Caught up in living this aristocratic lifestyle and proud of her family’s public prominence now that her father was the mayor of Reims and her daughter was a countess, Barbe-Nicole didn’t begrudge the expenses exactly. But even with the business now selling almost $12 million worth of champagne a year, she had still sacrificed some of her personal financial security to give Louis his extravagant dowry. Louis, for his part, had always planned to bargain for more. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was during these first years of her daughter’s marriage to Louis that Barbe-Nicole began to entertain the idea of turning over the business to someone else—someone she could trust to manage it.
Suddenly, thinking about the future like this seemed urgent. Philippe Clicquot, who had supported her since the early days of her enterprise, died in the final months of 1819 at the family home on rue de la Vache. Almost precisely a year later, after a long and painful illness, her father, Nicolas, passed away at seventy-three years old. And just like that, she was left without two of her closest advisers and without the company of two men on whom she knew she could depend. A solemn procession of town worthies and National Guardsmen followed her father’s casket to the grave, and he was remembered with remarkable frankness as a man who was “pliable and pragmatic in his beliefs…of great intelligence, with a taste for authority and power.” But he was also honest, decent, and, as one of his biographers put it, “skillful in his acquaintances.”
Barbe-Nicole now unexpectedly became heir to the family compound at the Hôtel Ponsardin. It had always been understood that it would be Jean-Baptiste’s inheritance, as the only son. But Jean-Baptiste was dead. After her father’s passing, the family home—and the social responsibilities that came with owning one of the city’s great estates—belonged to her.
Someday, this mansion would also belong to Louis and Clémentine, along with Barbe-Nicole’s home on rue de l’Hôpital, the country estates at Oger and Bouzy, their little home in Paris, and the castle on the hill in Boursault. But by 1821, Louis was needling her for a country estate of his own, where he could indulge his gentlemanly hobbies of gardening and botany. She finally relented and bought them another large property to the north of Reims, in Villiers-en-Prayères. By then, Barbe-Nicole had already made up her mind about the company. She was determined that Clémentine and Louis would never get near it.
Louis Bohne would have been the obvious candidate for running the company in her old age. Together they had built Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and Company into the world-renowned business that it was, and some of this fabulous luxury she owed to him and his sharp business instincts as a salesman. She knew that he cared about the legacy of her champagne with a passion that matched her own. But she was still coming to grips with the sudden news of his death that winter as well. After all those years crossing a war-torn continent, after the dangers he had faced as a suspected spy in Russia at the height of the conflict, he had ended up dying in the most mundane fashion: He slipped off an icy bridge.
So she turned instead to another of her employees, a fast-talking dreamer named George Christian von Kessler. He had been one of her salesmen during those lean years before the Russian triumph, and since 1815 he had been a junior partner of sorts in managing the business. In December, she shocked her staff and her family by announcing that in three years’ time, at little more than forty, she intended to retire—and to give George the entire business as a gift.
A decision this extraordinary makes it easy to wonder if there was something more to Barbe-Nicole’s relationship with George von Kessler. There is no concrete evidence that there was. Then again, in this new era of the domestic angel and the good mother, there wouldn’t be, and it’s pretty difficult to imagine that Barbe-Nicole threw off all thoughts of sexuality at the age of twenty-seven. Besides, George was recently widowed, and grief has a way of helping people find each other. Or perhaps it’s simpler still. The local gossip suggests that Barbe-Nicole had a habitual weakness for handsome young men, and who can blame her? Rich men have often made a life’s work of seducing secretaries, and Barbe-Nicole at least was doggedly loyal to the men she admired.
Still, a promotion was one thing. Giving away the family company was astonishing. Almost equally unbelievable was the idea that Barbe-Nicole was considering retirement at this particular moment. At the beginning of the century, when she and François were first experimenting with the commercial production of sparkling wine, there were ten champagne houses. In 1821—largely as a result of her success and the success of her early competitors—there were more than fifty, all struggling to make enough wine to meet the fabulous demand created for this new luxury product. Already there were signs that a vast new market was learning to love champagne as well. Americans were beginning to clamor for bubbly by the 1820s, and as Charles Heidsieck put it, “There is no country where you can make a fortune so easily just by sending a product that pleases people and sells well.”
Barbe-Nicole already had her fortune, of course, and the pressures of running an increasingly complex and demanding business were real. Her outlook complicated by grief and depression—and by emotional entanglements as well, if there was any truth to the talk—she was struggling with the shape of her future. There had been great personal losses, enough to leave anyone reeling. But it wasn’t long before she reconsidered her rash decision. In the summer of 1822, less than a year after her announcement, Barbe-Nicole abruptly revoked her promise to give George the business. It was only more cause for tongue wagging in the commercial offices of Reims. The gossips noticed, not coincidentially, perhaps, that a new young man had joined the business team of the Widow Clicquot as a clerk. He was a handsome twenty-year-old German named Matthieu-Édouard Werler, who soon changed his name to the more francophone Édouard Werlé.
