The Widow Clicquot (21 page)

Like her great-grandmother, the countess was destined to be a widow as a young woman. Emmanuel, the Duke of Uzès, died in 1878, leaving her with four small children and a vast inheritance—an inheritance that included all her great-grandmother’s property. Unlike Barbe-Nicole, however, Anne would make her mark in a different way, as a talented and sophisticated aristocrat, with no inclination to rule a champagne empire. She certainly had no inclination to play the part of a bourgeois capitalist. Leaving the care of her stake in the company to agents, the Duchess of Uzès retired to country estates in the south of France and Paris. Boursault fell into disrepair, and the Hôtel Ponsardin was sold to the city of Reims. The Clicquot family vineyards and the properties that Barbe-Nicole had slowly collected passed into the hands of Édouard, and it would be Édouard and his descendants—his son Alfred and the sons and sons-in-law who came after him—to guide the wines of the Widow Clicquot into the twentieth century, through the phylloxera outbreak in the French wine country and the two world wars that made the region again a battlefield, through the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the market that had made their fortunes. For more than 130 years, no woman would lead the champagne house that Barbe-Nicole had built from its origins as a family business to one of the world’s great commercial legends. But even as she placed her company in the hands of the men with whom she surrounded herself, Barbe-Nicole—perhaps unwittingly—opened the road for new generations of women in the marketplace.

T
oday in the
Oxford English Dictionary
, one of the definitions of the word
widow
is still champagne. Yet the short entry also tells a larger story than it intends. The entry reads, “the widow: champagne. From ‘Veuve Clicquot,’ the name of a firm of wine merchants.” Today, for some, perhaps it
is
just the name of a company. In the official history of the English language—in this linguistic testament to her celebrity and accomplishments—Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin is nowhere to be found. But when parched young lords in the gambling dens of nineteenth-century London called for a bottle of the Widow, she was still a woman. By the end of the century, of course, that had changed. The story of the Widow has become the story of a company and not the story of the businesswoman whose name it bears. But it’s an astonishing thing. Barbe-Nicole lived a life that was, by any standards, quite amazing. Yet my search for the richness and intensity of that life and for the woman behind the label has been spent, more often than I care to admit, staring blindly at street corners and winding country lanes. The other part has been spent under the flicker of fluorescent lights in libraries.

The work in those libraries was not of the straightforward kind. Her personal letters, it would seem, did not survive. The company archives in Reims, though filled with treasures for economists and historians of business, offered up few secrets of the kind I was searching for. Perusal of the early biographies was the matter of an afternoon, although I had to travel five thousand miles to find a single copy of the earliest one—a short account of Barbe-Nicole’s life, published in 1865 by a local historian. One of Édouard Werlé’s distinguished descendants and the wife of the company president wrote the second in the 1950s, a pamphlet of fifty-three pages. The only biographical sketch in print today is part of a coffee table book on the history of the company, entitled simply
Veuve Clicquot: La grande dame de la Champagne
. I am indebted to them all, of course.

It is a surprisingly thin biographical record, considering Barbe-Nicole’s celebrity and accomplishments, and writing this book has been an exercise in the oblique. I have found myself becoming a scavenger of uncollected details about her life and the world in which she lived. I said at the outset that what I wanted to find, more than anything else, was the experience of the woman whose story was printed on a tiny bit of card stock, tucked inside a box of vintage champagne. I wanted to discover not just what she did and when she lived, but how she was able to imagine for herself a different future and how she was able to negotiate those familiar crossroads of grief, despair, and opportunity. It sometimes took considerable imagination. The facts in this story are true—as true as history can make them. I don’t mean that. But telling the story of another woman’s life, I have learned, is as much a matter of sympathy as scholarship.

