The Widow Clicquot (18 page)

Just as Barbe-Nicole was faced with these new capital costs and with having to decide how fully to invest in the mechanization of her cellars, the other shoe dropped in the financial world. By 1827, France was in the middle of a painful recession. Two years later—when Édouard was still in the process of extricating her from her investments in the Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and Company Bank—it had turned into a full-blown depression. There were massive crop failures across France, causing misery for countless working families. In industrial centers like Lyons and Reims, even the looms were grinding to a halt as the textile industry struggled. Barbe-Nicole had risked too much capital on the Clicquot banking enterprise, and she knew in the back of her mind that there was a dangerous exposure.

Barbe-Nicole went out of town for several weeks that winter, to spend time with Clémentine and Louis at his uncle’s estates in the Vendée. Suddenly, while she was too far away to do anything about it, disaster struck. They had been depositing much of the Clicquot bank’s capital reserves with the large and well-established firm of Poupart de Neuflize, a financial institution with long-standing ties to the French woolen trade. What they didn’t know was that Poupart de Neuflize—like many banks in Europe that winter—was on the edge of failure. As the company went into a credit meltdown, its accounts were frozen, and the investors panicked. Within hours, Édouard was besieged with customers demanding their deposits, and they were in the middle of a run on the Widow Clicquot’s bank. It was certain to destroy Barbe-Nicole financially.

Knowing that Barbe-Nicole and her company were facing ruin, Édouard made a gutsy decision. He would risk his own fortune to save hers. Thanks to his share of the company profits and a prudent marriage, that fortune was now considerable. After gathering up the deeds to his properties, he raced out of town to Paris. It was ninety miles to the capital, hours of travel in his carriage along the dusty roads of post–Napoleonic France, and as he passed through acres of vineyards on his way out of Reims, Édouard must have thought how foolish it was to have played such a high-stakes game with an otherwise uncomplicated future. As the countryside of the Champagne slowly gave way to the lower plains of the Paris basin, his thoughts turned to what he would say when he reached his destination: the offices of an old business associate, Rougemont de Lowenberg, a banker who specialized in offering lines of credit to wine merchants. He needed to persuade this careful financier to give him as much as 2 million francs in cash—the equivalent of $44 million. Louis would need to ride with it back to Reims that night. Otherwise, Barbe-Nicole would be forced into complete liquidation, and the champagne of the Widow Clicquot would be a thing of the past.

Édouard, of course, succeeded. He exuded good sense and self-discipline. The bank loaned the company 1 million francs in cash and opened an immediate line of credit for the second million Édouard would need to save the business. By the time Barbe-Nicole got the message telling her the heart-stopping news, a tired and resolute Édouard was already standing in the open offices of the bank, prepared to pay out the deposits of any client. Now that investors were reassured their money was safe, the run on the bank quietly ended, and Barbe-Nicole—who sustained total losses of almost $5.5 million—was still in business.

Once she learned of her narrow escape, Barbe-Nicole was determined not to be in the banking business for long. It would take more than another decade to extricate her finances fully from this foolhardy venture, but there was now no question about her new company strategy. She would focus on one thing and one thing only: champagne. As she famously announced, they would make only the best. She had risked everything and overextended her resources, and she had nearly lost it all—her palatial home in the Hôtel le Vergeur, the country estate at Oger with its cheerful broad windows overlooking acres of vines. Gone would have been the château at Boursault and the grand lifestyle that she was still bankrolling for Clémentine and the spendthrift Count of Chevigné. Gone the hopes of a grand marriage someday not too distant for the eleven-year-old Marie-Clémentine.

She had weathered the storm, and all thanks to Édouard. Still, the business had sustained a blow to its financial health. Above all, the dissipation of her energies meant that the house of the Widow Clicquot, for the first time since its great triumph over the Russian market in 1814, was falling behind its competitors. In 1821, she had sold an astonishing 280,000 bottles of champagne; now, exactly ten years later, her total sales were down to fewer than 145,000 bottles—far less than Jean-Rémy could boast at any time in the 1820s. If she wanted to recoup her losses and continue at the head of one of the world’s great champagne houses, Barbe-Nicole would have to work to recapture her position. Now, she would have to begin rebuilding the business, once again, in the midst of political turmoil.

