Barbe-Nicole listened to it all from the sidelines, perhaps with their five-year-old daughter, Clémentine, growing drowsy at her knee on those summer evenings. She and François were learning the winemaking business together, and she wished for the success of these new prospects, which seemed just on the horizon, with a passion equal to his own. When at last Louis set off in July for Russia, he went with her good wishes and all her hopes as well. Within weeks, they would have his first letters and soon, they hoped, news of astonishing sales.
The news, when it arrived, was crushing. For François, it must have been a terrible disappointment and an embarrassment as well. He already had the bungled London adventure to live down. Now it was clear that Russia would be a disaster, too. Writing from Saint Petersburg in the first days of October, Louis discovered that they had misjudged the market: “The excess of luxury [here] means that the broker, after all the costs are deducted, gains nothing and in a bad year is lost.” From Moscow, the news was worse. “The commerce in this place is excessively rotten and bad faith is the order of the day,” Louis wrote, adding bitterly, “Foreign companies are seen as nanny goats ready for milking.” Even if they got orders, he doubted they would ever get paid.
By the winter of 1805, François was undoubtedly depressed. The Russian numbers were miserable, accounting for just a small percentage of their sales. With Louis in Russia, moreover, they had lost ground in Germany. Then there was the war, which once again seemed endless and futile. The conflict with Great Britain, which had resumed in the summer of 1803, was pulling in more combatants, and some days it was difficult to know which foreign markets would stay open and which would close. The climate for international trade got worse with every passing week, with word of new battles and new blockades.
That winter was the sorry prelude to the period that historians talk about as the war of the Third Coalition—when Russia, Austria, and Sweden eventually joined Great Britain in a loose alliance against France. Napoléon wasn’t doing anything to turn down the political heat. In December, he had crowned himself emperor—not in the cathedral of Reims, like the kings of France since time immemorial, but in Paris. Now he was amassing troops for a planned invasion of England, perhaps in the spring. At the moment, nothing was certain, but an intensification of the war already seemed inevitable in the coming months, and there was no reason to expect a sudden improvement in their affairs. Barbe-Nicole was powerless, left to spend quiet afternoons in her sitting room, bent over some piece of fine needlework or glancing distractedly at a new novel sent from Paris, worrying about the future and what it might bring.
When the spring orders arrived in Reims, they should have raised François’s spirits. They were far better than expected. During those few months, they would ship over seventy-five thousand bottles of wine—more than their entire sales in 1804. Russia, not yet drawn into the simmering conflict, would account for an astonishing third of their sales. It had been a year of excruciating ups and downs, when they had begun to doubt in themselves and in the wisdom of François’s dreams of an international marketplace for their wines. Now, they should have been celebrating this small victory. It was a sign that they were doing something right. But François remained discouraged and dejected.
When the summer arrived, it was wet. They had seen enough summers to know that it was already too late to hope for anything from the harvest. It would be another failure. François, thwarted at every turn, could only watch the vineyards with despair, calculating over and over what this would mean in losses for the company, in new obstacles that he must have doubted his own ability to overcome. He had tried to reinvent the company he had inherited from his father, and he had been given all the advantages—sufficient capital, excellent training, an enviable list of international clients, contacts ready to do business with him, even a brief but important period of peace in which to build the company.
What was the result of it all? He had disappointed. His father surely warned him against staking the future on the distant and unsettled Russian market. Already by now, Napoléon and the czar, Alexander I, were at loggerheads, and by September it was open hostility. The future of international commerce was dark. Perhaps giving up the textile business had been a mistake. Perhaps bottling wines had been too great a risk. For those looking at the wet, muddy fields and at the useless grapes rotting on the vines, the worries were everywhere.
Then, sometime in early October, when the low vineyards sloping away from the mountain of Reims were again silent in the early hours of dawn, in the gloomy aftermath of that harvest, François—if the family version of events is true—must have found himself exhausted and consumed by a kind of frantic anxiety. As he sank quickly and deeply into a darker depression, the family began to worry in earnest.
