Still, it must have stung a bit to be so abruptly and determinedly cut out of the business. In making her partnership with Édouard, Barbe-Nicole had effectively given away half of an immensely lucrative family business to a man who had started out in her offices as a handsome and clever clerk. There were some people who still remembered the rumors about what was at the root of his meteoric rise, and perhaps there was some emotional element to the decision as well. Certainly, as a simple matter of numbers, if Barbe-Nicole wanted to cash out and retire, she could have sold the business for far more than Édouard’s modest investment. But Barbe-Nicole knew that Édouard had been more than just a loyal employee over the course of the past decade. In him, she had found a fellow entrepreneur on whom she could rely unhesitatingly. She also did not forget that he had saved her. Without his intervention in those precarious first hours of the bank run, there wouldn’t have been much of a company to consider passing on. Having come so close to losing everything, Barbe-Nicole had found her second wind as an entrepreneur, and she had also found a new partner. She was filled with ambition and competitive drive, and she was going to lead the way in shaping the business models of the nineteenth century as well.
Always alert to the changing commercial climate, Barbe-Nicole was once again ahead of emerging trends. It was part of what made her a legend. In the years to come, the manufacturing model of business would require thinking like a corporation and not like a family unit, and with it came what historians call “the managerial revolution”—the rise of the salaried businessmen and company executives we know today. Ironically, it was this new model of the professional managerial class that, more than anything else, signaled the end of the traditional opportunities for untrained bourgeois women in family businesses. Barbe-Nicole was making the savviest decisions she could to stay competitive in a changing marketplace, and she needed someone willing to put in the same crushing hours that she demanded of herself. That would never be the style of the handsome count. Bringing Édouard into the business, first as a professional director with a share of the profits and later as a full-fledged executive partner, was one step on the way to turning the wine company of the Widow Clicquot into a legacy company. She was smart to do it. The cold facts are that “by the mid-1840s, [even] personally managed enterprises…had become specialized, usually handling a single function and a single product.” The economics of industrialization demanded it, and soon it demanded full-time management staff as well. These would be professional men able to lead large companies. Ironically, however, Barbe-Nicole was helping to establish a trend that would close the door on other talented and untested young women looking for a chance to enter the business world.
During the next decade, Barbe-Nicole dedicated herself to rebuilding her champagne empire. She had almost let it slip from her grasp, and now she was determined to secure its future. It was a critical moment in the history of the company. Had she fallen behind at this juncture, the wines of the Widow Clicquot might easily have shared the same fate as those of the Widow Binet, who was once listed by the city of Reims as a leading champagne maker. Nothing of the Widow Binet’s story—or of her business—remains. In the late 1830s, the commercial world was changing rapidly. Success meant walking a fine line between craft and industrialization. Already, the first railroad tracks were being laid in France, and improvements were under way in the Champagne to modernize the canal system that linked the province to the capital. Soon, the steam locomotive would change the business climate and landscape of Europe. The first train wouldn’t reach Reims for more than another decade, and for now Barbe-Nicole and Édouard had to rely on the old-fashioned means of transportation: wagons and barges carrying her delicate wines to seaports and Paris. But the coming railroads already meant the growth of mass markets—and the need to advertise in them. The result in the years to come would be the rise of the champagne label. Until then, Édouard would take to the road, bringing in clients for the company, as Louis Bohne had done before him. He would do it with the same talent. Soon the company sales had doubled.
Barbe-Nicole worked with a furious intensity, and even if she was not like the other grandmothers of her generation, family was always very much on her mind. She thought a great deal about motherhood, especially. Her mother, Jeanne-Clémentine, passed away quietly in 1837, at seventy-seven, leaving Barbe-Nicole and her sister orphaned and no less bereft for being in their adulthood. Barbe-Nicole knew that it was the end of an old way of life, the end of her own bourgeois roots. She had grown up in a world different from the one her daughter now inhabited. And she was glad. In those uncertain days before the occupation of Reims, her greatest worry had been for the luxuries and the life that Clémentine would lose. Now, she still believed that the business—if she could restore it—would be a guarantee of her family’s comfort. Left in the hands of Édouard, it could become a hedge against futurity, a silent source of riches.
