” Barbe-Nicole lamented. “I have been occupied for many days with walling up my cellars, but I know full well that this will not prevent them from being robbed and pillaged. If so, I am ruined, so it is best to be resigned and work to survive. I would not regret my losses except for my poor child for whom it would have been better if this Misfortune had come five or six years earlier, because then she would never have known any of the pleasures that she will lose, and which will make her miserable. But I will struggle to do without everything, to sacrifice everything, everything, so that she will be less unhappy.” There would be devastating losses for the rest of the family as well. Her brother’s textile factory at Saint-Brice was destroyed by the invading troops, and much of the industry of Reims was crippled.

When the Russians arrived at last, it still surprised her, but even more surprising was that they were gentlemen. The leaders of the Prussian and Cossack armies gave their troops free rein to loot and pillage. The Russians were more restrained, and they were determined to keep administrative control of Reims. There was an ugly bureaucratic tussle when the Russian prince leading the armies, Serge Alexandrovich Wolkonsky, insisted that there would be no looting and no retributive requisitions. To the Prussians, the prince sent word that his orders came directly from the czar. There would be no pillaging of Reims. And “as for your insolent threat of sending troops to Rheims,” he told the Prussian leaders, “I have forces here to receive them.”

For Barbe-Nicole, it was a bittersweet irony. Her cellars would not be looted. They would mostly buy her wine. For years, she had struggled to sell her champagne, and Louis had traveled across half the continent in search of customers in regions as remote as Turkey and Albania. Each time, he had come back disappointed and discouraged. Now, here at her doorstep was an army of men all ready to buy her wine, not the prized 1811 vintage, which she guarded jealously, but the accumulated stock—still fine wines in their own right—that she had been unable to move during the long years of the war. The soldiers, eager to believe the war was almost at an end, drank with enthusiasm. Watching them guzzle her wines, Barbe-Nicole was philosophical. “Today they drink,” she said. “Tomorrow they will pay!”

More ironically still, although Barbe-Nicole would not have known it, the arrival of the Russians would also prove a brilliant marketing opportunity for winemakers throughout the Champagne. Although she had already made a name for herself in imperial Russia, had already captured a significant market share in the days before the economic collapse of the war and the closing of the borders, that recognition had surely faded in the years that had followed. These new men would never forget her sparkling wines. Watching the destruction of his cellars, Jean-Rémy also saw the potential. “All these officers who ruin me today,” he predicted, “will make my fortune tomorrow. All those who drink my wine are salesmen who, on returning to their own country, will make the product” famous. Barbe-Nicole would benefit from these same ambassadors.

The Russians, however, were not the only ones in the winter of 1814 to enjoy the champagne of the Widow Clicquot. In early March, the French army under the leadership of General Corbineau recaptured Reims. Some joked that Barbe-Nicole and the other wine brokers had done their part for the war effort by supplying the allies with strong local wines. When the French entered Reims, “about a dozen prisoners were made, who had been laid under the table by the first and pacific artillery. At the moment of the attack of the French troops, there remained some drinkers but no soldiers. These, dead drunk, had not heard the sound, ‘To horse!’” Of course, the French troops wasted no time in celebrating their victory, either. There is a legend, in fact, that it was during these days that the art of
sabrage
—opening champagne bottles with military sabers—was invented. According to the story, “Madame Clicquot…in order to have her land protected, gave Napoléon’s officers Champagne and glasses. Being on their horses, they couldn’t hold the glass while opening the bottle.” So they lopped off the necks of the bottles with their swords, and
sabrage
was born.

These Russian prisoners of war did not suffer long as captives. The French victory was short-lived. A week later, the French were forced to retreat, and the Russians again occupied the town. Finally, in mid-March, a desperate and furious Napoléon vowed that he would sleep that night in Reims, the city that could make kings. In making this vow, Napoléon was confident that he would be graciously welcomed at the Hôtel Ponsardin, where he and Joséphine had stayed before, the guests of the charming Nicolas, in more promising times.

