The Widow Clicquot (2 page)

She opened these new horizons for women in business and forced those around her to reconsider the gender stereotypes of her day more or less despite herself. But the public figure of this enterprising widow, who resisted the limited domestic role society demanded of her, is in marked contrast with the private woman. Barbe-Nicole quietly defied the expectations her culture had about what women were and what they were capable of achieving. Meanwhile, at home and in her opinions, she was anything but a revolutionary.

In her personal beliefs, she was a deeply conservative and sometimes rigid woman. Her family remained staunch Catholics, even when the religion was outlawed and dangerous in republican France. She did not advocate for the rights of women, although she lived in the era when feminism was born. Instead, she surrounded herself with men, as employees, partners, and even friends. She was a devoted but frankly domineering mother, whose only child—a daughter—she undervalued intellectually and excluded from the family business, preferring instead to marry her off to an idle and flamboyant aristocratic playboy—one to whose charms Barbe-Nicole herself was dangerously susceptible. And, in the end, she gave away a large part of the family business and most of her vineyards to her male business partners.

She was a mass of contradictions, but her genius as a businesswoman was in refusing to see her options as black and white. Her success was not in bucking the system, but neither did she slavishly follow convention. As the daughter of a local politician with a cunning instinct for survival even in the midst of an ugly revolution, she had a talent for seeing the opportunities that existed in moments of cultural and economic instability, in the space between where the old structures and old ways of doing business (and those who stubbornly stuck to them) disappeared and innovative new approaches took hold. Hers is the portrait of a woman with the courage to step into the breach, emotionally, physically, and financially.

Because of her willingness to take risks without fanfare, the Widow Clicquot became one of the most famous women of her era. Like the other great widow of her day, Great Britain’s queen Victoria, she helped to define a century. For decade after decade, her name was heard on the lips of soldiers, princes, and poets as far away as Russia. Before long, tourists came looking for a glimpse of the woman whom the writer Prosper Mérimée once called the uncrowned queen of Reims. In the Champagne, she was known simply as
la grande dame
—the great lady. Rare Veuve Clicquot vintages are still called “La Grande Dame” in tribute to her fame. She remained a contradiction to the end: a generous philanthropist and a hardheaded business owner; a small, gruff, and decidedly plain woman with a sharp tongue who sold the world an exquisitely beautiful wine and an ethereal fantasy. Then she disappeared, becoming little more than the name on a bottle of bubbly.

Before this complex and sometimes contradictory woman was reduced to a brand name—or in twentieth-century caricatures to nothing more than a dancing bottle with legs—the Widow Clicquot defined the industry to which she was dedicated. At a time of increasing cultural rigidity, she opened the way for a second generation of enterprising women in the champagne business, women who had wit and talent as sharp as her own. Following in her footsteps, the young widow Louise Pommery went on to build one of the world’s great champagne houses, which reached dizzying heights of wealth and promise just as Barbe-Nicole’s own story was coming to an end. In doing so, the Widow Pommery invented the dry brut champagne that wine drinkers still adore today. It was a path Barbe-Nicole had opened for her. Sadly, there would not be a third generation of women with such scope in the champagne business. There would not be other women who transformed small family businesses into astonishing commercial empires. Those who came after—women like Lily Bollinger and Mathilde-Emile Laurent-Perrier—were above all stewards of enterprises first raised to public prominence by an earlier generation. By the first decades of the twentieth century, the wine industry in the region had become a large-scale commercial affair, controlled almost exclusively by men who could already be counted among the rich and the powerful, with few opportunities for untrained and untested fledgling entrepreneurs.

But for nearly a century—the first century of its global transformation into the iconic symbol of luxury and celebration—the champagne business was a woman’s world. At the most critical juncture in the history of this celebrated wine, Barbe-Nicole dominated the industry. The result was a different future for women in the commercial arena. Today, the champagne house she founded gives a prestigious award in her name that celebrates the accomplishments of talented international businesswomen. And because of the Widow Clicquot, historians still claim that “no business in the world [has] been as much influenced by the female sex as that of champagne.”

