The Widow Clicquot

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  In Reims, Barbe-Nicole was left with the bank. It turned out that closing down a bank was rather more difficult than opening one, and she offered Édouard a share in the company’s profits in exchange for his taking on some of the complex management. By now, Barbe-Nicole was running a large operation: The champagne company alone had, at different times of the year, hundreds of employees. While the liquidation of the bank was slowly beginning, Barbe-Nicole also had other business worries. The champagne industry was changing rapidly, and it was a constant struggle to stay ahead of new developments and to keep the competitive edge that made her one of the big players in the business.

  Most irritating were the new problems with impostors using her name in Russia to sell cheap champagne at her luxury prices and damaging the one thing that kept the sales coming in: her reputation. It was in part the steep costs of a bottle of the Widow Clicquot’s wines that had established what one enthusiast called “the superiority of her brand.” Barbe-Nicole knew what historian Kolleen Guy has recently discovered: “The price of the wine [of the Champagne] depend[ed] principally on the reputation of its manufacturer; wine with marks and labels of a well-known or celebrated maker [sold] for double the price of the same wine with an unknown brand.” The difficulty was that, impostors and fraud aside, the only way a customer could recognize a bottle of the Widow Clicquot’s champagne was by the brand burned into the cork. Consider what buying a bottle of wine would be like today if the only marketing were on the ends of the corks. Then, consider that most corks are actually covered with aluminum sleeves. Those sleeves are meant to imitate the wax seals used to protect the necks of wine bottles in the early days. Barbe-Nicole used them regularly.

  Buying wine in the 1820s had something of the blind tasting party about it. Wine labels—étiquettes in French—were only beginning to become familiar sights in the cellars in the 1820s. Barbe-Nicole had first sent bottles with labels in 1814, when customers were still willing to pay outlandish prices for the legendary 1811 vintage of her Bouzy red but were also increasingly suspicious about what was really in their expensive bottles. Plain white labels, with just the date and the location of the vineyard and a few floral swirls for a bit of prettiness, served as inexpensive reassurance. She was still labeling the bottles only when customers requested it, and it would be almost another decade before étiquettes were common either in her cellars or in the Champagne—but increasingly, Barbe-Nicole began to wonder if it might not be a good idea to protect her good name a bit more aggressively. So, to combat the fraud and with an eye toward the future, she went through the trouble of registering her trademark comet cork with the local officials.

  The manufacturing of champagne was also becoming increasingly mechanical by the end of the 1820s, and Barbe-Nicole knew that her new system of remuage—just beginning to appear in other cellars across the Champagne, as the secret of her technique leaked out—had played a role in increasing the rate of production. Now that she could no longer count on the competitive advantage of her secret method, there was the real possibility of falling behind. Already, the bottles used by champagne makers were being mass-produced in factories, made by machine in more regular shapes and sizes. Suddenly, it was possible to stack more bottles in the cellars safely.

  André Jullien had been working in Jean-Rémy’s cellars for over a decade trying to find new equipment able to speed the disgorging process, too, and now in 1825, the first mechanical bottling machines appeared in the French wine country. Two years later, there was the announcement of an industrial instrument for corking the bottles. By the 1830s, Cyrus Redding’s monumental History and Description of Modern Wines (1833) was touting new, modern winepresses with “two wooden cylinders, turning in opposite directions.” In the 1840s, Adolphe Jacquesson—son of Napoléon’s favored purveyor, Memmie—patented the wire cork cage for sparkling wines still known as the muselet and the little metal cork caps called capsulets. Jean-Baptiste François revolutionized the champagne industry by discovering how to measure residual sugar, leading to better control of the mousse and fewer breakages, and Dr. Jules Guyot changed the landscape of vineyards around the world when he showed winemakers the advantages of planting grapes in the familiar rows we see today, rather than the traditional circular clumps. Everyone in the industry knew that the race was on for the final stage in the industrialization of champagne—a wine famous for being handcrafted and a wine that, even today, can never be made simply by machine.