The public story was that François had contracted an infectious fever. Like so many in Europe, they had lived with fears of the epidemic since the beginning of Napoléon’s wars, knowing that the disease was kept alive in the crowded and unhealthy conditions at the camps. In the nineteenth century, it was an easy death to imagine—far too easy and familiar. For two weeks, François suffered with what his doctors called simply putrid or malignant fever. Later generations would know the disease as typhoid. Only when the vomiting and chills began in the second week would Barbe-Nicole have understood the terrible truth about his illness. The resolute look of the doctor, when he came, must have told her what she already suspected. As François struggled to breathe, the ringing in his ears would have grown louder, and soon he was coughing blood, tormented by headaches. The telltale black spots soon covered his body, turning even his tongue to a black crust of infection, and everywhere, he ached. Barbe-Nicole could only watch his private agony.
For days, she suffered with him, surely sick with worry for the health of her little girl. She must have nursed the secret hope that he would be one of the lucky ones—one of the survivors. These hopes would soon be dashed. On October 23, after days of terrible torments, she could only feel relief to hear that François was dead. Three days later, numb with grief and horror, the Widow Clicquot buried her husband, after a funeral mass in the soaring Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims. At twenty-seven, Barbe-Nicole would now need to begin imagining a future alone.
This, at least, is the usual story of François’s death. If he was a victim of malignant fever, the doctor who treated him during his illness necessarily understood little about the actual nature of the infection. Typhoid remained a fearsome illness throughout much of the nineteenth century, and there was nothing reliable to be done for the patient unfortunate enough to contract it. If the doctor who tended to the Clicquot family during this sudden illness had been trained locally, at the medical university in Reims, he must have been struck by a cruel irony, however. The antiseptic properties of champagne were the subject of heated controversy among doctors and scientists in the region. Sparkling wine was thought to prevent—perhaps even to cure—the very illness that had struck down François Clicquot before the age of thirty.
In an eighteenth-century pamphlet entitled Question Agitated in the School of the Faculty of Medicine at Reims…on the Use of Sparkling Champagne Against Putrid Fevers and Other Maladies of the Same Nature (1778), Jean-Claude Navier cut to the heart of the controversy. Champagne was thought to possess particular curative powers. “It contains,” Dr. Navier wrote, “…a particular principle, which the Chemists call Gas or air fixed, a principle that characterizes it essentially, a principle recognized today as the most powerful antiseptic that there is in nature.”
Because Dr. Navier was a champagne insider, we might be forgiven for wondering if this was just another of the local marketing efforts, like the one that invented the legend of Dom Pérignon sixty years later. After all, Dr. Navier’s brother-in-law was none other than Jean-Rémy Moët, a competitor in the wine business. But the unlikely assertions that champagne could cure fever were apparently widespread.
The idea was not even simply a passing medical fashion, not
just one of those unaccountable and gruesome things doctors did at the dawn of the nineteenth century. For more than two hundred years, it had been conventional wisdom that the fermentation of wine was comparable to infections in the blood, leading to harebrained (but quite appealing) experiments with wine cures. Doctors still believed it as late as 1870, when Charles Tovey wrote, in a book called Champagne: Its History, Properties, and Manufactures: “Champagne, if pure, is one of the safest wines that can be drunk. In typhoid fevers, in weakness, in debility, when there is a deficiency of the vital powers, there is nothing which can take its place; it enables the system to resist the attacks of intermittent and malignant fever.”
To think that a bottle of his own sparkling wine might have saved François! Or perhaps the doctor who attended him tried this champagne cure but found his illness too far progressed to be cured, even by bubbly of the best kind. Certainly, champagne would have been a more welcome treatment than the other nineteenth-century remedies for infectious fever—bloodletting and enemas—and one hopes that François’s final moments were soothed with a healthy medicinal dose of the Clicquot sparkling rosé that he and Barbe-Nicole had found such pleasure in crafting.
