The Widow Clicquot (19 page)

The new mansion was years—and hundreds of thousands of francs—in the making. Paying for the new construction meant that Barbe-Nicole had a free hand to indulge her fancy. She had always been drawn to the Renaissance style in particular. Her home at the Hôtel le Vergeur was built with a classical facade. But this wouldn’t be the impressive house of a rich merchant like her home in Reims. She wanted a palace and with the architect, Jean-Jacques Arveuf-Fransquin, hit on a plan to design a château that would imitate—and rival—the famous castles of the Loire Valley. Built of a warm golden stone and topped with airy towers, it is delicate and ethereal.

In the nineteenth century, an amusing story of its construction was told among the locals. “Not content…with the old-fashioned house at the bottom,” Barbe-Nicole, it was said, “raised an imposing structure at the top of the hill. This…is [as] much like a veritable château, with pepperbox turrets, as the imagination of the aspiring architect, aided by all the wealth of the Clicquots, could make it. Its grandiose spaciousness and luxurious appurtenances make it the wonder of every Parisan
badaud
[sightseer] and rustic visitor. Among its other attractions is a dining room, adorned with elaborate armorial carvings in wood, with which are intertwined the initials of C. and M., of the noble names of Chevigné and Mortemart. On one occasion a party of the neighboring farmers paid a visit to the château…. On reaching the dining room, he pointed, with conscious pride at serving such a distinguished master, to the carved armorial shields surmounted with a double crown, and bearing in gold the initials C. and M.

“‘You see,’ said the
cicerone
[guide]…‘those letters mean
Chevigné-Mortemart
.’

“‘Bah!’ replied one of the knowing country-men…. ‘They mean, I tell you,
Champagne Mousseux
. Wasn’t that the making of their fortune?’” She might be the mother of a countess these days, but the locals never let anyone forget that Barbe-Nicole and her family had entrepreneurial roots. They knew perfectly well that it was champagne that bought all this splendor and not ancient family titles.

More than a century later, one of her ancestors remembered growing up at Boursault: “It was a grand château, all white, clinging to the side of a wooded hillside…in the middle of a vast park with the scents of fresh water, gooseberries, honey, and flowers.” Another visitor described the “dining-room…adorned with modern tapestries and richly sculptured panels…a monumental chimney-piece of Burgundy stone.” Her niece Juliette recalled how the drawing room “opened onto a library placed in a turret,” a testament to Barbe-Nicole’s enduring love of books and their world of chivalric romance.

Today, getting a glimpse of Barbe-Nicole’s château can be done only from a distance, over the height of a stone wall at a point where the enclosed park dips low and the narrow country road that skirts it on the south clings conveniently to the higher hill. Or it means taking one’s chances with the proprietor of the winery now set just inside the gates of the park—a pleasant and handsome man, dressed impeccably in cashmere, who is quite determined to protect the privacy of the current owners. After pleading my obsession late one afternoon, we were finally rewarded with the briefest of visits: ten minutes in the grounds to look at the house and peek in the windows. The château emerges dramatically from the woodland parks that surround the estate. As the eye is drawn along the sweeping pathway to the grand front entrance, a simple Latin inscription that she had added is still visible:
Natis Mater,
Mother to Her Children. She was generous to a fault. But Barbe-Nicole was also a domineering and insistent mother.

Barbe-Nicole had already been playing the matriarch for years, slowly moving her family from the affluent bourgeoisie to the ruling classes. Ironically, it was in part her rejection of the stereotypes of her day that gave her this domestic stature and power. Of course, there were some things she could not control, and it would seem young Marie-Clémentine’s love life was among them. No one knows if it was a thwarted affair of the heart or just a one-sided obsession. But today there is one other way to get a good look at the Château de Boursault. Marie’s lovesick admirer, the great industrialist and railway innovator Adalbert Deganne, whom the family had turned down as a suitor back in 1839 after four years of devoted courtship, built an exact replica of it in the southwest of France, on the beach of the spa town of Arcachon. Deganne’s castle—an extravagant mark of his devotion to the now matronly Marie—is today preserved as one of the town’s splendid casinos. Inside, amid the dizzy whizzing of the slot machines, it is hard to imagine many similarities between this château and the rural hush of Boursault, but from the quiet distance of a café table on a summer’s evening, over a couple of staggeringly expensive cocktails, it is quite enchanting.