The dilemma for any curious historian is a simple one: Without this sympathy, there is silence. Much of Barbe-Nicole’s things have been carefully preserved—her homes, her furniture, her property, and, of course, her business. There is even a record of the books in the Clicquot family library, which were sold at an auction in Paris in 1843, just as construction was beginning on her château at Boursault. But what happened to the record of her innermost thoughts and midnight worries over nearly ninety years of living? In the early morning hours, before the streets of Reims were filled with voices and the sounds of bustling industry, it is easy to imagine Barbe-Nicole bending over a small diary. Here, the daily appointments and to-do lists of a busy entrepreneur gave way to private reflection. Loneliness and resolve and ambition jostled for their place alongside household accounts and dress measurements; there were dinner party menus and shopping lists alongside the titles of books she had enjoyed, books she hoped to read, addresses for letters she would send. To her cousin in Paris, she wrote more news, chatty accounts of family life and new babies. There were worries over wedding gowns, anniversary gifts, and, later, over sickness and domestic tensions.

And when she died, who would have thought to save a little book of notes and private musings? By the 1850s, what could be the value of long outdated family news, shared in letters between two old women? There was nothing literary about them, and Barbe-Nicole had no pretensions. Perhaps for a time after her death, they found their way to a dusty box in an unused dresser drawer. Somebody once might have meant to save them. Then the house was sold or the war came. Finally, the papers ended up lining a trunk or lighting a fire. The letters and diaries of remarkably few women ever found their way into the archives, and Barbe-Nicole’s were not among them.

But if our books and biographies tell only the personal stories that are richly documented in the archives, it is a strange history that emerges. People with interesting lives and inspiring characters have not always been kings and queens and famous poets. They have not always burned the midnight candle recording their intimate thoughts for posterity. Sometimes they were just too busy or too tired. Perhaps nowhere is this more likely than in the history of women in business. Barbe-Nicole—as exceptional as she was as a person—was not really an exception; she was one of hundreds and perhaps thousands of middle-class female entrepreneurs who found in the commercial world an expression of their talents and dreams. She was far more talented and successful than almost any one of them, of course. In that sense she was unique, and her story is singularly inspiring. But she was not alone.

As one account of women’s history written in the late 1860s reminds us, “In Paris, and indeed on the continent of Europe generally, some of the largest commercial houses have women at their head. The name of the Veuve Clicquot, one of the largest manufacturers of champagne, will occur to many readers.” But there was also the now unremembered Mrs. Hart, who ran a printing empire. Angela Burdett-Coutts, heiress to one of the world’s great fortunes, was at the head of England’s most exclusive bank. Great Britain’s king Edward VII remembered Burdett-Coutts as “after my mother the most remarkable woman in the country.” His mother was none other than Queen Victoria. And, of course, there was the celebrated Madame Louise Pommery, whose biography remains to be written.

In fact, by the end of the century that she helped to define, Barbe-Nicole was simply at the pinnacle and forefront of a fledgling cultural movement in late-nineteenth-century Europe and America: the slow and quiet rise of the modern businesswoman. The first fifty years of the Industrial Revolution had been unkind to women entrepreneurs, and it would take them much of the twentieth century to climb the corporate ladder in large numbers. But by the closing decades of the belle époque, women with determination, intelligence, and a bit of luck were finding their first footholds on that ladder, and they worked in the shadows of the business world for the next century. In the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School, there are records of hundreds of American women who made their way in the world of business. “Despite…stereotypes,” the curator reminds us, “many women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries participated in commerce, both as merchants and as manufacturers.” They ran plantations in the South and textile mills in the North. Most often, of course, they prospered in businesses with a feminine touch—fashion houses and dressmaking shops, family remedies and flower gardens. A rare few, like catalog seed merchant Carrie Lippincott or medicinal purveyor Lydia Pinkham, made their fortunes during the 1880s and 1890s. They were unusually adventurous women who defied contemporary gender roles. And like their European counterparts, they often remained invisible; no eager historian ever thought to document the complexity of their lives.