The economic crisis of 1829, which nearly brought down the Clicquot bank, was merely a symptom of larger problems, and just as in the years preceding the bloody Revolution of 1789, desperate economic circumstances were leading to anger and action. The weather in July 1830 was hot and dusty, and with the final defeat of Napoléon in 1815, the Bourbon princes once again ruled over France. King Charles X, thinking he would take advantage of the summer vacation that had left much of Paris quiet, announced new repressive reforms, limiting the freedoms of the press, restricting voting rights only to the richest citizens, and—most infuriating of all—barring the affluent middle classes from holding the highest public offices.

The result was middle-class fury. The businessmen and bankers shut down the city. They closed offices and factories, knowing it would bring the staggering economy to a grinding halt, and the journalists responded by blaming it all on the king. Compared with the bloody events of 1789, it was a restrained and pointedly economic protest, but it set off a firestorm. Soon, it was not a middle-class protest at all. Already in Paris, more than half the population was living in squalid poverty. That July, in a city of 755,000, an astonishing 227,000 families had applied for bread cards—vouchers allowing the destitute to purchase food at a small discount. After years of struggling with high unemployment, thousands more workers and day laborers found themselves without jobs, and the result was another revolution.

For three days—known in France still as Les Trois Glorieuses, or the Three Glorious Ones—the streets of Paris were riotous. Arriving in the city, François-René de Chateaubriand described the scene. The boy driving Chateaubriand’s carriage “had already abandoned his jacket with its [royal] fleur-de-lis buttons.” The old tricolor flag of the Revolution was once again fluttering sharply in the breeze, hung from windows and rooftops. “Clouds of white smoke rose here and there among the houses,” Chateaubriand recalled, and “cannon-shot and the sound of muskets blended with the noise of the alarm-bells…. I was watching the ancient Louvre fall.” Within hours, the king, remembering too well the fate of his Bourbon forebearers, was beating a hasty retreat out of the country.

Barbe-Nicole was worried, too—and with good reason. If the working-class battles in the streets of Paris spread to the great commercial centers like Reims, this time there would be no finessing it. Already in nearby Épernay, the vignerons were rioting and the town hall had been sacked. In these eastern provinces of France, the dislike of the Bourbon kings—and their supporters—was especially intense. Her father had thrived during that earlier revolution, still so vivid in her memory, by disguising the family’s royalist allegiances, but Louis de Chevigné’s aristocratic family had not survived. Now Barbe-Nicole knew that they were once again on the brink of a peasant revolt. And her daughter was a countess. Bourgeois roots alone would not be enough to save them. The only safeguard was to declare their support for the protesters, and Louis de Chevigné did his best. The Count of Chevigné—whose mother had danced at the balls of Marie Antoinette—declared himself to be a populist and a liberal.

For a man of his class, it was not an easy decision to make. It was going to be a harder one to live with. At that moment in French political history, it was not a choice between a monarchy and a republic. If it had been, Louis would almost certainly have supported the king. All his family ties bound him to the nobility. Instead, it was a choice in 1830 between two kinds of kings—the autocratic and splendid aristocracy of the ancien régime and its hereditary heirs or a new vision of a modern king, one with bourgeois values.

More simply, for Louis, it was a choice between two parts of the extended family that made up the ruling classes of France, the “legitimist” but repressive Bourbons or the radical—even revolutionary—Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, whom Barbe-Nicole and her family had welcomed into their home less than a decade earlier. Louis-Philippe had led a life right out of a romance, and it was hard not to find this dashing nobleman endearing. During the turbulent years of the Revolution, he was an ardent supporter of reform and liberty, even going so far as to join the radical Jacobins and—shockingly—to vote in support of the execution of Louis XVI. Soon, it was his own neck on the line, however, and at nineteen the young duke fled into an impoverished and dangerous exile. Forced to live in disguise, sometimes passing as a tramp and later finding employment as an underpaid schoolteacher, first in Switzerland and then in America, he traveled the world until Napoléon’s fall from power made it safe for him to return to France—more than twenty years later. Now again at the forefront of the aristocracy and able to regale his hosts with fabulous stories, the duke charmed Barbe-Nicole and her family during his stay, and he had charmed the people of France as well. He had the support of the middle classes, and he was the darling of the working people. Already, some were saying that he should be king.

Knowing that to some of his family it would seem like a betrayal, the Count of Chevigné came out in support of the Orléanist revolution. When the National Guard was revived to fight for the democratic rights of the people, Louis was among them, waving the tricolor flag of an earlier, more radical, generation. But, as he confessed to his old friend Richard Castel, it was complicated. “My feelings are divided,” he wrote, “but I regret more than anything the family ties; [still,] I have found ample reward in the days of July and in the tokens of affection that have been given to me.”