In the summer of 1839, those same riches gave rise to new celebrations and more thoughts of family. Her granddaughter, Marie-Clémentine, now twenty-one years old, was married with great ceremony. Listening to the eager preparations all winter, Barbe-Nicole could smile to think how pleased her father, Nicolas, would have been. For Marie was not only the daughter of a count; she was marrying one: the pious and proper Louis Samuel Victorien de Rochechouart de Mortemart, a member of one of the most famous noble families in all of France. In his portraits, he sits ramrod straight, surrounded by the splendor that was his fortunate birthright. He was also a gentle man possessed of an artistic sensibility, with a passion for growing rare and beautiful orchids and a remarkable skill as an amateur artist. After the solemn ceremony in the cathedral, a long train of carriages wound up the hillside to Boursault for a lavish celebration, with case upon case of the Widow’s finest champagnes. As a wedding present, Barbe-Nicole gave the young couple a magnificent gift: the very castle itself.
The sober Count de Mortemart was a sensible match for stout little Marie, who soon gave him a little girl named Pauline, Barbe-Nicole’s first great-grandchild. By 1841, Marie had also given birth to a little boy, unimaginatively named Paul. Eventually, there would be another little girl named Anne, on whom Barbe-Nicole doted. The champagne house of the Widow Clicquot—for that was how it was always known, despite Édouard’s name on the company books—was back on solid footing. It had taken a decade of careful management and hard work, but more than just recovering, the company flourished. It was once again firmly established as one of the region’s—and, therefore, one of the world’s—most important champagne houses. Now, the company profits were making Barbe-Nicole rich all over again. It was clear that the only option was to continue to expand the company and bring in more managerial staff.
It was also clear to Barbe-Nicole that Édouard didn’t need her there every day to do it. She would never be ready to let go entirely of the business she had created, and she wasn’t even remotely prepared to sell out. But in 1841, at sixty-four, the Widow Clicquot retired. It was time. From Épernay came word that her old competitor Jean-Rémy Moët had died, and it was the passing of a generation. Her generation. Jean-Rémy had left the company in the capable hands of his son Victor and his aristocratic son-in-law, Pierre-Gabriel Chandon de Briailles, who famously did business together under the name Moët et Chandon. She knew that before long, she would have to trust the business entirely to Édouard, one way or the other.
Now, she decided not to wait, at least not formally. Still, it wasn’t much of a retirement in the end. Barbe-Nicole was a workaholic and intent on keeping a guiding hand in the business to which she had dedicated her life. Retirement simply meant that she would be able to spend more time at Boursault, and by the 1840s she was spending only the winter months in Reims. She might have felt old at sixty-four, but if Louis de Chevigné had been thinking he would come into his inheritance anytime soon, he was sadly mistaken. Contrary to all expectations and at a time when the average woman in France lived fewer than forty-five years, Barbe-Nicole
still had a long life ahead of her. The champagne company she had transformed from a small family business into one of the world’s great commercial empires would still be at the center of it. Years later, the traveler Robert Tomes remembered “Madame Clicquot [as] a dwarfish, withered old woman of eighty-nine years, whose whole soul was in business, scanning over each day to her last the ledger of the commercial house to which she had given her name.”
Even so, Barbe-Nicole did now agree to let Édouard take over as director of the company, and she approved bringing two new partners into the business. Monsieur Dejonge became the early equivalent of company chief financial officer and was the CFO responsible for the increasingly complex account books. Then, with Édouard’s own promotion to what we would now think of as CEO, there was an opening for a new cellar master, in charge of overseeing the winemaking operations. That job—and the new partnership—went to Monsieur de Sachs. Surrounded by all these counts and barons and eager to be treated with the same grand dignity, the new cellar master soon remembered a noble ancestor in Germany of his own. As one visitor to Reims put it: “He is also a German, and a nephew, it is believed, of [Édouard] Werler. Although boasting a German title, he was not better provided for in his youth than his poor and adventurous uncle.”
