The Widow Clicquot

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Glowering nearby stood the young man Barbe-Nicole thought of simply as Clémentine’s subprefect. The assistant chief of the Reims police had been courting Clémentine steadily for weeks. It was pleasant to see him set back on his heels a bit, because regardless of how many suitors charmed Clémentine, the decision about whom her daughter would marry—and for how much money—was one that Barbe-Nicole fully intended to make. The anxious subprefect didn’t have a chance.

  But neither did this charming young man at her daughter’s side, she was afraid. He was fabulously rich, and when he had asked for Clémentine’s hand in marriage, she had proposed the generous dowry of 100,000 francs—more than $2 million—in cash as a wedding gift. His family was bargaining for three times that amount, despite knowing that Clémentine would eventually inherit another sizable fortune from Nicolas and her mother, who had made her their heiress, in addition to her being her mother’s only child. Barbe-Nicole had countered by offering the income from another 100,000 francs a year, but it seemed clear this was not going to be enough. Already, in a moment of frustration, she had protested at the indignity of selling girls “like cabbages in the market.”

  Indignity aside, however, Barbe-Nicole knew that marriage was a marketplace. Her own wedding to François had been the result of similar negotiations. Still, to her cousin Jennie, Barbe-Nicole confessed that it was making her anxious. “All this marriage talk,” she wrote to Mademoiselle Gard, “for a month has been making my head spin, so much so that I cannot sleep.” All that spring, Barbe-Nicole chaperoned Clémentine to one party after another, waiting for the girl to catch the eye of a likely suitor. For young women like Clémentine, the stakes were high. Girls were expected to catch a husband their first year out of the convent—especially if they were the heiress to a grand champagne fortune. Anything else would be an embarrassment. At party after party, however, Clémentine seemed to have no luck.

  Then, one evening, quite unexpectedly, Barbe-Nicole discovered a new prospect. He was sitting in her drawing room. For a young man of his class, he had slender means, and men of slender means did not often frequent the imposing Clicquot home. But this was no ordinary young man. His name was Louis Marie-Joseph Chevigné—the Count of Chevigné. Her father, Nicolas, was giddy at the prospect. Since those long years before the Revolution, he had dreamed of power and the aristocracy. Now that the empire of Napoléon was also a thing of memory, Nicolas had been relieved to learn that King Louis XVIII had reconfirmed his title as Baron Ponsardin. A baron was nothing next to a count, however, and Nicolas—like all the rest of the extended Clicquot-Ponsardin family—took an immediate liking to this twenty-four-year-old nobleman with flowing dark hair and flamboyant sexuality.

  Barbe-Nicole took a liking to him, too. In fact, it may be that she took a bit too much of a liking to Louis de Chevigné. He certainly understood that Clémentine’s hand depended, as much as anything else, on his wooing her mother. According to at least one account of the family legend, Barbe-Nicole “was infatuated.” Letters from his friends show that Louis had a calculating side in the whole business. He set out to marry Clémentine because he wanted the riches that came with it: “easy living for the time being, and opulence in the future,” as one of his friends summed it up. It is hard to imagine that anyone who knew him believed that he would ever make a faithful, steady husband, either. But he was charming—so charming that very little else seemed to matter either to the awkward young Clémentine or to the famously hardheaded Barbe-Nicole—a woman who had turned down far wealthier suitors before this struggling young count arrived in Reims.

  Perhaps it was the tragedy of Louis’s life story that Barbe-Nicole found so compelling. It reminded her of her own childhood during the Revolution and of the terrors that might have been their fate, were it not for her father’s keen political sense of timing. While the enterprising Ponsardin family had not only survived the Revolution, but flourished, Louis’s family had been destroyed. In 1793, the year of the most violent purges, his parents disdained the republican mobs. They lived a life of unimaginable splendor and privilege. Louis’s beautiful mother spent her nights “assisting at the balls of Marie Antoinette, [and] being invited to the theatre at Versailles.” His father, the count, spent his days “riding in the carriages of Louis XVI, and…accompanying his majesty to the hunt.” They had been born to rule France and to protect their king. His father joined the royalist forces fighting to put down the democratic insurrection, not knowing that his wife—like so many other noblemen and-women in that year of frenzied horror—would spend her final days in a foul prison, half-starved and brutalized.

