The Widow Clicquot

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Without the help of many librarians, archivists, and winemakers, this book never could have been written, and I am particularly grateful to the staff at the Sonoma County Wine Library Collection in Healdsburg, the Bibliothèque Carnegie in Reims, the Médiathèque d’Épernay, the Napa Valley Wine Library Collection in Saint Helena, the University of Cambridge Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the British Library, the Colby College Library, Eileen Crane of Napa’s Domaine Carneros, Philippe Bienvenue of Champagne Cattier, the kind staff in the resource library at Champagne Moët et Chandon and in the tasting rooms at Champagne Pommery, and, above all, to the generous people in the Historical Resources Department at Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, especially Fabienne Huttaux and Isabelle Pierre.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  This is the story of French champagne: Champagne is, of course, both a sparkling wine and a region in France. To distinguish between the two, champagne refers to the wine and Champagne to the historical province. The ancient provinces of France were converted to modern départements in 1790, so that the Champagne now includes the departments of the Ardennes, Aube, Marne, and Haut-Marne, as well as parts of the Aisne, Meuse, Seine-sur-Marne, and Yonne.

  lobster salad and champagne: George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), vol. 2; letter of September 25, 1812: “A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and Champagne, the only true feminine & becoming viands.”

  Madame de Pompadour: “Champagne is the only wine that leaves a woman beautiful after drinking it,” quoted in Don and Petie Kladstrup, Champagne: How the World’s Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed over War and Hard Times (New York: William Morrow, 2005), p. 50.

  Madame Cécile Bonnefond: According to wine expert Tom Stevenson, in an article on Bonnefond’s assuming the directorship, “It is the first time that any LVMH house—or indeed any grande marque—has hired a woman CEO.” Harper’s, December 20, 2000, available at www.harpers.co.uk. Today, Champagne Veuve Clicquot is owned by the luxury conglomerate LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, acquired 1987), which also owns Champagne Moët et Chandon.

  popular song as “Champagne Charlie”: The history of the dance-hall tune “Champagne Charlie” is a curious bit of wine marketing. The song was first made famous in the late 1860s by singer George Leybourne, who had been commissioned by the firm of Moët and Chandon to create a popular jingle for their brand. Soon, Leybourne’s competitor Alfred Vance had worked out a deal with the Widow Clicquot to write a dueling tune in her honor. The result was a runaway stage battle that helped to spread the popularity of champagne in Great Britain at the end of the decade. However, many believe that Charles Camille Heidsieck was the original model for the “Champagne Charlie” phenomenon. During his sales tours of the United States in the 1850s, it was a popular nickname for the gregarious wine merchant, who used the celebrity to generate massive sales and brand recognition. For many years, Heidsieck also marketed vintage champagne known as “Champagne Charlie,” and the song is most closely associated with the firm in the cultural imagination. The best account of the history is available on the official website of the Union des Maisons de Champagne, www.maisons-champagne.com; see also Marcel and Patrick Heidsieck, Vie de Charles Heidsieck (Reims: Société Charles Heidsieck, 1962); and Eric Glatre and Jaqueline Roubinet, Charles Heidsieck: Un pionnier et un homme d’honneur (Paris: Stock, 1995).

  “noted drinker of fizz”: “The name of a song that appeared in 1868…. The original Charley is said to have been a wine-merchant, who was in the habit of making presents of bottles of champagne to all his friends.” Oxford English Dictionary, “Champagne Charlie.”

  less than 85,000 total acres of vines: Gérard Liger-Belair, Uncorked: The Science of Champagne (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 19. Traditionally limited to 34,000 hectares (83,980 acres), approval for the addition of forty new communes to the appellation is pending. See Henry Samuel, “Champagne Producers Have Nominated 40 Villages in Northeastern France That May Be Allowed to Produce Sparkling Wine,” Daily Telegraph, October 15, 2007, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/20/13/wchampagne113.xml.

  registered by the estates of Moët and Chandon: The company purchased the vineyards at Hautvillers in 1794 but began commercial production of the Dom Pérignon vintage only in the 1930s; company promotional materials.

