The Widow Clicquot (3 page)

Political events in France
had unfolded quickly that summer. A bread riot in Paris that June grew into a grassroots political movement, and within weeks, the people of France had had enough. In a direct challenge to the king and the nobility, they demanded a role in the collection of taxes. By July, Louis XVI, tone-deaf as usual, had managed only to antagonize and infuriate the revolutionaries, and there were tens of thousands of citizens in the streets of Paris, calling for change. Then, on July 14, the notorious Parisian prison, the Bastille, was stormed by a bloody, murderous mob, and the king and his queen, the despised Marie Antoinette, became prisoners in their palace at Versailles.

Reims is only a short distance east of Paris, and word of events in the capital spread quickly. The result was instantaneous. Suddenly, all of Reims was in the streets. The Revolution was at its heart a class war, and aristocrats and clerics were abused and stripped of their estates. The fabled vineyards at Hautvillers were among those confiscated and returned to the people. In the days that followed, public squares throughout the Champagne were given over to protest marches, jubilant celebrations, and the mobs. When the first news of the unrest reached Reims, Nicolas Ponsardin joined the Revolution.

Being known as a friend of the aristocracy was a dangerous situation at the dawn of the Revolution. Men were killed for less in these turbulent and lawless times. Suddenly, the very fact of being wealthy and socially prominent—the fact of having participated in the feudal systems that had governed life in rural France for centuries—placed one’s family in jeopardy, and Nicolas was among the first to grasp the implications for life in Reims.

Nicolas was no martyr and did not intend that his family should become martyrs, either. Astonishingly, he not only weathered the complete about-face in the political climate, but also prospered under it, rising to even greater local prominence and power in the years of Barbe-Nicole’s early adolescence. The Revolution, it transpired, would be a boon for anyone in the wealthy industrial classes able to keep his wits about him. Nicolas did a quick political calculation and decided without hesitation that the best chances for him and his family—his gracious and demure wife, Jeanne-Clémentine, and his three young children—was to support the Revolution with open enthusiasm. Assessing his options, he probably decided that he did not have much of a choice.

Nicolas not only joined the protesters, but he joined the most radical fringe, the Jacobins, whose members called for a permanent end to the monarchy in France. He became a representative of his city in the new National Assembly, joining thousands of other prominent local citizens from around France in the exercise of democratic politics. In those first heady days of the Revolution, he surely took to the streets. The broad avenues of Reims were the hotbed of political activity, much of it bitterly retributive. The citizens were celebrating, but there was a nervous tension in the air. The wisest of the nobles made plans for a hasty flight into exile.

The cathedral of Reims, with its ancient royal treasures, was the target of public fury from the mobs that now filled the streets. The National Assembly and the new revolutionary government—with Nicolas as a member—outlawed all the churches of France and renamed them “temples of reason.” Perhaps he stood watching as the vial of sacramental oil used to anoint the kings of France, guarded for centuries, was carried by an ecstatic crowd through the cool air to the central square of the city—once called the Place Royale but now renamed the more patriotic Place Nationale. It was only a few minutes’ walk from the quiet splendor of the Hôtel Ponsardin. There, under the vacant stare of a statue of Louis XV, the sacred glass vial was publicly smashed.

Carried along with the crowds, Nicolas must have also watched as the ancient church and the nearby royal Palace of Tau, home to the kings of France during their coronation, were looted and vandalized. The cathedral was stripped of its heraldic decorations, and the portraits of the kings of France were burned and trampled underfoot. Today, the cold stone walls of the cathedral still bear the evidence of this distant turmoil, although it pales in comparison with what all of the city and its Gothic masterpiece suffered in the first decades of the twentieth century. Only the delicate carved floral decorations remained unscathed. They were said to depict every plant that grew in the fields of the Champagne and on the mountain and vine-laced hills that rose over the city to the south. The people of Reims never forgot their ties to the land or their respect for it.

In the open spaces where the city’s broad boulevards meet, men like Nicolas soon erected festive altars to the goddess of a new secular religion. There, old married couples renewed their vows on the streets as a symbol of faithfulness in a new order, and in the central square children decorated liberty trees with ribbons and flowers. Nicolas is said to have planted one of these trees himself. In Paris, the women marched bare-breasted through the streets, and even in Reims young women were lifted indelicately aloft by the crowds and paraded along the avenues, scantily draped in loose-fitting togas and wearing crowns with a simple word on their foreheads:
LIBERTY
. The image of these young women is still a familiar symbol of freedom and democracy: Look no further than America’s Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France.