Writing the history of champagne at the end of the nineteenth century, the American author Robert Tomes summed up the situation neatly: “Werler…came a poor boy to Rheims from the Duchy of Nassau. Taken into the employ of the Widow Clicquot as a lad of all work, with a mere pittance of two dollars or so a week for wages, his intelligent activity won for him rapid advancement. The gossips of Rheims assert that the blue eyes, ruddy face, and broad shoulders of the youth, finding favor with the hitherto disconsolate widow, caused a livelier appreciation of his moral and intellectual qualities in the counting-house, and gave an irresistible impulse to his progress.” Before long, he was her constant companion in the cellars, and she had given him responsibility for her vast vineyards and for choosing the wines. Someday, she would tap him as her successor. For now, reenergized, she had given up any idea of retiring soon.
We can only imagine what George von Kessler thought of this change of fortune and the gossip circulating in Reims about Barbe-Nicole and her fancy for this strapping young man. Considering he lost out on the gift of a major international company, it’s easy to guess he was feeling a bit desperate. He certainly didn’t quit his job. Instead, along with Louis de Chevigné, he began encouraging Barbe-Nicole to expand the business in new directions. Perhaps it was already clear to both Louis and von Kessler that the champagne business was lost to Édouard Werlé. Perhaps von Kessler preferred the idea of heading up a different line of business, and Barbe-Nicole thought he would be best suited somewhere other than in her cellars. Perhaps she thought she owed it to him. Whatever the case, in the summer of 1822, Barbe-Nicole took up two new commercial enterprises. She returned to the textile industry that had made the Ponsardin and Clicquot fortunes. And in June she opened the Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and Company Bank. It would prove far and away the most disastrous business decision of her life.
Chapter 13
Flirting with Disaster
It was an unlucky time for Barbe-Nicole to be making so many important decisions. Still disoriented by the death of her father and the unexpected demise of Louis Bohne, she was unmoored. And perhaps, after almost a decade of one fabulous success after another, she had been lulled into the dangerous belief that nothing could go seriously wrong.
Eager to take some definitive action about the future, she started by making Édouard cellar master in the summer of 1822. Antoine Müller was leaving the company, and Barbe-Nicole was determined to give the promotion to Édouard—despite the fact that this young clerk, the son of a postmaster, had worked with her for only a year and had almost no experience making champagne.
Barbe-Nicole also went on a spending spree that summer. With her refinements to the remuage system, the house of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin was running efficiently, and she had succeeded in turning a small family sideline into an industrial powerhouse. By hiring George, she had even led the way in embracing the managerial revolution, boosting her profits but, ironically, helping to bring an end to the old tradition of family-run businesses and, especially, to the tradition of the family businesswoman. The result of it all was vast profits. Barbe-Nicole was already among the wealthiest industrialists in the Champagne—and one of the richest middle-class women in all of France.
She was mostly interested in buying property. The house that she and François had inherited on rue de l’Hôpital was an affluent bourgeois home, certainly spacious and elegant enough for her small family: Clémentine, Louis, and baby Marie-Clémentine. The Count and Countess of Chevigné—as Louis and Clémentine were now styled—spent most winters in Paris and much of the summer at the turreted château in Boursault or the estates in Villiers-en-Prayères anyhow. Barbe-Nicole’s new plan was to turn the family home into the business offices for the fledgling Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and Company Bank. Her personal residence would now be the palatial home known in Reims as the Hôtel le Vergeur, a sprawling building with three pitched roofs and a timber-beamed facade. Inside, it was a carnivalesque wonder reminiscent of the nearby grand cathedral. In one room, the ceiling was decorated with sculpted figures emerging from the beams—images of contorted faces, monkeys, even dragons. The fourteenth-century original mansion was destroyed during the World War I, but the reconstructed building is now home to a local history museum. Committed to this plan of business expansion, she also found new offices for the wine company on rue du Temple, not far from her childhood home. Today, these buildings, tucked discreetly behind iron gates and a shady gravel courtyard, are the corporate world offices of the company that bears her name.
One thing still has not changed in the world of business: More solid companies are destroyed by overreaching expansion than almost anything else. And Barbe-Nicole was not just building her business, she was starting two new ones in the space of a summer. The temptation is easy to understand. Modern commercial banking was also in its infancy at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and for years Barbe-Nicole and Louis Bohne had been forced to rely on a complicated line of credit from bankers as far away as Paris. Making champagne required all the big houses to tie up huge amounts of capital in the cellars, sometimes for a period of years, and foreign payments could take almost as long to clear the books.
Most important, banking was another major step toward vertical integration for the company, an idea at the heart of her manufacturing-style model. Already, in fact, “bankers played a secondary role…in the production cycle” of champagne. Without a line of credit, it was sometimes impossible to raise enough money to keep making new champagne when the old stocks were still aging in the cellars, and she had already been acting as her own banker for years. Her employees, willingly or not, had also been some of her first clients. A voyageur (traveling salesman) or a commis voyageur (traveling clerk) was typically required to loan his personal savings to his employer, in exchange for a 5 percent return in interest. It was part of his commitment to the business. Men like Louis—fore-runners of the modern corporate manager—earned salaries and a share of the company’s profits, but they also had to invest in the companies they helped to build. Opening a bank to serve the other winemakers in the Champagne was a logical extension of the practice. Jean-Rémy Moët started self-financing his production costs as early as 1819, and Barbe-Nicole was determined to do him one better. Taking control of the financing side of the wine trade—especially if it could be turned to additional profit—seemed like an obvious next step.
