The Widow Clicquot (28 page)

her father, Nicolas, passed away at seventy-three years old
: Fiévet,
Madame Veuve Clicquot
, records the date as October 25, 1820; p. 50.

“pliable and pragmatic in his beliefs”
: Ibid., p. 51.

“skillful in his acquaintances”
: Ibid., p. 50.

He slipped off an icy bridge
: Crestin-Billet, p. 89.

she intended to retire—and to give George the entire business as a gift
: Ibid., p. 91.

At the beginning of the century…there were ten champagne houses
: Details from website of the Union des Maisons de Champagne, available at www.maisons-champagne.com.

“There is no country where you can make a fortune so easily”
: See “L’insertion de la maison Pommery dans le négoce du champagne,” available at www.patrimonieindustriel-apic.com, p. 8.

German named Matthieu-Édouard Werler
: Crestin-Billet, pp. 91–94.

“Werler…came a poor boy to Rheims from the Duchy of Nassau
”: Tomes, p. 87.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: FLIRTING WITH DISASTER

In one room, the ceiling was decorated with sculpted figures
: Paul Vitry,
L’Hôtel le Vergeur, notice historique
(Reims: Société des Amis du Vieux Reims/Henri Matot, 1932), p. 11. According to town records, a gentleman by the name of Vanin-Clicquot, a manufacturer in Reims and probably a family relation, purchased the building on 27, brumaire an II. He updated and renovated the mansion and sold it in 1822 to Barbe-Nicole. The building was subsequently sold in 1895 by the Werlé family, who had come into possession of the building after Barbe-Nicole’s death.

More solid companies are destroyed by overreaching expansion than almost anything else
: See, for example, Carlos Grande, “Stretching the Brand: The Risk of Extension,”
Financial Times
, June 4, 2007, available at www.ft.com; and Dennis Berman, “Growing Danger: Relentless Prosperity Is Forcing a Choice on Many Small Companies: Expand or Die,”
Business Week
, October 8, 1999, available at www.businessweek.com.

“
bankers played a secondary role…in the production cycle”
: Desbois-Thibault, p. 80.

typically required to loan his personal savings
: George V. Taylor, “Notes on Commercial Travelers in Eighteenth-Century France,”
Business History Review
38, no. 3 (Autumn 1964): 346–353, 348.

Jean-Rémy Moët started self-financing his production costs as early as 1819
: Desbois-Thibault, pp. 80–81.

what the poet William Blake called “dark satanic mills”
: From “And did those feet in ancient times,”
Milton
(1804), preface. At this point in British industrial history, the mills in and around London would have been primarily water-powered textile mills and not the steam-powered mills that were later so common; see Sir Edward Baines,
History of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain, with a notice of its early history on the East, and in all the quarters of the globe: A description of the great mechanical inventions, which have caused its unexampled extension in Britain: And a view of the present state of the manufacture, and the conditions of the classes engaged in its several departments
(London: H. & R. Fisher, P. Jackson, 1835).

Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orléans
: Fiévet,
Madame Veuve Clicquot
: “At the moment of the coronation of Charles X, Madame Clicquot had the honor of lodging during his visit…the duke of Orléans, after Louis-Philippe,” p. 23. Charles-Philippe, Comte d’Artois, the younger brother of Louis XVI and brother-in-law to Marie Antoinette, became king in 1824, at the age of sixty-seven, after the death of Louis XVII. He was deposed during the revolution of 1830, and Louis-Philippe became king by popular acclaim.

Barbe-Nicole was almost $14 million
: 700,000 French francs; statistics from Crestin-Billet, p. 91.

When a tearful and frightened young lad was sent to deliver a defective load of glass bottles
: Interview, January 8, 2007, Fabienne Huttaux, Historical Resources Manager, Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin.

poor Thérèse had lost her husband
: Adrien lived from 1802 to 1826; her son, Pierre, from her first marriage, survived until 1870.