In this company organization, Barbe-Nicole was a one-woman board of directors. Internationally, she had already become an icon—although too often it was an icon without a face. She was quickly becoming purely a name in the eyes of the world, even if it was a famous and elegant one. By 1842, it wasn’t simply that the word Clicquot had become synonymous with champagne. A “bottle of the Widow” was beginning to take on a larger cultural role. The Clicquot champagne was already appearing in some of the century’s greatest works of literature. But with her retirement, Barbe-Nicole the woman was disappearing from public view. While her partners dedicated themselves to the continued expansion of her company, which soon had sales figures topping four hundred thousand bottles of champagne a year, Barbe-Nicole tried to enjoy the role of grandmama. “Here I have my grandchildren and great-grandchildren around me,” she wrote to her cousin that year. “It is a reminder to me that I am not young and will be thinking about packing up soon and saying good-bye, which I shall do as late as possible.” She was as good as her word on that score.
However much she tried to fit into the nineteenth-century model of the domestic grandmother, however, Barbe-Nicole could never manage it. After a lifetime of twelve-hour workdays, she needed more than lively children to occupy her mind. Louis de Chevigné had thrown himself into garden designs and writing bad poetry. Barbe-Nicole resumed her passion for buying—and decorating—houses. With the revitalized champagne firm of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and Werlé now bringing in annual sales of more than $30 million a year, money was no object. And to save the Count and Countess of Mortemart the humiliation of just a small country château, she offered to build the family an immense new one.
Now firmly ensconced among the noble families of France, the Chevigné and Mortemart families ran in the most splendid circles, and Barbe-Nicole enjoyed the festive and elaborate family parties that Louis, in particular, relished arranging. On the feast of her namesake, Saint Barbara, in early December each year, there were lavish birthday celebrations that he arranged to please her, and he would improvise flattering poems to amuse her and her noble admirers. Like her father and, more recently, like Édouard Werlé, she was taken with all the trappings of aristocracy. “I am making preparations,” Barbe-Nicole wrote, “for my removal to the country and M[onsieur] de Mortemart…is coming down with one of his friends and his brother-in-law, the Marquis d’Avaray. Since my old château is so small, I cannot receive too many visitors at a time, but we are building a new one which will be able to house up to twenty guests and as many servants, which should save me much embarrassment and allow me to put up many more people without giving up my own bed.”
The new mansion was years—and hundreds of thousands of francs—in the making. Paying for the new construction meant that Barbe-Nicole had a free hand to indulge her fancy. She had always been drawn to the Renaissance style in particular. Her home at the Hôtel le Vergeur was built with a classical facade. But this wouldn’t be the impressive house of a rich merchant like her home in Reims. She wanted a palace and with the architect, Jean-Jacques Arveuf-Fransquin, hit on a plan to design a château that would imitate—and rival—the famous castles of the Loire Valley. Built of a warm golden stone and topped with airy towers, it is delicate and ethereal.
In the nineteenth century, an amusing story of its construction was told among the locals. “Not content…with the old-fashioned house at the bottom,” Barbe-Nicole, it was said, “raised an imposing structure at the top of the hill. This…is [as] much like a veritable château, with pepperbox turrets, as the imagination of the aspiring architect, aided by all the wealth of the Clicquots, could make it. Its grandiose spaciousness and luxurious appurtenances make it the wonder of every Parisan badaud [sightseer] and rustic visitor. Among its other attractions is a dining room, adorned with elaborate armorial carvings in wood, with which are intertwined the initials of C. and M., of the noble names of Chevigné and Mortemart. On one occasion a party of the neighboring farmers paid a visit to the château…. On reaching the dining room, he pointed, with conscious pride at serving such a distinguished master, to the carved armorial shields surmounted with a double crown, and bearing in gold the initials C. and M.
“‘You see,’ said the cicerone [guide]…‘those letters mean Chevigné-Mortemart.’
“‘Bah!’ replied one of the knowing country-men…. ‘They mean, I tell you, Champagne Mousseux. Wasn’t that the making of their fortune?’” She might be the mother of a countess these days, but the locals never let anyone forget that Barbe-Nicole and her family had entrepreneurial roots. They knew perfectly well that it was champagne that bought all this splendor and not ancient family titles.