W
hat people in the Champagne remembered later about the summer of 1789 were the cobbled streets of Reims resounding with the chanting, angry mobs calling for liberty and equality. The French Revolution had begun, although no one would use those words yet to describe one of the most monumental events in the history of modern civilization. Democracy had taken root in the colonies of America only a decade before, and a new nation had emerged, aided in its war for independence from Great Britain by the military and financial might of France, one of the world’s most powerful and ancient kingdoms. Now, democracy had also come to France. It was a bloody and brutal beginning.

The young girls in the royal convent of Saint-Pierre-les-Dames, just beyond the old city center of Reims—a bustling commercial town of perhaps thirty thousand inhabitants, at the heart of the French textile industry and only ninety miles to the east of Paris—had little to do with this larger world of war and politics. Two centuries before, Mary, Queen of Scots had been a student in the abbey from the tender age of five, under the care of her aunt, the noble abbess Renée de Lorraine. The other girls at this Catholic convent school often came, like Mary Stuart and her noble aunt, from the ranks of the aristocracy, and they spent their days learning the graceful arts expected of the wealthy daughters of the social elite: embroidery, music, dance steps, and their prayers. The cloistered courtyard echoed with the light steps and rustling habits of nuns moving silently in the shadows, and the garden was shady and welcoming even in the summer heat.

Their parents had sent them to Saint-Pierre-les-Dames to be educated in safety and privilege. But in July 1789, a royal abbey was just possibly the most dangerous place of all for these girls. The nobility and the church had crushed the peasantry with crippling taxes for centuries, and suddenly that summer, long-simmering resentments finally broke out into an open class war that changed the history of France. Old scores were being settled in horrifying ways. It was only a matter of time before the nuns and these young girls—the daughters of the city’s social elite—became the targets of public abuse. Already, there were stories from Paris of nuns being raped and the rich being murdered in the streets. Now, wine flowed from the public fountains, and the laughs and cheers of the crowd in Reims had become more and more feverish.

Behind the shuttered windows, cloistered within the royal walls of Saint-Pierre-les-Dames, one of those girls may not have known that the world and her future were being transformed until the mob was nearly at their doorstep. Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin was eleven years old when the Revolution began. She was a small and serious girl, with golden blond hair and large gray eyes, the eldest daughter of one of the city’s wealthiest and most important businessmen—an affluent and cultured man who dreamed of moving his family into the aristocracy and had sent his child, accordingly, to this prestigious royal convent to be educated with the daughters of feudal lords and princes.

Now, the streets of Reims were alive with angry crowds, and it seemed that Barbe-Nicole would share the fate of her aristocratic classmates. The shops everywhere were closed, and the fields were empty. In the center of the city, in the grand family mansion on rue Cérès, just beyond the shadow of the great cathedral, her parents—Ponce Jean Nicolas Philippe and Marie Jeanne Josèphe Clémentine Ponsardin, or more simply Nicolas and Jeanne-Clémentine—were frantic. Even if there were a way to send a carriage through the streets of Reims to fetch Barbe-Nicole, such a display of wealth and fear would only advertise her privilege and increase her danger on the streets.

Their last hope rested with the family dressmaker, a modest woman but with remarkable bravery. Arriving quietly at the convent door with a small bundle of garments, anxious not to be observed, she knew the only way to spirit a wealthy daughter through the streets of revolutionary France: in disguise. After she dressed the child in the clothes of the working poor, they hurried. The shapeless tunic must have itched, and Barbe-Nicole’s first steps in the coarse wooden shoes—so different from her own soft leather slippers—were surely unsteady.

In another moment they had slipped out into the frenzied streets of Reims, praying to pass unnoticed. No one would bother a dressmaker or a peasant girl, but the convent-educated daughter of a bourgeois civic leader—a man who had personally helped to crown the king only a decade before—would make a compelling target for abuse. Much worse would happen to some of those whom Nicolas and Jeanne-Clémentine had entertained on those long summer evenings in the splendid halls of their family estate before the Revolution.