  Louis was only a few months old when the arrest order came. In those days, they were sudden, capricious, and violent. Revolutionaries arrived at the doorstep, dragged their victims into hay carts, and paraded them through the streets, where they were taunted and often much, much worse. An Englishwoman who witnessed such arrests was horrified. “It was not uncommon,” she wrote, “for a mandate of arrest to direct the taking of ‘Citizen Such-a-one, and all persons found in his house.’ A grand-daughter of [one aristocrat] was arrested in the night, put in an open cart, without any regard to her age, her sex, or her infirmities, though the rain fell in torrents; and, after sleeping on straw in different prisons on the road, was deposited here [where] our holy mother Guillotine is at work. Within these three days she has shaved eleven priests, one ci-devant [former] noble, a nun, a general, and a superb Englishman, six feet high, and as he was too tall by a head, we have put that into the sack!”

  When they came for Louis’s mother and for her sister, the Countess de Marmande, all five of the Chevigné children—Louis and his four elder sisters—were taken to prison as well, where they would await trial for treason against the state and the almost inevitable execution in the public squares that came with it. But before the guillotine, celebrated in this year of frenzy as an instrument of rationality and justice, could take them, Louis’s mother, aunt, and three of his sisters were dead from the crippling diseases that spread throughout the unsanitary cells. In the final hours of her life, his mother made a heartbreaking decision. She begged a woman passing through the halls to take her two surviving children—the baby Louis and his nine-year-old sister, Marie-Pélagie. Perhaps she hoped that they would be reunited with their father. But he would die, too, before the summer was out, and the children were left orphans, dependent on the charity of strangers. Luckily, two wealthy women in the town of Nantes stepped forward quietly to take them. Madame Andigné adopted his sister, and Madame de Rouillon promised to care for the baby Louis, now heir to the abolished title of count and in great danger if discovered, until his family could come for him—if any of them escaped the guillotine.

  In the end, both Louis and Marie-Pélagie, along with their uncle, the Count of Chaffault, came through those dangerous years alive. As a young woman, Marie-Pélagie was married and became Madame Urvoy de Saint-Bedan, while at thirteen Louis, now under the care of his uncle, was sent to an imperial boarding school in Nantes, where he would be trained for an officer’s position in the military guard. While he served Napoléon, however, in his heart he was a royalist. In the last days of the empire, when Bonaparte returned from exile to fight his final battle at Waterloo, the twenty-two-year-old Louis fought for the restoration of the kings of France. As his reward, Louis XVIII returned to the young count all his titles—but no one could restore the family fortunes. Louis, a dispossessed young lord with the less than princely annual income of some 8,000 francs (a not quite impoverished $160,000 a year), retired to his uncle’s small estate in Boursault, a mountainous village on the south banks of the river Marne, in the heart of the Champagne wine country.

  Now, Louis found himself in the drawing rooms of one of the richest families in Reims, proposing to marry its only daughter. Nearly forty, Barbe-Nicole was as enamored with the dream of power and aristocratic connections as her father, Nicolas, had ever been. Ironically, this fiercely independent woman never considered the
possibility of her daughter following in her footsteps. There was no question of Clémentine remaining single and taking over the helm of this feminine commercial empire. There was no question even of Clémentine marrying a wealthy entrepreneur who might let her listen quietly at the sidelines in silent partnership, as Barbe-Nicole had done in the first years of her marriage to François—not now that there was the chance of making her a countess or of marrying her to a man with the magnetic charisma of Louis de Chevigné. But Barbe-Nicole was not completely head over heels. Making her daughter a countess was also going to be very good for business. During the boom years of the champagne industry, “obtaining noble titles was a shrewd marketing strategy,” adding to the glamour and allure of the company name—and profits to the company coffers.

