The Widow Clicquot

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Mademoiselle Gard—to the family, simply Jennie: Chimay, p. 38.

  “I have been occupied for many days with walling up my cellars”: Bertrand de Vogüé, Conquête pacifique de la Russie, p. 26.

  Her brother’s textile factory at Saint-Brice was destroyed: Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot, p. 33.

  Serge Alexandrovich Wolkonsky, insisted that there would be no looting: Kladstrup, p. 83; Chimay, p. 24.

  “as for your insolent threat of sending troops to Rheims”: Chimay, p. 24.

  “Tomorrow they will pay!”: Ibid.

  “All these officers who ruin me today”: Desbois-Thibault, p. 35.

  General Corbineau recaptured Reims: Louis Antoine Fauvelet, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte (London: Richard Bentley, 1836); also Houssaye.

  “about a dozen prisoners were made, who had been laid under the table”: Tomes, p. 67.

  “Madame Clicquot…gave Napoléon’s officers Champagne and glasses”: Details from “The Noble Art of Sabrage,” available at www.champagnesabering.com.

  Hedging his bet, he wrote Napoléon a letter: According to Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot, the letter read: “Sire, at this instant, the city and those who protect it are in your power,” p. 39.

  Barbe-Nicole who greeted the emperor at the door of the Hôtel Ponsardin: Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot: “The Widow Clicquot, it was said, welcomed the emperor to the Hôtel Ponsardin herself, deserted by her father, mayor of the village,” p. 19.

  As was the custom, she herself filled the emperor’s pillows with the softest new down: Crestin-Billet, p. 24.

  “If fate intervenes and dashes my hopes, I want at least to be able to reward you for your loyal service and steadfast courage”: Roubinet and Nolleau, p. 63.

  “Russian officers…lifted the champagne glass to their lips”: Tomes, p. 67.

  Lord Byron wrote to his friend Thomas Moore: Thomas Moore, Life of Lord Byron, with His Letters and Journals, 6 vols (London: John Murray, 1854), vol. 3, letter 174; letter of April 9, 1814.

  “At last the time has come”: Chimay, p. 24.

  Within decades of Napoléon’s defeat, it would multiply more than tenfold: Brennan, p. 272.

  Still, when the Russian czar Alexander ordered provisions: Roubinet and Nolleau, p. 43.

  “Thanks are due to Heaven…I do not have any losses to regret”: Bertrand de Vogüé, Conquête pacifique de la Russie, p. 9.

  Monsieur Rondeaux, a shipping merchant in Rouen: Ibid., p. 11.

  “our wines must be properly cared for”: Chimay, p. 26.

  Jean-Rémy was already writing to Count Tolstoy: Michel Refait, Moët & Chandon: De Claude Moët à Bernard Arnault (Paris: Dominique Gueniot, 1998), p. 41.

  she had also slyly included a present for Louis: Bertrand de Vogüé, Conquête pacifique de la Russie, p. 12.

  “as strong as the wines of Hungary, as yellow as gold, and as sweet as nectar”: Ibid., p. 15.

  “Our ship is the first, in many years, to travel to the North”: Ibid., p. 12.

  CHAPTER TEN: A COMET OVER RUSSIA: THE VINTAGE OF 1811

  “I am bored of seeing them leave us in peace taking the money”: Bertrand de Vogüé, Conquête pacifique de la Russie, p. 18.

  “Great God! What a price! How novel!”: Ibid., p. 17.

  “I am adored here…because my wines are adorable”: Quotations in this paragraph from ibid., p. 14.

  “I have already in my portfolio [orders for] a new assault on your caves”: Ibid., p. 18.

  “If my business continues as it has gone since the invasion”: Ibid., p. 20.

  “your judicious manner of operating, your excellent wine”: Ibid., p. 19.

  In the company archives in Reims…she writes about the shape of the bottles: Interview, January 8, 2007, Fabienne Huttaux, Historical Resources Manager, Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin.

  “The world market which was slowly coming into existence”: Peter Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords, and Merchant Capitalists: Europe and the World Economy, 1500–1800 (Leamington Spa, UK: Berg, 1983), p. 13, quoted in “Proto-Industrialization in France,” Gwynne Lewis, Economic History Review (New Series) 47, no. 1 (February 1994): 150–164, 155.

  “business historians, agree that those women would have disappeared”: Craig, p. 52.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE INDUSTRIALIST’S DAUGHTER

  In France, a handful of women run wine estates: Matasar, p. 2.

  Today, in all of Europe, there is not a single woman who does both: Interview, October 2007, Eileen Crane, President, Champagne Domaine Carneros, Napa, California.