Her decision to pick up the textile trade must have seemed even more obvious. After all, with the death of her father and her only brother before him, there were lucrative family interests in cloth manufacturing that would otherwise just disappear. With the mechanization of the textile industry and the rise of what the poet William Blake called its “dark satanic mills,” there was a great deal of money to be made, and Barbe-Nicole was bursting with confidence. It was a confidence that George was feeding with his enthusiasm.
At first, there was no reason for Barbe-Nicole to question her entrepreneurial instincts or her charmed future. The champagne business had made her immensely rich, and she was already one of the most famous entrepreneurs of her day. Her home was also among the most splendid in Reims—so splendid that in 1825, when Charles X was crowned king in the cathedral of Reims, following the ancient traditions of France, one member of the royal family stayed as her houseguest: Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, a man with republican sympathies who would soon become the last king of France.
When the bank opened, deposits and business rolled in. With George as both partner and professional manager, they started expanding the textile company as well, buying new mills in Germany and funding the purchases with large loans from the bank. From there, it is a familiar story. George wasn’t gambling with his own money so much as with hers, after all, and soon there were bad investments. By 1825, three years into this financial adventure, it was time to face facts. The champagne business was still going strong, but the out-of-town textile mills were struggling terribly. Soon the losses were dragging down the bank as well.
Sitting up late looking at the books and worrying over the figures left her with a pounding headache. She must have been shaken by self-doubt, too. In the space of just a few short years, Barbe-Nicole was almost $14 million in the red. It wasn’t her own skill as a businesswoman that she questioned. If those mills had been in Reims—somewhere she could march into and set to rights—the venture could still have been salvaged. But they were in far-off places, where she had to rely on someone else to handle her business. A woman, even a matronly widow, did not take journeys without some male relative at her side, and there is no evidence that Barbe-Nicole ever traveled beyond her native France. The fact that she ran an international business for decades and conquered markets that she never visited makes her story that much more astonishing.
Instead, Barbe-Nicole now had to question her personal judgment. As long as she could keep her heart from getting involved, she was an excellent judge of character. But she had a soft side and a generosity that could get the better of her. That was the essence of the story with Louis de Chevigné. She found it painful disappointing him when his heart was set on some new extravagance. So she didn’t. Everyone knew it was the same in the offices. It was part of her charm. When a tearful and frightened young lad was sent to deliver a defective load of glass bottles that had come from the factory misshapen and useless, everyone knew that Barbe-Nicole wouldn’t have the heart to refuse the shipment. Sure enough, the crates were unloaded. They were sent back to the suppliers the next day with a sharp note, of course, but she hadn’t wanted to see the boy cry.
Something about George and her relationship with him had prevented her from approaching these investments coolly. She would pay a high price for this indulgence. Like Louis de Chevigné, George had an enthusiasm for spending his way out of a problem, and for months he and Barbe-Nicole had been arguing about the investments. Édouard was after her to stop the financial hemorrhaging at the bank, and Barbe-Nicole knew that it was time to make a painful decision. In the spring of 1826, she decided to stop throwing good money after bad. She and George would have to split. In fact, a lot of things came to an end that year, and the financial losses were only just beginning.
The worst of the year’s losses were personal. There wa
s another death in the family, this time a terrible one. The image haunted her for years. Her twenty-four-year-old nephew, Adrien, was killed in the vicious attack of a rabid dog in May, leaving the family to grieve over his savaged body and over the horror of his death. Her brother’s widow was disconsolate. In the space of a decade, poor Thérèse had lost her husband and her child, and because there were no other sons, it was the end of the Ponsardin family line.
The other losses were far smaller but no less real. That summer was Édouard’s wedding to a young woman named Louise-Émilie Boisseau. The new Madame Werlé was the near relation of one of their competitors at Champagne Roederer, and Édouard—who was not ashamed of preferring the finer things in life—had married with all the instincts of a keen businessman. Barbe-Nicole had seen him at work, where he ruled over the employees with an iron hand, and she could have guessed that Louise-Émilie would have a rough bargain of it. But if she and Édouard had been enjoying, as the gossips of Reims said, a flirtation, things were suddenly far more complicated.
Of course, there was also the collapse of her relationship with George. After all their months of arguing about the business and money, after the decision to part ways, there was not much of their earlier warm friendship left. Now, he was engaged to marry the daughter of an important state official back in Germany, and there was little chance she would ever see him again. In the liquidation of their partnership, George agreed to take the foreign mills and disappeared to start a new life. Flush with a bit of family capital, he ran the mills and before long founded his own sparkling wine business—never more than a modest success in the nineteenth century, but now Germany’s oldest and most prestigious producer of sparkling wine.
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