Oddly enough, the other thing no one could control was Louis de Chevigné’s spending habits or his sexuality. Still gambling, he was always in debt. Considering he was a rich man, with a mother-in-law who bank-rolled his lifestyle, he must have been reliably unlucky. Louis was undoubtedly still smarting under his mother-in-law’s decision to cut him out of the family economic engine. With his tighter control of the company purse strings, Édouard was also cramping his style. Louis knew he could count on his charm with
chère Mama
up to a point. He was beginning to wonder if perhaps that point hadn’t been reached. The problem was, he seemed always to owe someone money. Not the kinds of debts she was likely to pay—extra costs for the country gardens, something elegant for Clémentine or Marie—but debts for gambling. And there were debts for the other kinds of dubious evening entertainments that a dashing aristocrat could easily find himself drawn into after a few drinks too many.

What was an idle aristocrat to do but turn his passions to account? Apart from gambling, he had three: wearing fancy clothes, writing bad poetry, and acting the playboy. Charles Monselet visited the family at Boursault and recalled that “the Comte de Chevigné…was the very image of the dandy, he had the obvious good-looks of the man of fashion, the plumpness of riches…. His wealth had allowed him to indulge in the pleasures of poetry.” Trimming his expenses with the tailor was unthinkable. But his translations of some classical Latin poems had been politely received, and he knew that his friends found his bawdy verses very witty. Impromptu poetic toasts were one of his social hallmarks, and he had been privately collecting some of his better little compositions. Increasingly, those pleasures were in poetry with a naughty twist. In the first years of his marriage to Clémentine, he had regaled his friends with private details—and they had written to ask for more. Already, he had turned his hand to writing erotic verse, which was meant to be philosophical and rakish.

Sadly, Louis was not much of a poet. But lack of talent never stopped a rich man from publishing. In 1836, Louis had first published some of his erotic poems with a press in Paris, in a volume called
Les contes rémois,
or
The Tales of Reims
. One review sums up his talents quite eloquently: These “imitations of Boccaccio and Lafontaine…have none of the wit and grace, but all the grossness, of those authors.” For Clémentine it was embarrassing. Even if Louis had not put his name on the title page, everyone in her social circle knew the count was the author. He was proud of the accomplishment. The worldly but conservative Barbe-Nicole was not amused, but she must have hoped that this small edition would disappear quietly. It might have, if Louis had not found himself needing cash again.

Just as construction of the new château at Boursault was beginning in 1843, Louis announced a second and larger edition of his tales. In 1858, he would publish a third, with illustrations. These would be only the first of many editions, and it meant embarrassment for the family for years to come. Rather than take Louis to task, Barbe-Nicole soon turned to what she thought would be a simple solution. Every time a new edition was released—and there were dozens in the next twenty years—Barbe-Nicole bought up as much of the print run as she could find. It was a good strategy, but she was not very successful at keeping Louis’s titillating poems out of circulation. Even today, nineteenth-century copies of
Les contes rémois
can be found in antique bookshops without much difficulty and at surprisingly modest prices. Louis may never have suspected that his mother-in-law was behind the excellent sales of each new edition, but publishing the book was still a kind of complex emotional blackmail, and it kept him in ready cash for years to come.

D
uring the first quarter century of Barbe-Nicole’s life, there are scant details that reflect the woman behind the name. In the last quarter of her life, it is very much the same. When she retired and became once again a mother and a grandmother, a woman who built houses and decorated them, who threw lovely parties and enjoyed her family, and who turned to charity and good works, she returned, at least in outward appearances, to the traditional role of the nineteenth-century lady. With this departure from the public sphere of business, her life—as extraordinary and celebrated as it had been—fades back into the shadowy realms of unrecorded history. The name, of course, continued. Everyone still knew the wine of the Widow Clicquot. But there were few who recorded their intimate impressions of the woman.