If Louis struggled with his decision, Barbe-Nicole did not. Nicolas Ponsardin was not the only steely pragmatist in the family. In this revolution, as in the last, her family would prosper. In fact, the years to come would be the golden age of the entrepreneurial upper classes in France. Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, would come to be known as the “bourgeois king,” and in the words of one historian, “The reign of Louis-Philippe was a business régime,” whose motto was
Enrichissez-vous
—“Get rich.” Although the working people of France fought this second revolution in the streets, there was a reason the middle classes had started it, and they would be its primary beneficiaries. As king, Louis-Philippe would rule France in relative tranquillity for nearly twenty years, the vast majority of them a new economic boom time, and with a now single-minded vision, Barbe-Nicole would dedicate herself, once again, to rebuilding one of Europe’s business legends.

I
t is lucky that Barbe-Nicole refocused her energies when she did. There was a small window of opportunity, and it was quickly closing. The champagne industry—aided by the support of Louis-Philippe—changed dramatically over the course of the next few decades. Most of the world’s famous champagne houses today established themselves as fierce competitors with a global reach during the middle years of the nineteenth century. As early as the summer of 1831, when the vines were ripening in the fields and the cellars were quiet, the new king made his first visit to the Champagne wine country, and soon there would be many more. In his passion for sparkling wine, Louis-Philippe would rival Napoléon. Champagne had always been the drink of kings. Sensing new growth in the industry, Barbe-Nicole decided to take on another business partner. To restore the fortunes of her company, she would need help. For a second time, she would cut Louis and Clémentine out of the world of commerce and industry. For an investment of 100,000 livres—a mere $2 million—she gave Édouard Werlé a 50 percent share in the champagne business. Like the financial marriage it was, the company from that moment forward added his name to that of the Widow Clicquot.

With Édouard now a full partner in the champagne business that Barbe-Nicole had already turned into a household name in much of the world, Louis, the Count of Chevigné, was out of luck. Édouard had encouraged her to turn off the tap when the textile investments were draining her resources, and he offered her the same advice for dealing with her charming son-in-law. But Barbe-Nicole could refuse Louis nothing, and there were constant requests. He wanted to remodel the vast gardens at the château in Villiers-en-Prayères. He needed more cash to support his aristocratic lifestyle. And, of course, he was always looking to pay his gambling debts, a point of honor among gentlemen. Before long, Édouard took up the habit of dealing with Louis’s most exorbitant demands.

Her hard work had created a world of privilege and ease for the Count and Countess of Chevigné. While Barbe-Nicole, now in her fifties, was still putting in fourteen-hour days from dawn to dark, trying to assure a strong company footing after the banking catastrophe, Louis and Clémentine were free to dance until dawn and sleep until noon. They lived the charmed life of rich aristocrats in the dazzling age of industrialism.

Still, it must have stung a bit to be so abruptly and determinedly cut out of the business. In making her partnership with Édouard, Barbe-Nicole had effectively given away half of an immensely lucrative family business to a man who had started out in her offices as a handsome and clever clerk. There were some people who still remembered the rumors about what was at the root of his meteoric rise, and perhaps there was some emotional element to the decision as well. Certainly, as a simple matter of numbers, if Barbe-Nicole wanted to cash out and retire, she could have sold the business for far more than Édouard’s modest investment. But Barbe-Nicole knew that Édouard had been more than just a loyal employee over the course of the past decade. In him, she had found a fellow entrepreneur on whom she could rely unhesitatingly. She also did not forget that he had saved her. Without his intervention in those precarious first hours of the bank run, there wouldn’t have been much of a company to consider passing on. Having come so close to losing everything, Barbe-Nicole had found her second wind as an entrepreneur, and she had also found a new partner. She was filled with ambition and competitive drive, and she was going to lead the way in shaping the business models of the nineteenth century as well.