Barbe-Nicole knew that Philippe was broken by the death of his son. The intensity of her own grief was nothing compared with the depression that gripped her father-in-law. He could speak of little besides his despair, even in the most routine business correspondence. “Nothing,” he wrote in one of his letters, “can ever assuage the deep sorrow I feel. My loss is brought back to me every moment. Old age and increasing infirmity…have made me determined to retire and rest and have necessitated an interval between life and death.” Past caring, Philippe settled down to wait and die.
Perhaps Barbe-Nicole considered doing the same when she heard the horrifying rumors circulating in Reims in the weeks after her husband’s death. There is another story of how François died. People whispered that he had committed suicide. The scene is almost too terrible to imagine: François lying white and motionless in cool, bloody bathwater, perhaps, after the famous 1794 image of the slain revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat that hangs today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Reims. There is the scream of the servant finding François or perhaps just the dull shock of his father, Philippe, after seeing the knife that had dropped from his son’s hand, the slow dawning of understanding, the terrible conviction of what it meant for his eternal soul—and, above all, the desperate hope of finding a doctor who would keep their secret, so François could be buried in sacred Catholic ground.
There is no direct evidence that the gossip was true. It may have been nothing more than vicious rumor or a confused sense of his other symptoms. The first sign of typhoid would have been a sense of hopelessness, after all. The very name typhoid comes from the Greek word for “smoke” and was chosen because mental confusion, irrational anxiety, and unspecified despair are the disease’s earliest and most persistent signs. As eighteenth-century readers of William Buchan’s The Domestic Medicine (1797) were told: “The malignant fever is generally preceded by a remarkable weakness…. This is sometimes so great that the patient can scarcely walk, or even sit upright, without being in danger of fainting away. His mind too is greatly dejected; he sighs, and is full of dreadful apprehensions.”
But the story might equally have been true. There is no doubt that François was down that autumn. The business had been struggling. There had also been hints all along that François was prone to bouts of depression and mania that had less obvious causes. People described him sometimes as a man of irrepressible energies and enthusiasm. He loved big plans and big ideas, and he lived with an almost frantic exuberance. The other side of François seems to have been darker.
If Barbe-Nicole ever spoke of it, the letters have not survived. Some of Philippe’s early correspondence with his son, however, hints that François’s tendency toward “gloom” worried his father. In one letter, written on Christmas Day 1793, Philippe urged his son, “Do not abandon yourself to a sort of melancholy gloom that can harm you and retard the development of your faculties and prolong the weakness of your temperament. Your happiness, your existence is all that makes mine precious.” We hear the resonance of a father worried about his son’s mental health.
Whatever the truth—and one hopes it was fever that took François—Barbe-Nicole is sure to have resented the rumored cause of his suicide: business failure. Local reports circulated that in those first years of running the family business, François was busy driving the company into the ground. He had developed a new—and, it was said, fundamentally flawed—business strategy. He had committed himself to a risky commercial approach to selling wines and was failing. As one nineteenth-century historian tells the story, “While big with this magnificent project, death came and cut short the career of…[François] Clicquot, the former husband of the Widow Clicquot Ponsardin. Common rumor at Rheims tells a different story of the exit of this notable personage, saying that he cut his throat in despair of the success of the ‘entirely different commercial system’ with which his biographer credits him.”
Barbe-Nicole herself surely despaired at moments that autumn. She could remember François as he had been—kind and generous to his family, alive with all the plans for the wine business that was his dream. Perhaps there were periods of serious depression, too. There certainly had been times of worry. Still, they had been, on the whole, happy, and now she saw that everything they had worked for in their seven years of marriage would be lost: all the risks in opening new markets abroad, the new adventures in making their own wines, the future of a business that, despite the more limited role she had been given to play, she cared about as deeply as François.