Barbe-Nicole’s distinction is to have been the first celebrity businesswoman among them. Some say, in fact, that she is the first woman in history to run an international commercial empire at all. Certainly, she was the first woman—and to this day, one of only a few—to lead one of the world’s great champagne houses. Entering the commercial world just as the first rumblings of the Industrial Revolution were reshaping life in nineteenth-century France, she brought the values of the family businesswoman to the age of manufacturing. Barbe-Nicole was not just an extraordinary woman, she was an extraordinary entrepreneur.

In fact, in this era of the great industrialists, Barbe-Nicole was one of the robber barons. By the 1870s, champagne was on its way to becoming the legal monopoly that it remains today, controlled largely by this new breed of wine aristocrat. Barbe-Nicole not only was among them, she had helped to create the phenomenon—one that would make it all but impossible in the twentieth century for enterprising young upstarts like herself to make new fortunes in champagne. By limiting where the grapes could be grown and how they could be harvested, by controlling who could use the word and at what price, the great houses at the end of the nineteenth century—and the men who increasingly ran them—had established an elegant and exclusive cartel. As early as 1880, British wine historian Charles Tovey was protesting against it. “Of all monopolies existing,” he wrote, “no single one has led to so much mischief as that of certain houses in champagne manufacture which are the fortunate possessors of reputed brands. It is really and truly the monopoly of these brands which enables the proprietors to add year by year to their already largely accumulated gains…. Fortunes, the accumulation of enormous profits, are evidenced by the palatial residences, as well as large possessions, belonging to the magnates of Rheims and Épernay. Nor is their immense wealth their only advantage; they are the plutocracy—the wine aristocrats…heroes, celebrated in song, and immortalised in history. If my readers are sceptical, let them refer to the published life of Mons[ieur] J. R. Moët, and his successors, or to that of Madame Clicquot.” Barbe-Nicole was not, of course, immortalized in history at all—only the company that she created and the name she made famous survived beyond the end of the nineteenth century. I hope that here, at least, she has been the heroine of her own story.

W
riting this book has been a labor of love, and I want to thank all of the many friends who joined me so enthusiastically in the extensive “primary” research, with a bottle of the Widow in hand. But in the more sober moments, you also offered much more than good company. I would like to thank Abby Laukka, Jon Hardy, and Erica Mazzeo for coming so far to share the adventure and Bill Hare for his fearless charm, which opened so many doors in France. Jeremy and Paula Lowe were, as always, stalwart supporters of improbable schemes, and Jeffery McLain and Jérémie Fant offered wine wisdom, hearty laughs, and expert tasting adventures. My love to J. J. Wilson for the midmorning walks that kept me writing and to my parents, who in listening to early drafts helped to spin a good yarn, stitch by stitch. Ianthe Brautigan, Anna-Lisa Cox, Adrian Blevins, and Noelle Oxenhandler shared their far greater talents with reckless generosity, and the far-flung Cockneys—as in all things—worked their merry magic at crucial moments. Stacey Glick and Genoveva Llosa made it all possible, and a heartfelt thanks to my fabulous editors at HarperCollins, Toni Sciarra and Matt Inman. And, then, there aren’t enough words to properly thank either Thaine Stearns or Noelle Baker and Roberta Maguire: You were the only reasons to drink champagne in that last winter of discontent, and this book has always been for you.

Without the help of many librarians, archivists, and winemakers, this book never could have been written, and I am particularly grateful to the staff at the Sonoma County Wine Library Collection in Healdsburg, the Bibliothèque Carnegie in Reims, the Médiathèque d’Épernay, the Napa Valley Wine Library Collection in Saint Helena, the University of Cambridge Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the British Library, the Colby College Library, Eileen Crane of Napa’s Domaine Carneros, Philippe Bienvenue of Champagne Cattier, the kind staff in the resource library at Champagne Moët et Chandon and in the tasting rooms at Champagne Pommery, and, above all, to the generous people in the Historical Resources Department at Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, especially Fabienne Huttaux and Isabelle Pierre.