Although other parents decked their daughters in white gowns and flowers to parade through the streets, Nicolas was not about to put his children on public display. In fact, despite his political prominence in the new revolutionary movement, he would do everything in his power to calm local politics and keep his family from drawing any unnecessary attention. Perhaps it is another reason we know so little about the childhood of Barbe-Nicole.

Nicolas had the best motives for wanting to keep his family out of the public eye, for shrouding life at the Hôtel Ponsardin in silence. Anything else was simply too dangerous. Behind the precarious facade of republicanism, the Ponsardin family guarded an explosive secret for the next decade. Despite her father’s public role as a Jacobin patriot and willing convert to the cult of secular reason, there was a very different reality. Barbe-Nicole was less a child of the Revolution than a child of the Champagne—a place rich in the legend and mysteries of kings, where, even from the distant rolling vineyards, the eye could find on the horizon the spire of the great cathedral of Reims.

B
arbe-Nicole was the member of a uniquely important generation, perhaps one of the most important in Western history. Scholars tell us that modern society—with its emphasis on commerce and the freedom of the individual—was invented in the wake of the French Revolution. For a thousand years, the social fabric of France had remained essentially the same. People thought of themselves as part of an extensive network of relationships that stretched back over generations. They were defined by the social roles they had inherited, roles they accepted as absolute.

For this new postrevolutionary generation, which grew to adulthood after 1789, that network unraveled. What the Revolution taught them was that the world could change in the most radical ways. Peasants could become politicians. Kings—once esteemed as gods—could face the executioner. The young Italian soldier Napoléon Bonaparte, who would soon rule one of the world’s great empires but had spent much of his childhood at an impoverished boarding school in the Champagne, became one of his generation’s best representatives.

The structure of society in this new modern era was based on commercial relations and on the display of commodities. In many ways, it was not very different from the world in which we now live. Because people started to see their dreams reflected in the goods they purchased, there was a second economic revolution. Before long, champagne would become one of those defining products that told people who they were. The explosion of the fashion industry hit closer to home for Barbe-Nicole and her family. Their luxurious lifestyle, after all, depended on the textile trade.

In the 1780s and 1790s, the world went crazy for fashion in a way it never had before. A generation earlier, clothes were a sign of whatever good fortune you had inherited. The aristocracy had always spent recklessly and famously on fashion, of course. Marie Antoinette couldn’t get enough diamond shoe buckles or silk petticoats. They were symbols of power and privilege that she manipulated shrewdly. Now, middle-class citizens embraced fashion, which also became democratic. For the first time, the dresses of working people imitated the styles of the rich. And in revolutionary France, the upper classes, if they had any sense, pretty quickly started imitating the style of the peasants.

Fashion was at the heart of the Revolution. Another word for a member of the radical Jacobin Club was a
sans culottes
—someone who didn’t wear a rich man’s pants. During the months when people were haphazardly guillotined in the streets of France as public entertainment, ladies mimicked the look, cutting their hair in dramatic bobs and wearing blood-red ribbons around their necks. In Paris, the wives of republican politicians made a competition out of such fantastic costumes. In Great Britain, there was a special word for the men who imitated the revolutionary fashions of France and the United States: dandies. The word lives on in the old tune “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

As a young woman, Barbe-Nicole was not immune to fashion or to the social statements that it could make. Her sister, Clémentine, a local beauty, was notorious in Reims for her love of the latest styles. When she learned that everyone in London was wearing their hair stacked to towering heights and decorated with ribbons and trinkets, Clémentine had her portrait done, her granddaughter later remembered, “wearing a cloudy coiffure of white tulle and celestial blue ribbons.”

No one has identified a picture of Barbe-Nicole as a young woman, although there must once have been one. Small miniatures painted on ivory were common—the snapshots of the era. Even without a portrait, it is easy enough to imagine Barbe-Nicole at sixteen. Unlike her willowy sister, she was not conventionally pretty. She was plain and tended to be chubby. Her citizen identification card describes her at that age as very petite, a mere four and a half feet tall, but with gray eyes and hair that even the stern bureaucrat conceded was a poetic “ardent” blond. The word in French evokes the color of live coals or a glass of tawny spirits.