Édouard’s wedding to a young woman named Louise-Émilie Boisseau
: Crestin-Billet, p. 43.

engaged to marry the daughter of an important state official back in Germany
: Vizetelly writes: “Establishment of G. C. Kessler and Co. at Esslingen—formerly one of the most important of the free imperial cities, and picturesquely situated on the Neckar—was founded as far back as 1826, and claims to be the oldest sparkling wine factory in Germany,” p. 192. Details here from G. C. Kessler promotional materials, available at www.kessler-sektkellerei.de.

Barbe-Nicole was running a large operation
: Vizetelly records that her competitors at Moët et Chandon, for example, had 1,500 employees by 1879; p. 113.

“the superiority of her brand”
: Fiévet,
Madame Veuve Clicquot
, p. 63.

Barbe-Nicole knew what historian Kolleen Guy has recently discovered
: Guy, “Oiling the Wheels of Social Life,” p. 216, n. 20; quoting U.S. Department of State, dispatches from U.S. consul at Rheims, January 15, 1869.

began to wonder if it might not be a good idea to protect her good name
: Delpal, p. 173.

she went through the trouble of registering her trademark
: Crestin-Billet, p. 134.

André Jullien had been working in Jean-Rémy’s cellars
: Desbois-Thibault, p. 141; Fiévet,
Histoire de la ville de Épernay
, p. 82, discusses mechanization of industry by the late 1830s in greater detail. See also François Bonal,
Champagne Mumm: Un champagne dans l’histoire
(Paris: Arthaud, 1987).

Cyrus Redding’s monumental
History and Description of Modern Wines: Cyrus Redding,
A History and Description of Modern Wines
(London: Whittaker, Treacher, & Arnot, 1833), p. 56.

massive crop failures across France
: David H. Pinkney, “A New Look at the French Revolution of 1830,”
Review of Politics
23, no. 4 (October 1961): 490–506, 492.

with the large and well-established firm of Poupart de Neuflize
: Fritz Redlich, “Jacques Laffitte and the Beginnings of Investment Banking in France,”
Bulletin of the Business Historical Society
22, nos. 4–6 (December 1948): pp. 137–161; and Richard J. Barker, “The Conseil General des Manufactures under Napoléon (1810–1814),”
French Historical Studies
6, no. 2 (Autumn 1969): pp. 185–213, 196, n. 36.

losses of almost $5.5 million
: 270,000 francs; Crestin-Billet, p. 93.

an astonishing 280,000 bottles of champagne
: Ibid., pp. 88, 94; Desbois-Thibault, p. 333.

Soon, it was not a middle-class protest at all
: Edgar Leon Newman, “The Blouse and the Frock Coat: The Alliance of the Common People of Paris with the Liberal Leadership and the Middle Class during the Last Years of the Bourbon Restoration,”
Journal of Modern History
46, no. 1 (March 1974): 26–59, 31.

more than half the population was living in squalid poverty
: Statistics here and following from Pinkney, p. 494.

“his jacket with its [royal] fleur-de-lis buttons”
: François-René de Chateaubriand,
Mémoires d’outre-tombe
[Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb] (1849–1850), trans. A. S. Kline, sect. 31, pt. 8, available at www.tkline.pgcc.net/PITBR/Chateaubriand/Chathome.htm.

the town hall had been sacked
: Fiévet,
Histoire de la ville d’Épernay
, pp. 318–320.

dislike of the Bourbon kings—and their supporters—was especially intense
: Pamela Pilbeam, “The ‘Three Glorious Days’: The Revolution of 1830 in Provincial France,”
Historical Journal
26, no. 4 (December 1983): pp. 831–844, 837.

waving the tricolor flag of an earlier, more radical, generation
: The National Guard was revived with particular intensity in the nearby Haut-Marne and was associated specifically with the revival of the
tricolore
and with the democratic election of officers to serve as local civic and military leaders; see Pilbeam, p. 836.