Still, even the most basic historical facts show that the years after 1850 in the Clicquot-Mortemart household were sad ones. At the beginning of that year, Marie-Clémentine was the mother of three small children. By the end, she had buried her first—ten-year-old Pauline. The family was consumed with the fear of losing the others. Before long, those fears were realized. Just three years later, the little girl’s brother, Paul, fell sick with what the doctors then called a cerebral congestion, possibly a result of the cholera pandemic that swept through Europe in the 1840s and 1850s. The boy—only twelve—suffered horribly for several days, racked with seizures and infection, and his baby sister, Anne, who had been born in 1847, later recorded in her memoirs the details of brother’s death.

“I was already six when my brother Paul fell ill,” she wrote, and “I loved my brother Paul so much that, breaking the rules, I went into his bedroom…and hid behind the furniture.” When the family found the frightened little girl, her heartbroken father had to carry her from the room by force, as she cried and pleaded. “Paul
wants
me to stay,” she begged. She remembered her brother’s last words, telling her to go. The danger of the infection was simply too great, and no one could bear the thought of losing both children. The next morning, she woke to find her parents standing at the end of her bed, weeping silently. They had come to tell her that Paul was dead. And they had undoubtedly come just to be sure that their last child was still breathing. Soon, they had reason to worry even about that. Within days, everyone knew Anne, too, had contracted the illness, and for a time, it looked as though she would not survive. Downstairs in the empty, cavernous sitting rooms, Barbe-Nicole, Louis, and Clémentine kept a sad vigil in a silent house.

Anne recovered from the illness, but her family would never be the same. After the death of Paul, life in the château at Boursault was isolated and lonely. Barbe-Nicole had been determined and resilent in the face of tragedy before, but now there was nothing she could do to assuage her granddaughter’s grief and consuming anxiety. Marie-Clémentine and the Count of Mortemart were terrified that disease or illness would take their last remaining child, and the world beyond the walled gardens of Boursault suddenly seemed like a dangerous place. With a continued outbreak of cholera in 1854, they delayed leaving for their usual visits to more distant country estates. With so many dying everywhere in France of the epidemic, the parties and houseguests were over, and traveling seemed an invitation to disaster. When they did move, it was only farther north and farther into the country, to the family retreat at Villiers-en-Prayères, with its sprawling gardens and even larger rural park. It was a protected existence for a young girl whose fragile life was at the heart of a family’s worst fears.

Anne remembered a solemn childhood, raised “by sad parents and aged grandparents,” without any playmates her own age and, increasingly, in a house full of tensions. The two men, especially, did not get along. The Count of Mortemart was a sober and religious man, and he was bound to clash with Louis de Chevigné, who had always delighted in playing the role of the witty and irreverent libertine. Their politics did not agree, either. Marie-Clémentine, a timid woman in the best of circumstances, collapsed under the pressure into aimless fretting; “My dear mother had such a weak character,” Anne wrote, “that I thought of her more as a child in my charge,” and “life was not always easy.” Her grandmother Clémentine was likewise a shy and nervous woman. Barbe-Nicole, of course, was not. But she still adored Louis de Chevigné, and that cannot have helped ease the family tensions. Too often, “animosity reigned.”

Perhaps this domestic unhappiness is why the portrait made of Barbe-Nicole sometime in the 1850s doesn’t show even the hint of a smile. It is a famous image of the Widow Clicquot, done by the French artist Léon Cogniet and reproduced in the only contemporary biography of her life, Victor Fiévet’s
Madame Veuve Clicquot (
née
Ponsardin), son histoire et celle de sa famille
(1865). It was copied again for English-speaking audiences in Henry Vizetelly’s beautifully illustrated
Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines, Collected During Numerous Visits to the Champagne and Other Viticultural Districts of France…with One Hundred and Twelve Illustrations
(1879). Today, both are exceptionally rare volumes, and additional lithographs of the portrait are nearly as scarce.