Always alert to the changing commercial climate, Barbe-Nicole was once again ahead of emerging trends. It was part of what made her a legend. In the years to come, the manufacturing model of business would require thinking like a corporation and not like a family unit, and with it came what historians call “the managerial revolution”—the rise of the salaried businessmen and company executives we know today. Ironically, it was this new model of the professional managerial class that, more than anything else, signaled the end of the traditional opportunities for untrained bourgeois women in family businesses. Barbe-Nicole was making the savviest decisions she could to stay competitive in a changing marketplace, and she needed someone willing to put in the same crushing hours that she demanded of herself. That would never be the style of the handsome count. Bringing Édouard into the business, first as a professional director with a share of the profits and later as a full-fledged executive partner, was one step on the way to turning the wine company of the Widow Clicquot into a legacy company. She was smart to do it. The cold facts are that “by the mid-1840s, [even] personally managed enterprises…had become specialized, usually handling a single function and a single product.” The economics of industrialization demanded it, and soon it demanded full-time management staff as well. These would be professional men able to lead large companies. Ironically, however, Barbe-Nicole was helping to establish a trend that would close the door on other talented and untested young women looking for a chance to enter the business world.

During the next decade,
Barbe-Nicole dedicated herself to rebuilding her champagne empire. She had almost let it slip from her grasp, and now she was determined to secure its future. It was a critical moment in the history of the company. Had she fallen behind at this juncture, the wines of the Widow Clicquot might easily have shared the same fate as those of the Widow Binet, who was once listed by the city of Reims as a leading champagne maker. Nothing of the Widow Binet’s story—or of her business—remains. In the late 1830s, the commercial world was changing rapidly. Success meant walking a fine line between craft and industrialization. Already, the first railroad tracks were being laid in France, and improvements were under way in the Champagne to modernize the canal system that linked the province to the capital. Soon, the steam locomotive would change the business climate and landscape of Europe. The first train wouldn’t reach Reims for more than another decade, and for now Barbe-Nicole and Édouard had to rely on the old-fashioned means of transportation: wagons and barges carrying her delicate wines to seaports and Paris. But the coming railroads already meant the growth of mass markets—and the need to advertise in them. The result in the years to come would be the rise of the champagne label. Until then, Édouard would take to the road, bringing in clients for the company, as Louis Bohne had done before him. He would do it with the same talent. Soon the company sales had doubled.

Barbe-Nicole worked with a furious intensity, and even if she was not like the other grandmothers of her generation, family was always very much on her mind. She thought a great deal about motherhood, especially. Her mother, Jeanne-Clémentine, passed away quietly in 1837, at seventy-seven, leaving Barbe-Nicole and her sister orphaned and no less bereft for being in their adulthood. Barbe-Nicole knew that it was the end of an old way of life, the end of her own bourgeois roots. She had grown up in a world different from the one her daughter now inhabited. And she was glad. In those uncertain days before the occupation of Reims, her greatest worry had been for the luxuries and the life that Clémentine would lose. Now, she still believed that the business—if she could restore it—would be a guarantee of her family’s comfort. Left in the hands of Édouard, it could become a hedge against futurity, a silent source of riches.

In the summer of 1839, those same riches gave rise to new celebrations and more thoughts of family. Her granddaughter, Marie-Clémentine, now twenty-one years old, was married with great ceremony. Listening to the eager preparations all winter, Barbe-Nicole could smile to think how pleased her father, Nicolas, would have been. For Marie was not only the daughter of a count; she was marrying one: the pious and proper Louis Samuel Victorien de Rochechouart de Mortemart, a member of one of the most famous noble families in all of France. In his portraits, he sits ramrod straight, surrounded by the splendor that was his fortunate birthright. He was also a gentle man possessed of an artistic sensibility, with a passion for growing rare and beautiful orchids and a remarkable skill as an amateur artist. After the solemn ceremony in the cathedral, a long train of carriages wound up the hillside to Boursault for a lavish celebration, with case upon case of the Widow’s finest champagnes. As a wedding present, Barbe-Nicole gave the young couple a magnificent gift: the very castle itself.

The sober Count de Mortemart was a sensible match for stout little Marie, who soon gave him a little girl named Pauline, Barbe-Nicole’s first great-grandchild. By 1841, Marie had also given birth to a little boy, unimaginatively named Paul. Eventually, there would be another little girl named Anne, on whom Barbe-Nicole doted. The champagne house of the Widow Clicquot—for that was how it was always known, despite Édouard’s name on the company books—was back on solid footing. It had taken a decade of careful management and hard work, but more than just recovering, the company flourished. It was once again firmly established as one of the region’s—and, therefore, one of the world’s—most important champagne houses. Now, the company profits were making Barbe-Nicole rich all over again. It was clear that the only option was to continue to expand the company and bring in more managerial staff.

