The Widow Clicquot

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Although these were heady times, in reality the royal court was still a tiny and very elite market. The entire Champagne region sold fewer than twenty thousand bottles of sparkling wine a year in the 1730s, and often more than 50 percent of it was sold directly to the palace at Versailles. The customer base was limited to the trendsetters among Europe’s nobility, who were enjoying a passing fad. From the beginning, champagne was always the drink of celebration for the lucky few. But even at the height of its first popularity, during those twenty years of royal fame, it never became a broader cultural phenomenon. The average person on the street never dreamed of tasting it. Only the richest of the rich knew its sensuous appeal.

  Champagne’s iconic status would only emerge much later, because the boom times ended as suddenly as they had begun: By the 1740s, fashion suddenly changed. The growers and distributors, counting on regular extravagances in Paris and looking to make easy money, had planted too many vines, many of them cheap, and the wine market in the Champagne crashed. As bad wines flooded the market, the reputation of the entire region suffered. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the local sparkling wine that François had dreams of once again selling to the world was little more than an extravagant curiosity, known only at the royal courts of Europe. It might well have stayed that way. Had the local wine industry not been reinvented by a handful of talented entrepreneurs—and had champagne not been transformed into the world’s most powerful symbol of celebration and the good life—this sparkling wine would have soon faded into the background of world history. And Barbe-Nicole’s amazing story would have disappeared with it.

  Chapter 4

  Anonymity in Their Blood

  Despite the grim state of the wine industry in the Champagne during the last decades of the eighteenth century, François and Barbe-Nicole were looking forward to the future with optimism. Not many people in France shared that optimism.

  The country had been at war since the early days of the Revolution—for nearly a decade when Barbe-Nicole and François were married. Now, in the first year of Barbe-Nicole and François’s life together, the Austrians drove the French across the Rhine at Stockach in a bloody battle that left less fortunate men than François maimed, and the British forced a French retreat in Holland. British admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed almost the entire French navy in the Battle of the Nile, leaving nearly forty thousand young soldiers not very different from François stranded in a war zone with no way of getting home.

  Despite the unrest that spread across the European continent, in this small corner of northeastern France the future seemed bright. Barbe-Nicole and François were young and wealthy, and passion for expanding the family’s wine business quickly united them. Dreaming of a life in the wine trade and watching the harvest that first year, caught up in the spirit of gaiety that it always occasions for those whose lives are spent watching the slow and uncertain progress of a vintage, they had every reason to be thankful.

  To another young man with his roots in the fields of the Champagne, the future also seemed bright in the last year of the century. In early November 1799, when the peasants were at work clearing the debris from the vineyards, word came of monumental changes in Paris. The young general Napoléon Bonaparte—so crushingly defeated in the Battle of the Nile that summer—had overthrown the government in a stunning coup, declaring himself the first consul of France. These were the first heady and frightening days of what would soon become the Napoleonic empire.

  Under the new consulate, the dazzling lifestyle that Barbe-Nicole had known as a girl became fashionable again. For an affluent young woman from one of the most ambitious families in Reims, now the mistress of her own home, it should have been an exciting time. But despite her enviable good fortune—and despite even François’s obvious pleasure in sharing his passion for the wine business with her—Barbe-Nicole’s world in 1799 was quickly closing in. As the wife of an important business owner and the daughter of a man with great political ambitions, the future imagined for her was a luxurious but narrow one. She was on her way to achieving the respectable anonymity for which women of her class were praised. It was a future spent largely in nurseries and drawing rooms.

  Already that spring, she had given birth to a baby girl, born at the family home on March 20, 1799, and named, like her mother and her sister, Clémentine. This should have been the beginning of a relentless reproductive life, like the one that left many women at the end of the eighteenth century maimed or dead, either from complications of childbirth or from the barbaric medical interventions meant to save them. A woman had a one-in-twenty chance of dying as a result of the delivery, perhaps a victim of septic infection or puerperal fever, both agonizing deaths. If things took their natural course, Barbe-Nicole could expect in the years to come as many as half a dozen pregnancies, making those death rates a sobering statistic. Her baby had even slimmer chances of survival. French doctors estimated that nearly a third of the children born would die before the end of their second year of life.

  Perhaps it was because of this frightening outlook that some young women made a point of dancing at balls until dawn. Even as a new mother and wife, there were undoubtedly plenty of parties. That year, Barbe-Nicole’s brother, Jean-Baptiste, married a twenty-four-year-old widow named Thérèse and moved into a sprawling new home on rue de Vesle, not far from the Hôtel Ponsardin, which he was destined to inherit. Within months, there was word that her sister, Clémentine, now seventeen, would marry the young widower Jean-Nicolas Barrachin in a secret and still dangerous Catholic ceremony at dawn, in the cool splendor of the nearby cathedral.