  All that changed in the first decades of the nineteenth century: Kladstrup, for example, reports that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were ten firms and by the 1860s three hundred; Kladstrup, p. 79.

  even before the Jazz Age: Statistics from Thomas Brennan, Burgundy to Champagne: The Wine Trade in Early Modern France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 272.

  the era when feminism was born: Although the word feminism in English dates to the 1890s (OED), “It is generally held that the first expression of modern feminism is Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792”; Lea Campos Boralevi, Bentham and the Oppressed (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), p. 23. In France, similar ideas found expression in the work of Olympe de Gouges, whose Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen was published in 1791.

  “no business in the world [has] been as much influenced by the female sex”: Anthony Rhodes, Prince of Grapes (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1975), p. 8, quoted in Ann B. Matasar, Women of Wine: The Rise of Women in the Global Wine Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 25–26.

  CHAPTER ONE: CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION, CHILD OF THE CHAMPAGNE

  angry mobs calling for liberty and equality: The familiar slogan Liberté, égalité, et fraternité (“Liberty, equality, and fraternity”) was advocated by Maximilien Robespierre during the Revolution of the 1790s, but it became popularized only during the rebellion of 1848 in France; see Tristram Hunt, “A National Motto?: That’s the Last Thing Britain Needs,” The Guardian, October 18, 2007, p. 32.

  town of perhaps thirty thousand inhabitants: Augustin Marie de Paul de Saint-Marceaux, Notes et documents pour servir à l’histoire de la ville de Reims pendant les quinze années de 1830 à 1845 (Reims: Brissart-Binet, 1853), p. 44. Saint-Marceaux, the mayor of Reims from 1832 to 1837 and 1839 to 1845, estimates twenty-seven thousand to thirty thousand inhabitants in 1793. All translations from French sources, unless otherwise noted, are by the author. In translating personal correspondence, particularly, the emphasis has been on retaining the spirit and tone of the original expression rather than on literal transcription.

  stories from Paris of nuns being raped and the rich being murdered: See, for example, Mita Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). Hippolyte Taine offered an early indictment of revolutionary excesses in his ten-volume study Origines de la France contemporaine, first published in the 1870s.

  educated with the daughters of feudal lords and princes: A detail repeated in various accounts of Barbe-Nicole’s early life; the most complete commentary is Michel Etienne, Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, aux origines d’un grand vin de Champagne (Paris: Economica, 1994), p. 22. For more on the abbey of Saint-Pierre-les-Dames, see Rheims and Battles for Its Possession (Paris: Michelin, 1919), pp. 98–99.

  first steps in the coarse wooden shoes: Details repeated in Jean, Princesse de Carmaran-Chimay, Madame Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin: Her Life and Times (Reims: Debar, 1956), p. 2; also Patrick de Gmeline, La Duchesse d’Uzès (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1986), p. 15.

  Phrygian caps…military marches: See, for example, the anonymous A Residence in France, During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795; Described in a Series of Letters from an English Lady, ed. John Gifford (London: T. N. Longman, 1797).

  central legend of Barbe-Nicole’s childhood: In most detail, Chimay, p. 2. Frédérique Crestin-Billet claims that it was Barbe-Nicole’s siste
r; Crestin-Billet, Veuve Clicquot: La grande dame de la Champagne (Paris: Editions Glénat, 1992), p. 15.

  the crops had failed throughout France: This and other details of the weather during that year from Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 155.

  might easily pay more than 40 percent in taxes: Roderick Phillips, A Short History of Wine (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 21; Kladstrup, p. 59. See also François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770–1880 (Oxford: Blackwells, 2000); and Brennan. Taxes on the rural commoners in prerevolutionary France were crushing and included a 10 percent tithe to the church, the 5 percent vingtième income tax, sales taxes, occupancy taxes, local taxes, banalités imposed for the use of public facilities such as mills, ovens, and winepresses, and even a tax paid in forced labor known as the corvée.

  Nicolas was “the town’s largest employer of textile workers”: Lynn Hunt, “Local Elites and the End of the Old Regime: Troyes and Reims, 1750–1789,” French Historical Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 379–399, 385.

  the equivalent of perhaps $800,000 a year: Crestin-Billet offers a figure of 40,000 French francs, p. 11. On the complexity of comparing historical values to modern currency, see the discussion on pp. 72–73.

  coronation of King Louis XVI: Victor Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot, née Ponsardin (Paris: E. Dentu, 1865), p. 21; see also Elise Whitlock Rose, Cathedrals and Cloisters of the Isle de France: Including Bourges, Troyes, Reims, and Rouen (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910).