Somewhere along the way, as part of my search for the Widow, I paid an unspeakable sum for a large and lovely one, and Barbe-Nicole looks out of it and, I like to think, out of the past. She sits sternly in a large and imposing armchair, and the grim solemnity of those years is captured in the set of her broad, square jaw. The eyes are intelligent but hard, and maybe a little tired, and it is the look of a woman who is not to be trifled with. There is still a fierce sparkle in her eyes, and in the original painting, her auburn hair retains those same reddish highlights that her girlhood citizen papers called an ardent blond, even now without a trace of gray—at least in the artist’s idealized vision of her. She wears the white lace cap of a genteel French widow and a monumental black robe, lined with crimson sleeves, that looks more like the costume of my sober Puritan ancestors than the dress of a woman who gave the world its most glamorous wine. This is what surprises me most.

All her wealth and newfound aristocratic privilege are set to the side, and despite the luxury she sold and the luxury she enjoyed, it is the portrait of a bourgeois woman. She holds on her lap just one object, an open book, and she has been caught midgesture, placing a ribboned marker between its folds. Perhaps, as the dapper man who sold me the lithograph in a little antiquarian bookshop on the Right Bank in Paris likes to believe, it is a book on the craft of winemaking. I rather think that it is one of those epic stories she had always loved, a
Don Quixote
or an early novel by Victor Hugo. Perhaps, if she was feeling serious and scholarly, it is
Histoire des Girondins
(1847) by Alphonse Marie Louise de Lamartine—the bourgeois revolutionary who for a brief time ruled over the republican government that once again wrested control of France and forced the abdication of King Louis-Philippe and the end of his so-called July Monarchy in 1848. For a short while, there was a second republic in France, with Charles Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of the famous conqueror, its president. But by the time this portrait was made, that republic had ended with a palace coup d’état, and Louis-Napoléon now held the title of Emperor Napoléon III.

Ironically, the revolution of 1848 had working women at its center. In the words of one historian, “Working women had emerged as a locus of tension and debate in the preceding years.” Girls were flocking to new low-wage jobs in factories as the Industrial Revolution picked up steam, and popular culture railed against even these advances. “Woman,” one journalist wrote, “was not made to manufacture our products or to occupy our factories. She must devote herself to the education of her children, to the cares of her household.” Not made to occupy our factories? If Barbe-Nicole read the newspapers, she must have wondered wryly what this journalist would think about a woman running one.

Whatever the book in her portrait is, we can be certain that it wasn’t Louis de Chevigné’s
Les contes rémois
. But the painting might easily have also coincided with the publication of a third edition of Louis’s poems in 1858, a stunt hardly calculated to smooth over the domestic conflict with his straitlaced son-in-law. If Louis’s poetic antics were another low point—and another cause of domestic tensions at Boursault—the harvest that year was one of the highlights in a mournful decade: 1858 was one of the rare grand vintages of the nineteenth century and a wine to rival even that “sweetest of assassins,” the champagne made in 1811, during the year of the comet.

Since those long-ago days of her marriage to François, Barbe-Nicole had found pleasure in watching the work of the harvest and looking out over the rolling fields of low vines, rising as a verdant haze in the early morning hours. From Boursault she could watch the harvest from her upstairs windows. There were the sounds of low voices in the distance and the creaking wheels of donkey carts, as small baskets of sugary grapes were hauled through the fields to the
vendangeoir,
or crushing room. She could smell wood and fruit and dry summer grasses. This much was the same as it had always been. In the hills to the east, at Bouzy, there was still the old wooden press, the same broad open oak beams and cool stone floors, and she remembered those autumns when she had learned the secrets of her craft.

Now, it was also different. This was no longer a small business but a vast commercial enterprise. In an increasingly industrial age, champagne was (and remains) a manufacturing contradiction—a handcrafted luxury wine, supplied to the world in mass-market quantities. One of the Clicquot-Werlé crushing rooms now had eight presses, capable of processing a thousand barrels of wine at a harvest. In the sprawling cellars beneath the rue du Temple in Reims, where the cuvée was blended, new mechanical cranes lifted up dozens of barrels from the
caves,
and the wine was perfected in vats large enough to supply the international market with hundreds of thousands of bottles of her famous champagne. Yet every grape was picked carefully by hand. In the Champagne today, it is still a time-honored tradition.