  Just as Barbe-Nicole was faced with these new capital costs and with having to decide how fully to invest in the mechanization of her cellars, the other shoe dropped in the financial world. By 1827, France was in the middle of a painful recession. Two years later—when Édouard was still in the process of extricating her from her investments in the Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and Company Bank—it had turned into a full-blown depression. There were massive crop failures across France, causing misery for countless working families. In industrial centers like Lyons and Reims, even the looms were grinding to a halt as the textile industry struggled. Barbe-Nicole had risked too much capital on the Clicquot banking enterprise, and she knew in the back of her mind that there was a dangerous exposure.

  Barbe-Nicole went out of town for several weeks that winter, to spend time with Clémentine and Louis at his uncle’s estates in the Vendée. Suddenly, while she was too far away to do anything about it, disaster struck. They had been depositing much of the Clicquot bank’s capital reserves with the large and well-established firm of Poupart de Neuflize, a financial institution with long-standing ties to the French woolen trade. What they didn’t know was that Poupart de Neuflize—like many banks in Europe that winter—was on the edge of failure. As the company went into a credit meltdown, its accounts were frozen, and the investors panicked. Within hours, Édouard was besieged with customers demanding their deposits, and they were in the middle of a run on the Widow Clicquot’s bank. It was certain to destroy Barbe-Nicole financially.

  Knowing that Barbe-Nicole and her company were facing ruin, Édouard made a gutsy decision. He would risk his own fortune to save hers. Thanks to his share of the company profits and a prudent marriage, that fortune was now considerable. After gathering up the deeds to his properties, he raced out of town to Paris. It was ninety miles to the capital, hours of travel in his carriage along the dusty roads of post–Napoleonic France, and as he passed through acres of vineyards on his way out of Reims, Édouard must have thought how foolish it was to have played such a high-stakes game with an otherwise uncomplicated future. As the countryside of the Champagne slowly gave way to the lower plains of the Paris basin, his thoughts turned to what he would say when he reached his destination: the offices of an old business associate, Rougemont de Lowenberg, a banker who specialized in offering lines of credit to wine merchants. He needed to persuade this careful financier to give him as much as 2 million francs in cash—the equivalent of $44 million. Louis would need to ride with it back to Reims that night. Otherwise, Barbe-Nicole would be forced into complete liquidation, and the champagne of the Widow Clicquot would be a thing of the past.

  Édouard, of course, succeeded. He exuded good sense and self-discipline. The bank loaned the company 1 million francs in cash and opened an immediate line of credit for the second million Édouard would need to save the business. By the time Barbe-Nicole got the message telling her the heart-stopping news, a tired and resolute Édouard was already standing in the open offices of the bank, prepared to pay out the deposits of any client. Now that investors were reassured their money was safe, the run on the bank quietly ended, and Barbe-Nicole—who sustained total losses of almost $5.5 million—was still in business.

  Once she learned of her narrow escape, Barbe-Nicole was determined not to be in the banking business for long. It would take more than another decade to extricate her finances fully from this foolhardy venture, but there was now no question about her new company strategy. She would focus on one thing and one thing only: champagne. As she famously announc
ed, they would make only the best. She had risked everything and overextended her resources, and she had nearly lost it all—her palatial home in the Hôtel le Vergeur, the country estate at Oger with its cheerful broad windows overlooking acres of vines. Gone would have been the château at Boursault and the grand lifestyle that she was still bankrolling for Clémentine and the spendthrift Count of Chevigné. Gone the hopes of a grand marriage someday not too distant for the eleven-year-old Marie-Clémentine.

  She had weathered the storm, and all thanks to Édouard. Still, the business had sustained a blow to its financial health. Above all, the dissipation of her energies meant that the house of the Widow Clicquot, for the first time since its great triumph over the Russian market in 1814, was falling behind its competitors. In 1821, she had sold an astonishing 280,000 bottles of champagne; now, exactly ten years later, her total sales were down to fewer than 145,000 bottles—far less than Jean-Rémy could boast at any time in the 1820s. If she wanted to recoup her losses and continue at the head of one of the world’s great champagne houses, Barbe-Nicole would have to work to recapture her position. Now, she would have to begin rebuilding the business, once again, in the midst of political turmoil.