  Today, the imposing structure houses…the local Chamber of Commerce: 10, rue Cérès; Jacques-Louis Delpal, Merveilles de Champagne (Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 1993), p. 33.

  his eldest daughter who captured a special place in his heart: Patrick de Gmeline writes: “She was always his favorite,” p. 14.

  The fabled vineyards at Hautvillers were among those confiscated and returned to the people: Brennan, p. 11.

  Nicolas is said to have planted one of these trees himself: Gmeline, p. 14.

  with a simple word on their foreheads: LIBERTY: Details of the Revolution in Reims and the festivals celebrating it from the anonymous pamphlet Description de la fête patriotique: Célébrée à Rethel le 14 Juillet 1790, & jours suivants (Reims: Jeunehomme, Imprimeurs du Rois, 1790); Gustave Laurent, Reims et la region rémoise a la veille de la Révolution (Reims: Imprimerie Matot-Braine, 1930); Arthur Barbat de Bignicourt, Les massacres à Reims en 1792 après des documents authentiques (n.p.: V. Geoffrey, 1872); and the anonymous A Residence in France, During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795, electronic edition, without pagination, available at www.gutenberg.org/etext/11995.

  The author of A Residence in France describes how in November 1793, “Mademoiselle Maillard of the Grand Opera, in white robe and blue cap, represented the goddess of Reason. On men’s shoulders she was carried from the church to the convention.” She also adds, “In many places, valuable paintings and statues were burnt or disfigured”; “The greater part of the attendants looked on in silent terror and astonishment; whilst others, intoxicated, or probably paid to act this scandalous farce, danced round the flames with an appearance of frantic and savage mirth”; and nuns in hospitals who “were accused of bestowing a more tender solicitude on their aristocratic patients than on the wounded volunteers and republicans; and, upon these curious charges, they have been heaped into carts, without a single necessary, almost without covering, sent from one department to another, and distributed in different prisons, where they are perishing with cold, sickness, and want!”

  CHAPTER TWO: WEDDING VOWS AND FAMILY SECRETS

  invented in the wake of the French Revolution: Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

  embraced fashion, which also became democratic: Madeleine Delpierre, Dress in France in the Eighteenth Century, trans. Caroline Beamish (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 150–151. Also Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2006).

  wearing blood-red ribbons around their necks: Mary Sophia Hely-Hutchinson, Fashion in Paris: The Various Phases of Feminine Taste and Aesthetics from the Revolution to the End of the 19th Century (London: W. Heinemann, 1901); Aileen Ribiero, Fashion in the French Revolution (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988).

  “coiffure of white tulle and celestial blue ribbons”: Manuscript, Memoirs of Madame Maldan, quoted in Crestin-Billet, p. 15.

  bureaucrat conceded was a poetic “ardent” blond: Etienne, p. 22.

  white dresses were more than just a popular—and populist—fashion: See Ribiero; on the national dress code and the French Revolution, see James H. Johnson, “Versailles, Meet Les Halles: Masks, Carnival, and the French Revolution,” Representations 73 (Winter 2001): 89–116.

  Madame Tallien: Thérésa, née Cabarrús (1773–1835), Parisian socialite during the Revolution and political opponent of Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), the man credited with leading the deadly purges during the Terror (1794); Madame Tallien later married into the noble Riquet family of Chimay (Belgium), becoming the Princess de Caraman-Chimay in 1805. Louis de Chevigné encountered her son during exile in Chimay during the Franco-Prussian War (p. 231). See Arsène Houssaye, Notre-Dame de Thermidor: Histoire de Madame Tallien (Paris: H. Plon, 1866).