  The marriage was at its heart a business deal, and it is a sign of Barbe-Nicole’s own attraction to Louis that he managed to get the better half of it. She had refused to budge from a dowry of 100,000 francs in order to marry Clémentine to a man with an astounding fortune. The landless Louis bemoaned the same number publicly—though privately he knew that “a mother with an only daughter will do for friendship what she might not promise on paper.” In the letters flying between Louis and his friends during the negotiations, no one doubted that the more Barbe-Nicole saw of Louis, “the less she will be able to refuse.”

  They were right. At first, Barbe-Nicole had balked at the negotiations. Some say that the timid Clémentine, perhaps tired of this parade of suitors, for once insisted and threatened to enter her Paris convent permanently. Already, Barbe-Nicole could not say “no” to this intoxicating young count. She had fumed the last time that anything more than 100,000 francs would jeopardize her own decidedly comfortable lifestyle. “I won’t make myself destitute,” she wrote her cousins, “it would be too hard to have to go begging to one’s children.” Now, she offered Louis 200,000 francs and an annual income of another 20,000—plus free accommodation with her in the family home on rue de l’Hôpital for years to come. It was expected, of course, that the young couple would live in the family home. And Louis knew that when Barbe-Nicole died, there would be more money. One of his friends rather callously reminded him that it was worth “awaiting the rest of the inheritance—which shouldn’t take long.”

  The engagement was formally announced in July, and plans were soon under way for an elaborate wedding in the nearby cathedral. In the elegant invitations, copies of which can still be found in one of the Clicquot family genealogies, Barbe-Nicole announced that the wedding was planned in Reims on the tenth of September. As was befitting Monsieur le Comte, Louis started complaining almost immediately that Clémentine’s dresses were not sophisticated or grand enough to impress his aristocratic friends. Soon Barbe-Nicole had given her future son-in-law control even over Clémentine’s wedding gown—and the generous budget that went with it. Her cousin in Paris was placing many of the orders for lace and silks, and Barbe-Nicole quickly threw up her hands and handed over the bankbook. “Arrange as you like with Monsieur de Chevigné about the trousseau,” she wrote. “I know little about such things [except that] usually it’s money thrown away.”

  Then, just as the wedding plans were working themselves into fever pitch, came terrible news. In August, just weeks before the ceremony, Barbe-Nicole’s brother, Jean-Baptiste, was found dead, from causes that were never recorded. There was no longer any question of the sumptuous wedding that Louis de Chevigné was so eagerly and expensively planning. The entire family was in mourning, and convention demanded a respectful show of restraint and sobriety for months to come. Instead of the social event of the season, Clémentine was married—like her mother before her—in a quiet family mass.

  Although she would never have wished for something so terrible to happen to her uncle or her aunt Thérèse, Clémentine must have been secretly relieved that she would not have to stand up to the rigors of a grand social occasion. She was a modestly pretty girl, but a convent education and a domineering mother had formed her into an obedient and awkwardly innocent young woman, always anxious about behaving properly. Her new husband was naturally gracious and fashionable—and was very particular that his wife should have the same appearance.

  Her convent education also could not have prepared her for sex, and there was no question about Louis being a lusty sort. It’s hard not to feel for poor Clémentine. After her wedding night, the girl was embarrassed. It was weeks before Barbe-Nicole could report that “Clémentine is no longer shy with her husband, she tutoies him.” That Clémentine began her marriage using the formal form of French address rather than the familiar tu is a sad testament to how little influence she had in her choice of husband and to how little experience she had of men at all. Barbe-Nicole, made pragmatic by her experience of marriage and her years of struggling in the business world, was not exactly brimming with concern.