  Clémentine and Thérèse quickly established themselves as elegant hostesses and social trendsetters. While Barbe-Nicole was plain and petite, Clémentine was lovely and statuesque, with a passion for the splendid silk dresses that had made French fashion famous. At extravagant parties and soirées, the young people rubbed elbows with the social elite of industrial Reims and with important and exciting visitors from farther abroad. Increasingly, those visitors spoke of Napoléon, the man destined, it seemed, to rule France and perhaps finally to bring peace.

  It was a privileged life, but it was still life in a gilded cage. And think how astonishing it is that we know anything about the lives of these young women at all. Barbe-Nicole and her sister had learned from the time the were small girls studying catechism in their convent school that the only women with public reputations were prostitutes or queens. Even the two most famous women of Barbe-Nicole’s day—Marie Antoinette and Joséphine Bonaparte—were famous only because of their choice of husbands. It is probably not a coincidence that the public still thought of them both as whores.

  Musing on the invisibility of women like Barbe-Nicole and her sister, Clémentine, the novelist Virginia Woolf wrote simply, “Anonymity runs in their blood.” Even one of Barbe-Nicole’s contemporaries, Lady Bessborough—born into one of Great Britain’s most important and most progressive political families—herself believed that “no woman should meddle with…any serious business, farther than giving her opinion (if she is ask’d).” Barbe-Nicole undoubtedly took a similar line with her husband. No man wanted to hear his wife rattling on about how he should run his business, especially when she didn’t have any training and knew nothing about it.

  Exactly how Barbe-Nicole, a woman destined for a sheltered life of domesticity, became educated in the gritty essentials of the wine trade has always been viewed as a great mystery. In fact, she lived at an especially unlucky moment. A century before, it was not impossible for middle-class women to participate in running the family enterprise. Most businesses then were still family affairs, run by an extended network of close relations. No longer. In nineteenth-century Europe, the combined forces of a postrevolutionary commodity culture, the rise of international manufacturing, and a new system of modern laws—the Napoleonic Code—meant a far narrower world for women. As the historian Bonnie G. Smith put it: “A prejudice against women acting in the marketplace appeared in
the Napoleonic Code [which] pointed women toward an exclusively reproductive life.”

  But the Napoleonic Code was the invention of the first years of the new century, and Barbe-Nicole was beginning life as the wife of a wealthy industrialist at what we might think of as just the last possible moment. Industrialism already meant that most families were confining wives and daughters to the drawing rooms. Her fashionable sister, Clémentine, soon preoccupied with four small children—her infant son, Balsamie, and three stepchildren—would embody this new domestic pattern. Barbe-Nicole would follow in the footsteps of a fading commercial tradition, embracing the entrepreneurial family model that both she and François had learned as the children of old-fashioned businessmen. The different lives of these two sisters show how quickly the world was changing. If Barbe-Nicole had been more fashion-conscious or had she been beautiful, it might have seemed too great a sacrifice. Her decision must have marked her, even in those first years of the cult of domesticity, as a social eccentric. I will also hazard a guess that if François had had brothers—if there had been more than one son to carry on the family enterprise and if her interest had not actually been of some use—Barbe-Nicole would never have been allowed the haphazard commercial education that she found.

  In the beginning, I expect she was his sounding board. François himself knew next to nothing about the wine business when he first threw himself into developing the family sideline, and this was surely a critical factor. His period of self-education happily coincided with the early years of their marriage, when they were first getting to know each other. Like any two people thrown together, they were looking for things to talk about, and nothing could have been more natural than to talk about wine and his plans for the business.

  So it would not have come to Barbe-Nicole as any surprise when, as soon as the news came in 1801 that France had signed a peace treaty at Lunéville, François decided that he would have to take to the road as a traveling salesman. Selling wines internationally still meant sending someone to get the orders, and in the beginning this would have to be François himself. The peace, they hoped, would change everything. The country had been at war with the so-called Second Coalition—Great Britain, Austria, Russia, the Ottoman empire, several of the Italian states—since the year she and François were first married. Now, with the peace at Lunéville, only Great Britain remained as the declared enemy of France, and that spring it looked for a moment as though life might soon return to normal. After years of waiting, it seemed as if the closed markets to the east and to the south would begin to open again. François intended to capitalize on the new opportunities.

  Today, wine tasting is a multimillion-dollar tourist industry, but it was these traveling distributors, especially at the end of the eighteenth century—men like François and his competitors—who popularized wine tasting as a commercial strategy. At the time, caves and warehouses were not open for cellar visits, barrel tasting, and winemaker’s suppers, and the branding of wines was only in its infancy. It would be another twenty years before consumers would even expect to find their wines labeled and identified. Customers had to rely on the judgment and integrity of agents for their wine purchases.

  These agents, increasingly, brought the experience of wine tasting to their clients, discovering that it was, then as now, an effective way of selling wine. If on the road François would suffer rough conditions, broken carriages, miserable inns, and bad food, he would have little to complain about on his arrival. The goal of a wine sales agent was to discover the most alluring and fashionable hostesses of the city, charm them with his wit and grace, and persuade them to serve his company’s wine. As often as not, this also involved some judicious sampling of the luxury wares—a dégustation, or wine tasting.