The roads beyond the convent were a brilliant red tide of men in Phrygian caps, classical symbols of liberty once worn by freed slaves in ancient democracies, singing familiar military marches with new words. In the distance was the sound of beating drums, and heels striking the cobble pavement echoed off the stone facades of the grandest buildings in Reims, as the men organized themselves into makeshift militias. There were fears throughout France of an imminent invasion, as the other great monarchs of Europe roused themselves to send troops to crush the popular uprising that had electrified the masses across the continent.

Hurrying through those chaotic streets must have been terrifying for a small girl. All around her was uproar as the mob gathered. They moved quickly past. Then, perhaps in the crowds of angry men, one or two looked at Barbe-Nicole with the perplexed stare of dim recognition. Perhaps she witnessed some of the many small atrocities of the Revolution—the vandalism, the beatings. The day was something no one who experienced it would ever forget.

We can only speculate
about what small horrors made up Barbe-Nicole’s memory of that day, and we will never know precisely what happened next. Only the broadest outlines of this dramatic story have survived as family legend. We have one other fact: After their escape, during the first days of the Revolution, the dressmaker hid the girl in the small apartment above her shop, not far from a small, dingy square on the southern outskirts of Reims, where there are still a few eighteenth-century buildings. Not much in Reims survived the bombings of World War I, but looking at these tilting structures, I find myself wondering if one of those apartments, with the faded linen curtains, was where Barbe-Nicole looked out on a changing world. The square is still known today as Place des Droits de l’Homme—Plaza of the Rights of Man.

After more than two hundred years of retelling, some people now even question whether it was Barbe-Nicole or her little sister who made this dramatic escape through the streets of a city in the grip of a revolution. But in the few early documents that record the details of her private life—a nineteenth-century biography of her family by a local historian and a breezy mid-twentieth-century sketch by the aristocratic wife of the company president—this has been the central legend of Barbe-Nicole’s childhood.

In fact, this one family anecdote is the only story about that childhood to survive. Apart from the barest outlines of birth and parentage, nothing of Barbe-Nicole’s girlhood remains. This silence might be the most important part of her story. Like other girls from privileged genteel families of the time, she was meant to be invisible. She should have lived a quiet and unexceptional life in a small city in provincial France. There would have been days filled with the duties of a wife and needs of children and aging parents. There would have been hours spent planning pretty dresses and dinner parties. There would have been the triumphs and tragedies of daily living. Had everything gone according to plan, Barbe-Nicole would have lived and died in relative anonymity.

We know, of course, that she did not. The Revolution, which ultimately transformed the entire social and economic fabric of France, is part of the reason her life story took such an unexpected direction. All politics are local, even in the midst of great world events. As so often is the case in the small rural region of northeast France known as the Champagne, the vineyards played a role in the turmoil that summer.

In 1789 the world
changed, but the Revolution had been a long time coming. These men and women were in the streets of Reims for a reason. For more than a decade, the agricultural economy had stagnated. The laboring classes, whose subsistence was always held in balance by the slenderest of margins, had lost ground. Entire villages were on the brink of starvation, their crops blasted by a long drought and erratic temperatures that in the Champagne had turned the chalky fields as hard as stone. The land was so dry that even when the rain came, it brought only suffering: The parched soil was unable to absorb the water, and spring flooding throughout the Marne River valley brought more misery to the workingmen and-women of the region.

By summer, those who tended the vines and grew the grapes that made champagne—the vignerons—were frustrated and resentful. That year had brought some of the coldest and most miserable weather in a century, and the crops had failed throughout France. The peasantry faced the real possibility of mass starvation, the wine growers among them. Even when there were crops to harvest, the taxes imposed on the working people of France were crippling. A typical vigneron—even one who owned his own land—might easily pay more than 40 percent in taxes to the local noblemen and clergy just for the right to be permitted to harvest and crush his grapes. In rural France, the vestiges of an ancient feudalism remained, and the law gave the local lord the exclusive right to control the village mill or its winepress. So the vigneron paid monopoly prices at harvest-time. And that was before he even tried to sell his wares. Among the most miserable of them all were the growers who lived outside the walls of the Benedictine abbey at Hautvillers, where a century earlier the craft of winemaking had been transformed into an art by the talented monk Dom Pérignon.