But Nicolas Ponsardin did not need a comet and the superstitious sensibilities of the peasants, who read in it a chilling portent, to know that Napoléon would not be emperor for long. The coalition was closing in on the French, and defeat seemed inevitable. Still, in the past, Napoléon had succeeded despite insurmountable odds. Who was to say that he might not manage to do so again?

Not for the first time in his eventful life, Nicolas found himself in a delicate and dangerous political position, unwilling to offend Napoléon in the event he was victorious but unprepared to align himself too closely to a man who was not likely to remain in power long. Even worse might be the consequences if the city fell to the emperor’s enemies. It was Napoléon who had made Nicolas mayor, as a mark of his special favor. If the political winds shifted in a new direction, it would now make him the target of retribution. So when it was hinted that he should leave town, Nicolas prepared to do the sensible thing. Hedging his bet, he wrote Napoléon a letter, promising that the city of Reims and those who governed it were his stauch allies, and then he hightailed it out of town, leaving the emperor to take his chances. Well in advance of Napoléon’s arrival, Nicolas called for his carriage, left word with his children, and went out of town on an extended business trip to the remote city of Le Mans. He did not return to Reims until well after the curtain had closed on the final act.

In the small hours of the morning, long before the dawn, Napoléon passed through the triumphal gates of the city, the same gates that once welcomed kings on their way to their coronation. Despite the darkness and the cold, the city was alive with excitement, and great crowds gathered along the route to welcome the emperor with exuberant cries and banners and speeches and all the pomp and circumstance that could be arranged at such short notice and after years of war. It was Barbe-Nicole who greeted the emperor at the door of the Hôtel Ponsardin, which her father had deserted. She assured Napoléon that the family was waiting to welcome him only a short distance away, at the home of her brother, Jean-Baptiste.

What must Napoléon have thought when he learned that the Hôtel Ponsardin was empty? It is hard to imagine that a man as astute as Napoléon failed to understand the lack of confidence the absence implied. Or perhaps it did not much matter. Nicolas had charged his son with meeting his social and political responsibilities, so Napoléon was welcomed as a personal guest of the family into the elegant mansion on rue de Vesle where Jean-Baptiste lived with his wife, Thérèse.

Napoléon stayed with the Ponsardin family for three nights. For Jean-Baptiste and Thérèse these were thrilling days, filled with important visitors and elegant dinners and the excitement of being at the center of world events. They were also stressful days. Entertaining the emperor in the midst of a war he was in the process of losing was a dicey business.

Thérèse was frantic that her hospitality should be graceful and exacting. As was the custom, she herself filled the emperor’s pillows with the softest new down. Jean-Baptiste, meanwhile, must have perceived how politically delicate his father’s absence was. And despite Barbe-Nicole’s disdain for the emperor and for the commercial ruin he had created, she was far too wise to complicate the family’s plight by giving any appearance of disrespect. Only their sister, Clémentine, who was one of Reims’s reigning socialites, perhaps welcomed the honor without misgiving.

As the Ponsardin family entertained Napoléon during those fading days of the French Empire, he surely drank some of Barbe-Nicole’s champagne. Indeed, he must have tasted that divine vintage of 1811. For a guest as powerful as the emperor of France, for a man known for his love of fine champagnes, Barbe-Nicole would have offered nothing less. She would have done it just to prove to him that Jean-Rémy Moët and Memmie Jacquesson were not the only ones who knew how to craft something marvelous.

She is unlikely to have explained to Napoléon the symbolism of the comet insignia branded on the end of each of her corks in that year’s vintage, a comet said by those who worked the vineyards and the fields to prophesy the end of his empire. In the weeks and months that were to come, Napoléon must have remembered those days with the Ponsardins and the champagne of the young Widow Clicquot as the last taste of victory itself, for within three weeks, his meteoric career would be at an end, and Napoléon would find himself stripped of power and sent into a forced exile.