More than a century later, one of her ancestors remembered growing up at Boursault: “It was a grand château, all white, clinging to the side of a wooded hillside…in the middle of a vast park with the scents of fresh water, gooseberries, honey, and flowers.” Another visitor described the “dining-room…adorned with modern tapestries and richly sculptured panels…a monumental chimney-piece of Burgundy stone.” Her niece Juliette recalled how the drawing room “opened onto a library placed in a turret,” a testament to Barbe-Nicole’s enduring love of books and their world of chivalric romance.
Today, getting a glimpse of Barbe-Nicole’s château can be done only from a distance, over the height of a stone wall at a point where the enclosed park dips low and the narrow country road that skirts it on the south clings conveniently to the higher hill. Or it means taking one’s chances with the proprietor of the winery now set just inside the gates of the park—a pleasant and handsome man, dressed impeccably in cashmere, who is quite determined to protect the privacy of the current owners. After pleading my obsession late one afternoon, we were finally rewarded with the briefest of visits: ten minutes in the grounds to look at the house and peek in the windows. The château emerges dramatically from the woodland parks that surround the estate. As the eye is drawn along the sweeping pathway to the grand front entrance, a simple Latin inscription that she had added is still visible: Natis Mater, Mother to Her Children. She was generous to a fault. But Barbe-Nicole was also a domineering and insistent mother.
Barbe-Nicole had already been playing the matriarch for years, slowly moving her family from the affluent bourgeoisie to the ruling classes. Ironically, it was in part her rejection of the stereotypes of her day that gave her this domestic stature and power. Of course, there were some things she could not control, and it would seem young Marie-Clémentine’s love life was among them. No one knows if it was a thwarted affair of the heart or just a one-sided obsession. But today there is one other way to get a good look at the Château de Boursault. Marie’s lovesick admirer, the great industrialist and railway in
novator Adalbert Deganne, whom the family had turned down as a suitor back in 1839 after four years of devoted courtship, built an exact replica of it in the southwest of France, on the beach of the spa town of Arcachon. Deganne’s castle—an extravagant mark of his devotion to the now matronly Marie—is today preserved as one of the town’s splendid casinos. Inside, amid the dizzy whizzing of the slot machines, it is hard to imagine many similarities between this château and the rural hush of Boursault, but from the quiet distance of a café table on a summer’s evening, over a couple of staggeringly expensive cocktails, it is quite enchanting.
Oddly enough, the other thing no one could control was Louis de Chevigné’s spending habits or his sexuality. Still gambling, he was always in debt. Considering he was a rich man, with a mother-in-law who bank-rolled his lifestyle, he must have been reliably unlucky. Louis was undoubtedly still smarting under his mother-in-law’s decision to cut him out of the family economic engine. With his tighter control of the company purse strings, Édouard was also cramping his style. Louis knew he could count on his charm with chère Mama up to a point. He was beginning to wonder if perhaps that point hadn’t been reached. The problem was, he seemed always to owe someone money. Not the kinds of debts she was likely to pay—extra costs for the country gardens, something elegant for Clémentine or Marie—but debts for gambling. And there were debts for the other kinds of dubious evening entertainments that a dashing aristocrat could easily find himself drawn into after a few drinks too many.
What was an idle aristocrat to do but turn his passions to account? Apart from gambling, he had three: wearing fancy clothes, writing bad poetry, and acting the playboy. Charles Monselet visited the family at Boursault and recalled that “the Comte de Chevigné…was the very image of the dandy, he had the obvious good-looks of the man of fashion, the plumpness of riches…. His wealth had allowed him to indulge in the pleasures of poetry.” Trimming his expenses with the tailor was unthinkable. But his translations of some classical Latin poems had been politely received, and he knew that his friends found his bawdy verses very witty. Impromptu poetic toasts were one of his social hallmarks, and he had been privately collecting some of his better little compositions. Increasingly, those pleasures were in poetry with a naughty twist. In the first years of his marriage to Clémentine, he had regaled his friends with private details—and they had written to ask for more. Already, he had turned his hand to writing erotic verse, which was meant to be philosophical and rakish.
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