  The economic crisis of 1829, which nearly brought down the Clicquot bank, was merely a symptom of larger problems, and just as in the years preceding the bloody Revolution of 1789, desperate economic circumstances were leading to anger and action. The weather in July 1830 was hot and dusty, and with the final defeat of Napoléon in 1815, the Bourbon princes once again ruled over France. King Charles X, thinking he would take advantage of the summer vacation that had left much of Paris quiet, announced new repressive reforms, limiting the freedoms of the press, restricting voting rights only to the richest citizens, and—most infuriating of all—barring the affluent middle classes from holding the highest public offices.

  The result was middle-class fury. The businessmen and bankers shut down the city. They closed offices and factories, knowing it would bring the staggering economy to a grinding halt, and the journalists responded by blaming it all on the king. Compared with the bloody events of 1789, it was a restrained and pointedly economic protest, but it set off a firestorm. Soon, it was not a middle-class protest at all. Already in Paris, more than half the population was living in squalid poverty. That July, in a city of 755,000, an astonishing 227,000 families had applied for bread cards—vouchers allowing the destitute to purchase food at a small discount. After years of struggling with high unemployment, thousands more workers and day laborers found themselves without jobs, and the result was another revolution.

  For three days—known in France still as Les Trois Glorieuses, or the Three Glorious Ones—the streets of Paris were riotous. Arriving in the city, François-René de Chateaubriand described the scene. The boy driving Chateaubriand’s carriage “had already abandoned his jacket with its [royal] fleur-de-lis buttons.” The old tricolor flag of the Revolution was once again fluttering sharply in the breeze, hung from windows and rooftops. “Clouds of white smoke rose here and there among the houses,” Chateaubriand recalled, and “cannon-shot and the sound of muskets blended with the noise of the alarm-bells…. I was watching the ancient Louvre fall.” Within hours, the king, remembering too well the fate of his Bourbon forebearers, was beating a hasty retreat out of the country.

  Barbe-Nicole was worried, too—and with good reason. If the working-class battles in the streets of Paris spread to the great commercial centers like Reims, this time there would be no finessing it. Already in nearby Épernay, the vignerons were rioting and the town hall had been sacked. In these eastern provinces of France, the dislike of the Bourbon kings—and their supporters—was especially intense. Her father had thrived during that earlier revolution, still so vivid in her memory, by disguising the family’s royalist allegiances, but Louis de Chevigné’s aristocratic family had not survived. Now Barbe-Nicole knew that they were once again on the brink of a peasant revolt. And her daughter was a countess. Bourgeois roots alone would not be enough to save them. The only safeguard was to declare their support for the protesters, and Louis de Chevigné did his best. The Count of Chevigné—whose mother had danced at the balls of Marie Antoinette—declared himself to be a populist and a liberal.

  For a man of his class, it was not an easy decision to make. It was going to be a harder one to live with. At that moment in French political history, it was not a choice between a monarchy and a republic. If it had been, Louis would almost certainly have supported the king. All his family ties bound him to the nobility. Instead, it was a choice in 1830 between two kinds of kings—the autocratic and splendid aristocracy of the ancien régime and its hereditary heirs or a new vision of a modern king, one with bourgeois values.