Of course, the wine made from this extraordinary harvest would not be making its way to the export market anytime soon. Vintage wines waited years in Barbe-Nicole’s cellars. There was no question in her mind that they would someday be something delicious. This had been a rare harvest, and throughout the region, wines made during 1858 would be known as “Consular Seal” champagne—a bit of advertising glamour reminiscent of that earlier vintage made in the year of the comet.

What made this new marketing possible were labels. Barbe-Nicole had been one of the first winemakers to use labels on her bottles in 1814, as a bit of reassurance directed at fussy clients. But it was not a sales device she had yet perfected. She had hardly exploited it at all, in fact. Until the 1850s, no one really had. Then, when the railroads arrived at last in Épernay and Reims, the speed and efficiency of this new modern form of transportation changed commercial culture. Suddenly, the market for business was truly international, and even delicate products like champagne could find their way, without clients having ordered them particularly, to store shelves and suppliers around the globe. What those shoppers needed, of course, was advertising to help them make their decisions along the way. Something that would draw them, in greater numbers than ever before, to life’s little luxuries.

The result was an explosion of wine labels. At Clicquot-Werlé headquarters, everyone knew that the best marketing device of all was an obvious one: the Widow’s name. Early labels simply read, “Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, Reims.” Édouard and the other partners wisely traded on the basic fact that already, when it came to champagne, she was
the
Widow. And the Widow
was
champagne. By 1860, her label was as familiar around the world as her name. “Many have doubtless noticed the word
RHEIMS
printed conspicuously on the labels of a bottle of
Clicquot
or
Consular Seal
, or upon any other of the numerous but less noted brands of champagne wine,” one loyal wine lover noted. But it was not yet the yellow label known around the world as the trademark of Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin. That would wait just another few years, for another of the most important changes in the history of this sparkling wine and for the story of champagne’s other great widow.

Barbe-Nicole’s story was slowly drawing to a close: In 1858, she was eighty-one. She had seen her wines take their place as one of the world’s great champagnes, and the business that she had shepherded through the beginnings of the French Industrial Revolution had made her wealthy almost beyond imagining. In just a few decades as her partner, Édouard Werlé had become “the richest man in Rheims, and one of the richest in France, having, it is said, accumulated a fortune of four or five millions of dollars”—the equivalent of between $8 billion and $10 billion in today’s economy. Barbe-Nicole was worth considerably more. At a time when few women commanded powerful commercial empires, she was among the richest in the world.

Always generous to her family, she was also civic-minded. In her last decades, although she never held public office or wielded the sort of influence of the men around her, she was unstinting in her donations to good causes. She gave 80,000 francs—more than $1.6 million in modern figures—to establish a home for poor children, and she intervened to save the ancient Roman triumphal arch in the city of Reims from destruction. As the author Prosper Mérimée reported to a friend, “It is a business of 30 or 40 thousand francs…. Madame Clicquot…is queen of Reims and…has made her highest employee mayor…. If she deigns to say a word the arch is saved.” Most famously, she donated a fountain to the city of Épernay. The public water supply for the city had run unaccountably dry, and on her nearby property in Vauciennes, tucked in the forestland between Boursault and the celebrated champagne city to the east, she owned an important spring. She gave it as a gift to the townspeople, and knowing that her competitors would also use it to rinse their champagne bottles, she joked, “I have aided you in your work and industry. Don’t ever accuse me of being jealous!” The locals responded, with typical dry French wit, by spreading the word that the Widow Clicquot was so generous, she even gave Monsieur Moët a drink. And although it’s pleasant to think that Barbe-Nicole was not just a hard-nosed businesswoman but also a kindhearted lady, the truth is that this generosity also helped establish her as a legend and an institution, the grande dame of the Champagne.