Like so many other daughters of revolutionary France, she wore the simple white muslin gowns that were patriotic symbols of a rustic and more egalitarian future. These white dresses were more than just a popular—and populist—fashion. Almost immediately, the more dogmatic leaders of the new republican government began calling for a required national dress code. By the end of the 1790s, it was foolhardy to wear anything else. Men wore their trousers tucked into working boots. Women’s simple gowns often had just one ornament: the national cockade. In her missing portrait, Barbe-Nicole surely has one pinned at her breast, in imitation of the great hostesses of Paris—a tricolor festoon of ribbons in the revolutionary colors of red, white, and blue.

If Barbe-Nicole appeared as the daughter of a French revolutionary and committed radical, appearances were deceiving. The Ponsardin family was living an elaborate lie—or at least a carefully constructed public deception. Her father had not only saved the family fortune; he had prospered during a peasant revolt. Embracing the revolutionary cause of the common man, he had risen to even greater political prominence while continuing to live a private life of upper-middle-class affluence and privilege that was essentially unchanged from the days of the ancien régime. This was all because Nicolas and his family understood the importance of keeping their secrets.

Barbe-Nicole’s marriage was part
of that collective silence. In 1798, the new century was swiftly approaching, and so was a new chapter in Barbe-Nicole’s life. Although the most terrible excesses of the Revolution had waned, France remained politically and socially unsettled in this new era of republicanism. In this climate, the twenty-year-old Barbe-Nicole was about to be married. Her intended was a catch—the dashing François Clicquot, handsome son of another wealthy and prosperous textile merchant, a man who also dabbled increasingly in the local wine trade.

Barbe-Nicole must have dreamed of a church wedding, with candles and a choir and the strong scent of incense in the air. Perhaps she and the family’s loyal dressmaker, the woman who had saved her from a revolutionary mob, now pored secretly over fashion plates from Paris, astonished at the fanciful dresses worn by the vibrant Madame Tallien and the other women who helped create the patriotic costumes of the new French Directory government. She knew, of course, that her father would never approve of such provocative attire for his daughter. It would only attract attention.

Besides, her dreams of a church wedding were illegal and dangerous. The practice of religion had been ended officially in France in 1794, and the Catholic rites were criminal. Her father had been part of the National Assembly that outlawed them. But the Ponsardin family was still Catholic. In fact, despite Nicolas’s public embrace of radical party politics and a new secular society dedicated to reason, he remained not only a Catholic but a staunch royalist. Nicolas, after all, had helped to crown a king, and he still dreamed of the day when he could boast a noble coat of arms. Privately and with great secrecy, Catholic families throughout France began to arrange dangerous, furtive religious ceremonies, while conforming outwardly to the new civic rituals of the republic.

So, in the early hours of a June morning, Barbe-Nicole, dressed simply but not unfashionably in the plain white muslin gown of a young revolutionary, married François, the only son of Philippe and Catherine-Françoise Clicquot, in a damp cellar before a small and anxious group of their families. Perhaps it was even in the cellars beneath her family’s grand estate: Since one of the passageways led underground to the new home where she and François would begin their lives together on rue de l’Hôpital, it would have been an obvious and convenient place for a secret gathering of the two families.

Interconnected cellars like this ran for three hundred miles underneath the city of Reims. According to legend, when the Romans built the ancient city of Reims (pronounced unaccountably to the Anglo-Saxon ear as “Rans”), then known as Durocortorum, they set thousands of enslaved men to digging out great blocks of limestone from quarries. These stones formed the foundation for the lively city of Barbe-Nicole’s girlhood, with its cool white-and-gray palette and soaring Gothic cathedral.

The vast empty spaces these Roman quarry workers left behind—dark and silent underground cathedrals of a different kind—became the town’s cellars and caverns. Businessmen such as her father employed them as storage depots, and for generations the monks, priests, and Knights Templars, whose presence in Reims dated back centuries, had used them as passageways beneath the cathedral and its nearby palace. The Hôtel Ponsardin stood in one of the most ancient and holy parts of the city, in what once was the heart of medieval Christendom. In modern times, wine merchants had already discovered that these passageways could serve as the climate-controlled wine cellars absolutely necessary to the production of the local sparkling wine that we enjoy as champagne.