  An “industry in retreat” opened doors for new entrepreneurs: Ibid.

  Built in the 1750s on the site of the ancient estate of the monks of Saint-Pierre aux Monts de Châlons: Promotional materials, Champagne Taittinger, available at www.taittinger.com.

  “Any big glass is good for champagne”: Hugh Johnston, Wine (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 71.

  miniature versions of the V-shaped stemware: Ibid., p. 63.

  Barbe-Nicole today is credited with three achievements: Matasar, p. 27.

  her name was celebrated in some of the greatest nineteenth-century works: Detail from Natalie MacLean, “The Merry Widows of Mousse,” International Sommelier Guild, 3:63AJ (December 2003): 1–2, 1.

  On the literary representations of the Widow Clicquot, see in particular Anton Chekhov’s “Champagne, A Wayfarer’s Story” and Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, where he famously writes: “Of Veuve Clicquot or of Moët / the bless’d wine /…/ Its magic stream / no dearth of foolishness engendered / but also what a lot of jokes, and verse, / and arguments, and merry dreams!!” (st. xlv, ll. 1–14); Eugene Onegin, trans. Vladmir Nabokov (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 196. The champagne of the Widow Clicquot also appears in various works of twentieth-century literature, including, memorably, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (ch. 7).

  “It is cruel,” Louis wrote, “to have to refuse orders”: Bernard de Vogüé, Conquête pacifique de la Russie, p. 18.

  By winter, grain was impossible to come by in the markets: Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot: “In 1816 after the war, there were no cereals at the public markets…. Many of the peasants turned in their misery to vagrancy and robbery,” pp. 41–42.

  “The old way, which involved knocking the bottles upside down to settle the sediment, used drugs and clarifiers”: Tomes, p. 150.

  “You only have fifty thousand bottles ready”: Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot, p. 65.

  “Great advance,” they whispered: Quotations in this paragraph from Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot, p. 66. A point reiterated by Kolleen M. Guy, “Drowning Her Sorrows: Widowhood and Entrepreneurship in the Champagne Industry,” Business and Economic History 26, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 505–512: “In the early nineteenth century, it was believed that this kind of manipulation of the wine would not serve to speed up the process of removing the sediment and that it would only trouble the already volatile wines. Clicquot’s early experiments were met with ridicule and sarcasm by male contemporaries,” p. 508. See also Tomes, who records details of Barbe-Nicole “slipping quietly into the cellar day after day, while all the workmen were at dinner,” p. 154.

  preliminary cellar experiments with siphons, “rigid tubes fitted with a tap”: Jullien, p. 139.

  What she and Antoine Müller discovered changed the way champagne is finished to this day: Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot: “The spirit and tenacity of a woman triumphed over these stubborn cellar workers, stuck in their routine. All the Champagne today has adopted the method of Madame Veuve Clicquot,” p. 68.

  Henry Vizetelly, in his History of Champagne, with Notes on the Other Sparkling Wines of France (New York: Scribner & Welford, 1882), gives Müller credit for suggesting the idea to Barbe-Nicole: “Already in 1806…the bottles were placed on tables, like to-day, with their heads downward; each bottle being taken out of its hole, raised, in the air, and shaken with the hand, so as to cause the cream of tartar an
d the deposit it contained to fall upon the cork…. This lasted till 1818, when a man named Müller…suggested to her that the bottles should be left in the table whilst being shaken, and that the holes should be cut obliquely…. The trial was made, and every day, with a view of keeping this new process a secret, Müller and Madame Clicquot shut themselves up in the cellars, and shook the bottles unperceived,” pp. 161–162, n. 1.

  Accounts of this sort led Matasar to observe: “There is disagreement regarding the degree of the Veuve Clicquot’s personal involvement in developing this process. Her detractors, including her winemaking contemporaries who dismissed her experimentation on the basis of her gender, give all the credit to Müller. Some, however, view her as the sole inventive genius. She surely instigated the research, encouraged and participated in developing the process, and can lay claim to it as the firm’s owner,” pp. 27–28.

  Vizetelly suggests 1818 as the date when remuage was invented, although some recent sources propose 1816, including Crestin-Billet and Etienne.

  wine aficionado Henry Vizetelly describes remuage: Quotations here and in the following paragraph from Vizetelly, pp. 160–161.