Her father-in-law, Philippe, could not bear to think of the future, and the entire company would be liquidated. It was said that he had also abandoned himself to the “profound depression” that perhaps was part of a family tendency. Maybe the very idea of a family business was just too painful a reminder of what he had lost. He did muster the energy to write Louis Bohne in Russia, telling him to return to Reims immediately. There was no point in Louis taking new orders when they would never fill them.
When Louis received the letter with news of François’s death, he was stunned. He and François were more than just employee and employer. They were building a company together, and opening these new markets in Saint Petersburg had been a shared passion. It was a warm relationship, born of years of shared correspondence, which Louis posted from the road, with news of his travels and with perceptive, often witty accounts of their commercial prospects in each city. Only months before, they had spent long hours together debating the risks and the rewards of this excursion to Russia with his father, and Louis had fueled François’s enthusiasm for this adventure.
They should have been still celebrating the success of the year’s orders, even if the harvest had gone badly. A failed vendange would create real headaches a year or two down the road, when those wines would be coming to market, but it was not an immediate disaster. For now, sales were up, and they had stock to fill them. There was time. Then, suddenly, his instructions were to abandon everything. Looking out on a stark November day, conscious of the early signs of another northern winter, Louis wasted no time in obeying them. He would have set off for Reims instantly, even if Philippe had not asked it, for Louis hoped that there might be some way to prevent Clicquot-Muiron from closing its doors, if only he could return quickly enough.
Louis traveled hard, for he arrived back in the Champagne in less than a month. It was a journey of more than a thousand miles, accomplished alternatively by horseback, carriage, and barge. By the time he arrived in Reims in December, perhaps Barbe-Nicole was already beginning to formulate a daring plan of her own. She knew something about the family business, after all. She came from a family of entrepreneurs. Surely she remembered that there were other women in the wine trade—women like the Widow Robert, who ran the depository in Paris, or the Widow Blanc, who supplied some of t
heir barrel wines at Clicquot-Muiron.
Barbe-Nicole also knew that her genteel-class background made striking out on her own complicated. These other women didn’t come from proud and important bourgeois families, and increasingly, the daughters and wives of wealthy entrepreneurs were meant to decorate drawing rooms with their lovely looks and elegant manners, not to run businesses. If she needed a model, she had only to look to her sister, Clémentine, already a fashionable domestic lady of leisure. And she had her father’s ambitions to consider. Nicolas was already on intimate terms with Napoléon, now emperor of France. Her father would certainly prefer to see his daughter married again safely—and perhaps, if she could manage it, splendidly.
Mulling over the possibilities, she recognized that the idea taking shape in her imagination was out of step with the tenor of her times. The moment when enterprising widows could respectably run a family trade was passing, in part because the very model of the family-run business was disappearing quickly as well. Nowhere was this truer than in textile centers like Reims, where the economic future was in the large, professionally managed factories that had created the Ponsardin and Clicquot fortunes. Everyone around her agreed that a genteel young woman and a mother had no place in the business world. Already, “the bourgeoisie of yesteryear who had tended the [company] books had…metamorphosed into the lady clad in silks and absorbed in social and religious life.” The wiser course was to embrace a quiet and comfortable life of polite invisibility, dedicated to domestic motherhood and pious circumspection.
We have no way of knowing precisely when Barbe-Nicole first began to imagine a different future for herself—or when she began to believe that it might actually be possible. Perhaps it was only a vague plan that she thought about sometimes in those first weeks of mourning, when she grieved not only for François but also for the end of the enterprise to which he had been devoted so passionately. When Louis Bohne returned in December, recalled by that awful letter telling him of François’s death, however, he found Barbe-Nicole very willing to hear what he had to say about the possibilities for the future of the company, and it appears that Barbe-Nicole was energized by his return. When it came to saving the business, Barbe-Nicole and Louis were soon of one mind. The problem would be convincing anyone else.
The Widow Clicquot Page 9