It was also clear to Barbe-Nicole that Édouard didn’t need her there every day to do it. She would never be ready to let go entirely of the business she had created, and she wasn’t even remotely prepared to sell out. But in 1841, at sixty-four, the Widow Clicquot retired. It was time. From Épernay came word that her old competitor Jean-Rémy Moët had died, and it was the passing of a generation. Her generation. Jean-Rémy had left the company in the capable hands of his son Victor and his aristocratic son-in-law, Pierre-Gabriel Chandon de Briailles, who famously did business together under the name Moët et Chandon. She knew that before long, she would have to trust the business entirely to Édouard, one way or the other.

Now, she decided not to wait, at least not formally. Still, it wasn’t much of a retirement in the end. Barbe-Nicole was a workaholic and intent on keeping a guiding hand in the business to which she had dedicated her life. Retirement simply meant that she would be able to spend more time at Boursault, and by the 1840s she was spending only the winter months in Reims. She might have felt old at sixty-four, but if Louis de Chevigné had been thinking he would come into his inheritance anytime soon, he was sadly mistaken. Contrary to all expectations and at a time when the average woman in France lived fewer than forty-five years, Barbe-Nicole still had a long life ahead of her. The champagne company she had transformed from a small family business into one of the world’s great commercial empires would still be at the center of it. Years later, the traveler Robert Tomes remembered “Madame Clicquot [as] a dwarfish, withered old woman of eighty-nine years, whose whole soul was in business, scanning over each day to her last the ledger of the commercial house to which she had given her name.”

Even so, Barbe-Nicole did now agree to let Édouard take over as director of the company, and she approved bringing two new partners into the business. Monsieur Dejonge became the early equivalent of company chief financial officer and was the CFO responsible for the increasingly complex account books. Then, with Édouard’s own promotion to what we would now think of as CEO, there was an opening for a new cellar master, in charge of overseeing the winemaking operations. That job—and the new partnership—went to Monsieur de Sachs. Surrounded by all these counts and barons and eager to be treated with the same grand dignity, the new cellar master soon remembered a noble ancestor in Germany of his own. As one visitor to Reims put it: “He is also a German, and a nephew, it is believed, of [Édouard] Werler. Although boasting a German title, he was not better provided for in his youth than his poor and adventurous uncle.”

In this company organization, Barbe-Nicole was a one-woman board of directors. Internationally, she had already become an icon—although too often it was an icon without a face. She was quickly becoming purely a name in the eyes of the world, even if it was a famous and elegant one. By 1842, it wasn’t simply that the word
Clicquot
had become synonymous with champagne. A “bottle of the Widow” was beginning to take on a larger cultural role. The Clicquot champagne was already appearing in some of the century’s greatest works of literature. But with her retirement, Barbe-Nicole the woman was disappearing from public view. While her partners dedicated themselves to the continued expansion of her company, which soon had sales figures topping four hundred thousand bottles of champagne a year, Barbe-Nicole tried to enjoy the role of grandmama. “Here I have my grandchildren and great-grandchildren around me,” she wrote to her cousin that year. “It is a reminder to me that I am not young and will be thinking about packing up soon and saying good-bye, which I shall do as late as possible.” She was as good as her word on that score.

However much she tried to fit into the nineteenth-century model of the domestic grandmother, however, Barbe-Nicole could never manage it. After a lifetime of twelve-hour workdays, she needed more than lively children to occupy her mind. Louis de Chevigné had thrown himself into garden designs and writing bad poetry. Barbe-Nicole resumed her passion for buying—and decorating—houses. With the revitalized champagne firm of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and Werlé now bringing in annual sales of more than $30 million a year, money was no object. And to save the Count and Countess of Mortemart the humiliation of just a small country château, she offered to build the family an immense new one.

Now firmly ensconced among the noble families of France, the Chevigné and Mortemart families ran in the most splendid circles, and Barbe-Nicole enjoyed the festive and elaborate family parties that Louis, in particular, relished arranging. On the feast of her namesake, Saint Barbara, in early December each year, there were lavish birthday celebrations that he arranged to please her, and he would improvise flattering poems to amuse her and her noble admirers. Like her father and, more recently, like Édouard Werlé, she was taken with all the trappings of aristocracy. “I am making preparations,” Barbe-Nicole wrote, “for my removal to the country and M[onsieur] de Mortemart…is coming down with one of his friends and his brother-in-law, the Marquis d’Avaray. Since my old château is so small, I cannot receive too many visitors at a time, but we are building a new one which will be able to house up to twenty guests and as many servants, which should save me much embarrassment and allow me to put up many more people without giving up my own bed.”