  More simply, for Louis, it was a choice between two parts of the extended family that made up the ruling classes of France, the “legitimist” but repressive Bourbons or the radical—even revolutionary—Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, whom Barbe-Nicole and her family had welcomed into their home less than a decade earlier. Louis-Philippe had led a life right out of a romance, and it was hard not to find this dashing nobleman endearing. During the turbulent years of the Revolution, he was an ardent supporter of reform and liberty, even going so far as to join the radical Jacobins and—shockingly—to vote in support of the execution of Louis XVI. Soon, it was his own neck on the line, however, and at nineteen the young duke fled into an impoverished and dangerous exile. Forced to live in disguise, sometimes passing as a tramp and later finding employment as an underpaid schoolteacher, first in Switzerland and then in America, he traveled the world until Napoléon’s fall from power made it safe for him to return to France—more than twenty years later. Now again at the forefront of the aristocracy and able to regale his hosts with fabulous stories, the duke charmed Barbe-Nicole and her family during his stay, and he had charmed the people of France as well. He had the support of the middle classes, and he was the darling of the working people. Already, some were saying that he should be king.

  Knowing that to some of his family it would seem like a betrayal, the Count of Chevigné came out in support of the Orléanist revolution. When the National Guard was revived to fight for the democratic rights of the people, Louis was among them, waving the tricolor flag of an earlier, more radical, generation. But, as he confessed to his old friend Richard Castel, it was complicated. “My feelings are divided,” he wrote, “but I regret more than anything the family ties; [still,] I have found ample reward in the days of July and in the tokens of affection that have been given to me.”

  If Louis struggled with his decision, Barbe-Nicole did not. Nicolas Ponsardin was not the only steely pragmatist in the family. In this revolution, as in the last, her family would prosper. In fact, the years to come would be the golden age of the entrepreneurial upper classes in France. Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, would come to be known as the “bourgeois king,” and in the words of one historian, “The reign of Louis-Philippe was a business régime,” whose motto was Enrichissez-vous—“Get rich.” Although the working people of France fought this second revolution in the streets, there was a reason the middle classes had started it, and they would be its primary beneficiaries. As king, Louis-Philippe would rule France in relative tranquillity for nearly twenty years, the vast majority of them a new economic boom time, and with a now single-minded vision, Barbe-Nicole would dedicate herself, once again, to rebuilding one of Europe’s business legends.

  Chapter 14

  The Champagne Empire

  It is lucky that Barbe-Nicole refocused her energies when she did. There was a small window of opportunity, and it was quickly closing. The champagne industry—aided by the support of Louis-Philippe—changed dramatically over the course of the next few decades. Most of the world’s famous champagne houses today established themselves as fierce competitors with a global reach during the middle years of the nineteenth century. As early as the summer of 1831, when the vines were ripening in the fields
and the cellars were quiet, the new king made his first visit to the Champagne wine country, and soon there would be many more. In his passion for sparkling wine, Louis-Philippe would rival Napoléon. Champagne had always been the drink of kings. Sensing new growth in the industry, Barbe-Nicole decided to take on another business partner. To restore the fortunes of her company, she would need help. For a second time, she would cut Louis and Clémentine out of the world of commerce and industry. For an investment of 100,000 livres—a mere $2 million—she gave Édouard Werlé a 50 percent share in the champagne business. Like the financial marriage it was, the company from that moment forward added his name to that of the Widow Clicquot.

  With Édouard now a full partner in the champagne business that Barbe-Nicole had already turned into a household name in much of the world, Louis, the Count of Chevigné, was out of luck. Édouard had encouraged her to turn off the tap when the textile investments were draining her resources, and he offered her the same advice for dealing with her charming son-in-law. But Barbe-Nicole could refuse Louis nothing, and there were constant requests. He wanted to remodel the vast gardens at the château in Villiers-en-Prayères. He needed more cash to support his aristocratic lifestyle. And, of course, he was always looking to pay his gambling debts, a point of honor among gentlemen. Before long, Édouard took up the habit of dealing with Louis’s most exorbitant demands.

  Her hard work had created a world of privilege and ease for the Count and Countess of Chevigné. While Barbe-Nicole, now in her fifties, was still putting in fourteen-hour days from dawn to dark, trying to assure a strong company footing after the banking catastrophe, Louis and Clémentine were free to dance until dawn and sleep until noon. They lived the charmed life of rich aristocrats in the dazzling age of industrialism.