  As a young mother and never a renowned beauty, Barbe-Nicole undoubtedly preferred not to dwell too long on this part of her husband’s business. When François took to the road for an extended sales tour that summer, he was gone for months, traveling in Germany and Switzerland. In the days before the harvest, Barbe-Nicole kept an eye on the fields and the crops. She undoubtedly meant to keep an eye on the business as well, if her father-in-law would share news of it with her, because she had inherited her father’s entrepreneurial instincts, even if no one else realized it yet.

  She soon must have learned that there were other women in the wine business—the wives and daughters of those same old-fashioned family businessmen. Vineyards had always been a family undertaking, and even if spinning and weaving had been increasingly taken out of the rural cottages and moved into big factories like the ones her father owned, there was nothing industrialized about winemaking yet. In fact, women had played an essential role in the industry—and in the sales of sparkling champagne especially—since at least the middle of the eighteenth century, when sales had slumped so dramatically.

  Ironically, the fact that champagne didn’t look like a good way to make big money was part of the reason these small-time businesswomen had such an important role in the marketplace. Contracting businesses have always created opportunities for women and other newcomers ready to seize the initiative. In her book Women of Wine: The Rise of Women in the Global Wine Industry, author Ann B. Matasar points out that these periodic collapses in wine sales have created rare “opportunities for women to participate in rebuilding the industry.” At a time when big money was to be made in businesses that could be industrialized and in commodities that could be mass-produced, wine—especially a finicky handcrafted product like champagne—had dim prospects.

  Perhaps it was when François was on the road as a salesman that Barbe-Nicole first heard of working women such as Dame Geoffrey, a widow from the graceful bourgeois town of Épernay, just south of the river Marne, in the heart of some of the best vineyards in all of France. It is still known today as the capital of champagne. Certainly Barbe-Nicole already knew the estates of the Moët family, whose name had Dutch origins and was often spelled in the late eighteenth century just as it is pronounced: Moette. Everyone knew that their sparkling vintages had made them famous at the pleasure-loving court of Louis XV. Like François and his father, the men of the Moët family were distributors, not winemakers, and they bought their wines ready-made from small local craftsmen—or craftswomen. For, many of these vignerons, Barbe-Nicole must have discovered, were women. In fact, throughout the eighteenth century, the Moët family purchased nearly 50 percent of their fine wines from women. Dame Geoffrey, the widow of a local tax collector who managed extensive vineyards and crafted her own wines, was one of their largest suppliers.

  Barbe-Nicole probably also learned before too long the story of the Widow Germon, an important wine broker who sold tens of thousands of bottles of champagne each year throughout the 1770s and 1780s. When Philippe Clicquot was just starting his small wine trade, the Widow Germon was already doing a brisk business and was even bottling her own sparkling wines. And, of course, Barbe-Nicole knew the Widow Robert and the Widow Blanc. The Widow Robert ran an important wine depository in Paris, where distributors could warehouse their wines for easy delivery to new customers in the nation’s capital. The Moët family had used the services of the Widow Robert for more than twenty years, and François had recently considered the possibility of placing some wines in Paris. And because François and his father did not make their own wines, they had to purchase them from somewhere. The Widow Blanc, a local vigneron, was one of their regular suppliers.

  If not these women, then Barbe-Nicole certainly learned of others like them. There were dozens more. Dame Geoffrey was only one of nearly twenty small-time women winemakers from Épernay whose names appeared in the Moët family account books during the eighteenth century but whose lives, like those of so many women from this period, are lost to history. No one has written their biographies, in part because at the time no one thought the ephemera of their personal lives worth saving for the archives. But their stories would not have been lost to Barbe-Nicole. In fact, increasingly, they would have been the c
ause of raised eyebrows in a small city like Reims. Businesswomen—once part of a bourgeois family economy—were quickly becoming something daring and faintly disreputable.

  A generation older than Barbe-Nicole, women like the Widow Blanc and the Widow Robert were typical of the earlier tradition of family entrepreneurs, and the tradition was fading fast. Already in 1801, Barbe-Nicole’s presence on the fringes of the Clicquot commercial concerns was an exception, especially for a woman of her class. Even a decade or two later, I think it would have been impossible for Barbe-Nicole to exercise an active interest in her husband’s business and to have access to the essentials of the wine trade. It was in part because these other women came from the working and lower middle classes that they were able to run these small businesses in the new postrevolutionary climate. Barbe-Nicole came from the other end of the social hierarchy. Historian Béatrice Craig, who has studied the lives of women in Barbe-Nicole’s day, found that “the wives of manufacturers were less likely to have an occupation than wives of craftsmen.” The burden of supporting families trumped the demands of feminine delicacy, and for these independent women, working was a matter of financial survival.

  Above all, Barbe-Nicole surely did not miss the other thing these women had in common: They were all widows, the only women granted the social freedom to run their own affairs. Having lost their husbands, they could make their own decisions—but it was hard to wish for opportunity at that price.