  How much more embarrassed Clémentine would have been in the first year of her marriage had she known of the other letters Louis was soon writing and receiving. His self-congratulatory rakish charm is more boorish than endearing. Clémentine became pregnant immediately, and before long there were locker-room references from his friend Richard Castel to the countess’s “pretty ‘bushel of wheat’” and to his conquests in the bedroom. That was nothing compared with what she had to look forward to. These raunchy references to their intimate life were merely a prelude to the risqué erotic tales that Louis would publish in the years to come. Perhaps he was already gathering materials. As one visitor to Reims who met Louis observed, “The Comte de Chevigné, who had not yet written his [erotic] fables, [was] perhaps still engaged in living them.”

  Clémentine and Louis were married just at the peak of the harvest season, and the three of them—the young couple and Barbe-Nicole—spent the first two weeks of their honeymoon together living at the family farm in Bouzy, where they could watch the vendange and visit the little pressing room where, years before, Barbe-Nicole first had learned some of the secrets of winemaking. Here, at last, Barbe-Nicole drew the line. Louis imagined that he would take a hand in the champagne business, and he began touring her vineyards and quizzing her growers. However much Barbe-Nicole adored her son-in-law, however willing she was to indulge all his whims, even the expensive ones, she wasn’t about to let him take over her company. In the beginning, it was their one source of tension. Soon, there would be others.

  Those new tensions would always be about money. Louis, it transpired, was not just a playboy but also a gambler, and in those days, men of fashion played for shockingly high stakes. In London, the Duchess of Devonshire—ancestress to Great Britain’s late princess Diana—lost millions at the faro tables, and her husband was forced to mortgage family estates that had been safeguarded for generations. Even the lowly sandwich was a sign of the times. It was invented when Lord Sandwich, determined to ruin himself in a gambling “hell,” as the rooms were then called, refused to break the game for dinner. The servants brought him meat between slices of bread instead. Some people have suggested that gambling “was a protest against bourgeois and capitalist modernity.” If so, Louis’s rebellion was part of his own assertion of aristocratic identity—identity complicated by his marriage to a middle-class heiress. Oddly enough, the pragmatic and steely Barbe-Nicole found men who took risks exhilarating and attractive. Perhaps it was an inclination formed in her girlhood, when the secrets of the Ponsardin family and her father’s political ambitions created an atmosphere of danger and excitement.

  Soon, Louis wanted a grand house for his society entertainments and trips to Paris. The couple was still living with Barbe-Nicole, and after Clémentine’s baby, a little girl named Marie-Clémentine, was born in the autumn of 1818, they started spending winters at a new house in the capital. Barbe-Nicole, who hadn’t visited Paris since her own girlhood, now sometimes went with them. Then, unable to refuse this son-in-law any of his costly whims, she also bought a country house near his uncle’s estate in the Marne River valley—a small château
perched at the top of a rocky outcrop in Boursault, where Louis would throw lavish dinner parties and begin dreaming of new, expensive plans for renovation and expansion.

  Today, Barbe-Nicole’s estates at Boursault are firmly closed to the public, but visitors to the small hillside town can get a glimpse of the original house by visiting the small winery that the owners run from the grounds. The champagne made at the Château de Boursault won’t set the wine world on fire—although the little restaurant across the street from the village church, practically the only show in town, is one of the undiscovered gems of home-style French country cooking. But the Boursault bubbly is one of the few wines in the region that are still 100 percent estate grown, and it’s nice to think that it is made from grapes that Barbe-Nicole once tended. Surrounded by ominously tall stone walls, the house is an imposing gray pile with quaint round turrets and a large gravel courtyard. Acres of quiet gardens spill out behind. Above all, the castle had the distinct advantage of being set squarely in the middle of the Moët family vineyards. Here at last was a chance to lord it over Jean-Rémy. Literally.