“My feelings are divided…but I regret more than anything the family ties”
: Quoted in Poindron, n.p.

“The reign of Louis-Philippe was a business régime”
: Anonymous, “Entertaining the Son of the ‘Bourgeois King,’”
Bulletin of the Business Historical Society
3, no. 4 (June 1929): 15–17, 15.

the vast majority of them a new economic boom time
: Pilbeam, p. 832.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE CHAMPAGNE EMPIRE

made his first visit to the Champagne wine country
: Fiévet,
Histoire de la ville d’Épernay
, pp. 334–335.

what historians call “the managerial revolution”
: Alfred D. Chandler Jr., “The Emergence of Managerial Capitalism,”
Business History Review
58, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 473–503, 473.

“
personally managed enterprises…had become specialized”
: Ibid., p. 383.

the Widow Clicquot might easily have shared the same fate as those of the Widow Binet
: For historical details on the Widow Binet, see Union des Maisons de Champagne, available at www.maison-champagne.com.

Already, the first railroad tracks were being laid in France
: Fiévet,
Histoire de la ville d’Épernay
, p. 108.

He was also a gentle man possessed of an artistic sensibility
: Tomes, p. 95; Gmeline, pp. 30, 170.

the average woman in France lived fewer than forty-five years
: “Data on Healthy Life Years in the European Union,” available at http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_information/indicators/lifeyears_data_en.htm.

“a dwarfish, withered old woman of eighty-nine years”
: Tomes, p. 68.

“He is also a German, and a nephew, it is believed, of [Édouard] Werler”
: Ibid., p. 89.

“I have my grandchildren and great-grandchildren around me”
: Quoted in Crestin-Billet, p. 94.

“I am making preparations…for my removal to the country”
: Details here and following from Fiévet,
Madame Veuve Clicquot
, p. 94.

an amusing story of its construction
: Tomes, pp. 96–97.

“It was a grand château”
: Maynard, preface, n.p.

“adorned with modern tapestries and richly sculptured panels”
: Quotes here and following from Chimay, pp. 50–51.

“none of the wit and grace, but all the grossness, of those authors”
: Tomes, p. 97.

if Louis had not found himself needing cash again
: Gmeline, p. 25.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: LA GRANDE DAME

what the doctors then called a cerebral congestion
: Gmeline, p. 2; Gustavo C. Roman, “Cerebral Congestion, a Vanished Disease,”
Archives of Neurology
44, no. 4 (April 1987), abstract summary: “It accounted not only for cerebral hemorrhage, but also for lacunae (Dechambre, 1838),
etat crible
[
sic
; cribriform state] (Durand-Fardel, 1842), depression, manic outbursts, headaches, coma, and seizures. According to Hammond (1871, 1878), cerebral congestion was ‘more common…than any other affliction of the nervous system.’” See also Gustavo C. Roman, “On the History of Lacunes,
État Criblé
, and the White Matter Lesions of Vascular Dementia,”
Cerebrovascular Diseases
13, no. 2 (2002): 1–6. Some have suggested this cerebral congestion was used to describe malaria, although cholera is more likely. By the 1820s, quinine had been extracted as a relatively reliable treatment for malaria, and it was commonly recognizable as ague. The symptoms are similar to cholera, which was still pandemic in Europe during the first part of the 1850s. However, cerebral congestion may have been a result of any other number of diseases. On possible diagnoses, see “Old Diseases and Their Symptoms,” available at http://web.ukonline.co.uk/thursday.handleigh/history/health/old-diseases.htm.

“I was already six when my brother Paul fell ill”
: Gmeline, pp. 1–2.

Within days, everyone knew Anne, too, had contracted the illness
: Ibid., p. 31.

continued outbreak of cholera in 1854
: Ibid., p. 2.

“sad parents and aged grandparents”
: Ibid., p. 3.