  the Catholic rites were criminal: The state authority of the Catholic Church in France is widely considered by historians as one of the causes of the Revolution, and by 1793 practice of the religion was formally banned, soon to be replaced, first, by the Cult of Reason and, later, by the Cult of the Supreme Being. Antireligious sentiment was at its height during 1794, although clergy were particular targets of revolutionary violence throughout the period. These strictures were relaxed during 1795, after the execution of Robespierre, but Catholicism remained formally outlawed and legally punishable until 1801. See Claude Geffré and Jean-Pierre Jossua, 1789: The French Revolution and the Church (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1989); and Nigel Aston, The End of an Élite: The French Bishops and the Coming of the Revolution, 1786–1790 (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1992).

  in a damp cellar: Chimay, p. 3; Gmeline, p. 15.

  bridal bouquet of roses and orange blossoms: Pierre-Louis Menon and Roger Lecotté, Au village de France, les traditions, les travaux, les fêtes: La vie traditionnelle des paysans (Entrépilly: Christian de Bartillat, 1993), pp. 43, 101, 138.

  married Citizen Ponsardin on June 10, 1798: Diane de Maynard, La descendance de Madame Clicquot-Ponsardin, preface de la Vicomtesse de Luppé (Mayenne: Joseph Floch, 1975), n.p.

  Barbe-Nicole’s great-grandfather had invented the industry: Robert Tomes, The Champagne Country (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1867), pp. 94–95: “The Viscount of Brimont [Jean-François Irénee Ruinart de Brimont] is known to champagne drinkers by his family name of Ruinart. He is a descendant—a collateral one, it is supposed—of one Dom [Thierry] Ruinart [1657–1709], who was of the convivial and holy brotherhood of the monastery of Hautvillers…the wine manufactory of which he is proprietor is one of the most ancient in Champagne…. His wine was in former times in considerable vogue, and his bottles may now occasionally be seen.”

  The Ruinart champagne company was originally established by Nicolas Ruinart (1697–1769) immediately after the royal decree of May 25, 1728, which granted the merchants of Reims the exclusive right to transport the local sparkling wines in bottles. After his death in 1769, Marie-Barbe-Nicole Ruinart’s brother Claude ran the family wine trade. He was married to the daughter of another champagne house, Hélène Héloïse Françoise Tronsson, of Champagne Tronsson. After the death of Claude, his son Irénee (1770–1850) inherited the business; also the mayor of Reims for a period and a local recipient of the French Legion of Honor, Irénee was a close associate of Nicolas Ponsardin. According to company promotional materials, Champagne Ruinart was producing on the order of forty thousand bottles of cha
mpagne a year by 1769, making it the major champagne house of the late eighteenth century, along with Champagne Moët; by the early nineteenth century, it was a contracting business. Marie-Barbe-Nicole Le Tertre, née Ruinart was born c. 1733.

  For scholarly accounts of the Ruinart family and the business climate of eighteenth-century wine brokers in the Champagne, see Patrick de Gmeline, Ruinart, la plus ancienne maison de champagne, de 1729 à nos jours (Paris: Stock, 1994); Charles Henri Jadart, Dom Thierry Ruinart…Notice suivie de documents inédits sur sa famille, sa vie, ses œuvres, ses relations avec D. Mabillon (Paris: n.p., 1886).

  gray cobblestone street known as rue de la Vache: Etienne identifies this as present-day rue de la Nanteuil; p. 10, n. 9.

  he played the violin beautifully: Detail from Crestin-Billet, p. 36.

  François’s spelling, however, was dismal: Bertrand de Vogüé, L’Éducation d’un jeune bourgeois de Reims sous la Révolution (n.p.: Marsh, 1942); also Etienne, pp. 10–17.

  begged his son to fight melancholy: Etienne, pp. 11–19.

  an appointment to the medical corps: Etienne, pp. 11–14.

  “retired from active service”: Charles Tovey, Champagne: Its History, Properties, and Manufactures (London: James Camden Hotten, 1870), p. 50; also in Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot, who writes, with questionable accuracy, “an officer retired from active service on account of his injuries,” p. 55.

  system of the échelle des crus: Tom Stevenson, Champagne and Sparkling Wine Guide (San Francisco: Wine Appreciation Guild, 2002), p. 204; see also the official website of the Syndicat Professionnel des Courtiers en Vins de Champagne for details on the early-twentieth-century history of regulation and ratings in the wine industry: www.spcvc.com/historique.php?go=3&art=2.