Barbe-Nicole surely carried that day the traditional French bridal bouquet of roses and orange blossoms, and the soft breezes, which began somewhere in the distant tunnels that ran for miles underneath Reims, would have infused their summer scent into the empty coolness that surrounded this small party. The priest spoke quietly, conscious of the resounding echoes. The nerves of the assembled party were alert to every noise from outside. Discovery meant certain arrest and imprisonment. Later, the families completed the required secular contract, which confirms that Citizen Clicquot married Citizen Ponsardin on June 10, 1798—on 22 Pairial, in the sixth year of the new French republic.

Although this secret wedding may have seemed an inauspicious beginning, no place could have been more fitting than a cellar to celebrate a marriage that would change the history of wine. It would be in cellars such as this that Barbe-Nicole would craft her first vintage. Until the moment she married François, she had no personal connections to the sparkling wine with which the name Clicquot would one day be synonymous. She was simply the daughter of a wealthy and well-connected textile merchant, living a quiet life in a small city in the northeastern corner of France, and her marriage into a family with a wine brokerage was all more or less a matter of chance.

But Barbe-Nicole had been named after her maternal grandmother, a woman who would have been very pleased with all that this marriage would bring. Because Marie-Barbe-Nicole Huart–Le Tertre had been born a Ruinart—the daughter of Nicolas Ruinart, already a famous man in Reims. Although, like so many in the extended Ponsardin and Le Tertre families, he, too, had started life as a woolen dealer, this Nicolas was famous for champagne. He was the nephew of the monk Dom Thierry Ruinart, the friend and sometime collaborator of that legendary figure Dom Pierre Pérignon. As the story goes, before his death, Dom Pérignon imparted his winemaking secrets to Thierry, who passed them on to his nephew Nicolas, who founded in 1729 the world’s first champagne house. Barbe-Nicole’s great-grandfather had invented the industry that she would someday revolutionize.

The couple’s respective families had negotiated this marriage. If Nicolas no longer entertained ideas of an aristocratic marriage after the Revolution, he certainly intended to arrange an advantageous one. François’s family had also made their fortune in the local textile trade, although his father’s wine brokerage, established some time in the 1770s, was becoming an increasingly important sideline, advertised in national news circulars. By 1777, the year of Barbe-Nicole’s birth, the Clicquot wine brokerage was already selling a modest ten thousand bottles of wine a year, and a significant part of it was the local sparkling wine.

The Ponsardin family surely purchased wines from Philippe Clicquot during this period—perhaps even some of the champagne that their daughter would one day make famous. When Nicolas and Jeanne-Clémentine enjoyed a bottle of bubbly to celebrate the birth of their first child in 1777, perhaps it was a Clicquot family wine. The two families, after all, were near neighbors. The impressive Clicquot home, built along the gray cobblestone street known as rue de la Vache, was only a stone’s throw from the Hôtel Ponsardin. More important, the two fathers worked in the same business. Despite the wine sideline, Philippe Clicquot was first and foremost a textile merchant, and in Reims this was a tight business community. Nicolas and Philippe were local industry leaders, with their commercial offices next door to each other. Competitors and neighbors, the families undoubtedly lived in each other’s pockets.

By the time of their marriage, Barbe-Nicole and François had known each other for years, and it would be pleasant to imagine a childhood romance. The reality, however, was probably less sentimental. Marriage was an economic decision and not a romantic one, and it involved the future of an entire extended family. Children were not typically forced into marriages that they despised, but the first duty of a young girl especially was obedience and submission to her father: Love was something that blossomed within marriage and not a prelude to it. At its heart, this was a match arranged by their respective fathers, calculated to extend the complex web of social and entrepreneurial ties that connected the prominent merchant families of Reims.

Studying her new husband in the first days of their marriage, however, Barbe-Nicole had reason to be optimistic. François was an energetic young man, and he played the violin beautifully. He had been given a liberal and expensive education, and he could boast many accomplishments. Not only did he know the sums and figures of a businessman’s son, he could also quote from the great works of French literature and had read the famous philosophers of the Enlightenment, men like Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Barbe-Nicole’s private passion was reading, and it was common ground. François’s spelling, however, was dismal, and his command of the foreign languages necessary to the family business was not quite what his father wished. Still, he had big ideas and great enthusiasm, and unlike many husbands, he was willing to share both with her.