But Barbe-Nicole did not come from a family of peasants, and her father had no ties to the winemaking business. It was quite the opposite.

Born December 16, 1777,
she was the eldest child of Nicolas Ponsardin and his nineteen-year-old bride, Jeanne-Clémentine Huart–Le Tertre. The economy of the Champagne region at the time depended for survival not on its now famous sparkling wine, but on the manufacture of cloth—especially soft, sturdy woolen goods. A family business in the textile trade, founded by Barbe-Nicole’s grandfather, had made her father a rich and increasingly important man. According to one historian, Nicolas was “the town’s largest employer of textile workers.” On the eve of the Revolution, he employed nearly a thousand people in his factories and could boast annual sales of around 40,000 livres—the equivalent of perhaps $800,000 a year.

A socially ambitious man, Nicolas had also been laying the groundwork for a political career for more than a decade. Only recently, he had achieved an important position on the city council of Reims, but his star had been on the rise since at least as early as 1775, when, at only twenty-eight years of age, he had been chosen to serve on the local committee responsible for hosting the coronation of King Louis XVI and his now infamous queen, Marie Antoinette. He was even part of the retinue of town worthies who welcomed the royals at the door of their carriage. The king and queen came to be crowned at Reims because the church still housed a treasure known as the Sainte Ampoule, a mystical vial of sacramental oil used to transform men into kings, delivered, it was said, by an angel in the form of a dove some eleven centuries before and guarded throughout the millennium.

His role in planning the king’s coronation ceremony marked Nicolas as a devoted subject and a man with a brilliant future in the city of Reims. It was also probably an excellent business opportunity. For the royal occasion, yards upon yards of the finest crimson cloth, embroidered with gold, were ordered from local textile merchants—Nicolas no doubt among them—to drape the nave of the great cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims.

Nicolas had been deeply impressed by this passing contact with the royal family. In tribute to the king, he had spent vast sums of money building a sprawling mansion in the center of Reims, known simply as the Hôtel Ponsardin, constructed in the formal and extravagant style forever associated with Louis XVI. Today, the imposing structure houses—appropriately enough—the local Chamber of Commerce and seems to echo with the footsteps of the family that once inhabited these walls. The house faces rue Cérès, one of the city’s main boulevards, with a symmetrical facade of endless airy windows. Barbe-Nicole was born here, on a street named after the Roman goddess of bountiful harvests. The gardens are in the classical eighteenth-century French style, with low hedges snaking down the lawns in intricate designs, and the courtyards must still be intoxicatingly fragrant in the early summers. It was here, surrounded by luxury in the heart of an important commercial center, that Barbe-Nicole spent her childhood, along with her younger brother, Jean-Baptiste Gérard, born in 1779, and her little sister, Clémentine, born in 1783.

While the outside of the Hôtel Ponsardin is forbidding in its cool grandeur, the inside remains luminous. The woodwork is fanciful and intricate, and the glowing parquet floors that Barbe-Nicole raced across as a girl still greet visitors. The ground level boasted elegant salons and ballrooms, where Nicolas entertained distinguished guests. The construction was vastly expensive. At times, Nicolas shuddered to think of the sums of money it was costing him to build and furnish such a magnificent home. Even with his very deep pockets, he could never afford to finish it.

Nicolas dreamed of the day when the Ponsardin family name would also be noble. This must have been part of the reason for sending his daughters to the royal convent school at Saint-Pierre-les-Dames, where they would rub shoulders with the children of the higher classes. Surely he dreamed of nothing less than a grand match for his first child. Of all his children, she was the one who had inherited his features and his air, and it was his eldest daughter who captured a special place in his heart. But if Nicolas had been dreaming of grand aristocratic matches for his daughters, those dreams ended in the summer of 1789. No man with even a modicum of foresight would give his daughter to a nobleman in the months and years that followed, and Nicolas was no fool.