  “from which tragic instrument”: Tomes, p. 159.

  a move by the large commercial producers to mechanized rotation in crates known as giropalettes: Interview, Champagne Cattier, January 19, 2007; see also Bruce Zoecklein, “A Review of Méthode Champenoise Production,” Virginia State University/Virginia Tech, Cooperative Extension Publication, Publication Number 463-017, December 2002, available at www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/viticulture/463-017/463-017.html.

  expert cellar worker, it is said, can turn as many as fifty thousand bottles in a day: Vizetelly, p. 161.

  “We must wrack our brains to obtain as good a result”: Quoted in Desbois-Thibault, p. 47.

  “The adventure of Madame Clicquot,” wrote Jean-Rémy, “is infamous”: Ibid., p. 50.

  “sufficiently eloquent to show the rivalry that existed”: Ibid., p. 49.

  The climate of espionage aside, Jean-Rémy would not discover her secret: There is some disagreement regarding how long Barbe-Nicole was able to keep remuage a company secret. Roderick Phillips claims it was a matter of only a few years and that the technique was widely used in the region by the 1820s; see Phillips, p. 243. However, all the evidence suggests that Jean-Rémy Moët—despite his enthusiasm for technological innovation in the champagne industry—didn’t begin using the technique until 1832, surely a curious situation if remuage was already widely used throughout the Champagne. On Moët’s use of remuage, see Desbois-Thibault, p. 49.

  “It is only within the last fifty years that the trade in champagne has become important”: Tomes, p. 74.

  Barbe-Nicole was scraping by on sales of under 20,000: Etienne, p. 277. In 1812, Moët sold approximately thirty-five thousand bottles; see Desbois-Thibault, p. 36.

  exporting upward of 175,000 bottles a year: Desbois-Thibault, p. 36; Crestin-Billet, p. 88.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: THE WINE ARISTOCRATS

  Two eligible bachelors were vying for the attentions of her daughter: Chimay, pp. 31–33.

  Marie’s husband, Florent Simon: Florent Simon Andrieux (1761–1835) and Marie née Lasnier (1768–1842). The visits of Barbe-Nicole, Édouard, and her family to the Andrieux salon were recorded by Marie’s grandson Arthur Barbat de Bignicourt (1824–1888) in his Un salon à Reims en 1832 (Reims: n.p., 1879).

  In 1820, the two families became even more closely connected when the stepson of Barbe-Nicole’s sister, Clémentine Barrachin, a young man named Augustin (1797–1883), married one of the Andrieux daughters, Elisabeth (1799–1846). Augustin was the child of Jean-Nicolas Barrachin’s first wife, Charlotte Augustine, née Raux.

  Florent Simon was mayor of Reims from 1828 to 1835, after the retirement of Nicolas Ponsardin from that office. Throughout the early nineteenth century, champagne dealers were well represented in city politics, with other notables including Barbe-Nicole’s distant relation Irénee Ruinart de Brimont (Champagne Ruinart, 1820–1827) and, later, Édouard Werlé (Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, 1852–1868). Details available at www.reims.unblog.fr/tag/generale.

  “Don’t cry, Mentine,” her mother had told her only recently: Gmeline, p. 20; Chimay, p. 31.

  she had proposed the generous dowry of 100,000 francs: Chimay, pp. 31–33.

  “like cabbages in the market”: Crestin-Billet, p. 24.

  “All this marriage talk,” she wrote to Mademoiselle Gard: Chimay, p. 31.

  King Louis XVIII had reconfirmed his title: Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot, p. 47.

  Barbe-Nicole “was infatuated”: Chimay, p. 42.

  “easy living for the time being, and opulence in the future”: Ibid., p. 35.

  “assisting at the balls of Marie Antoinette”: Tomes, p. 95; Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot, p. 115.

  “a mandate of arrest to direct the taking of ‘Citizen Such-a-one’”: Anonymous, A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795, n.p.

  her sister, the Countess de Marmande: Various details on Louis de Chevigné’s family and childhood from Gmeline, pp. 21–25.

  “obtaining noble titles was a shrewd marketing strategy”: Kolleen Guy, “‘Oiling the Wheels of Social Life’: Myths and Marketing in Champagne during the Belle Epoque,” French Historical Studies 22, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 211–239, 218.

  “a mother with an only daughter”: Chimay, p. 35.

  “the less she will be able to refuse”: Chimay, p. 35.

  Clémentine, perhaps tired of this parade of suitors, for once insisted: Éric Poindron, “Promenade et Conte rémois, en guise d’introduction, ou, tentative de nouvelle essai à la manière modeste des Contes de Louis de C[hevigné],” available at http://blog.france3.fr/cabinet-de-curiosites/tb.php?id=59083.

  “I won’t make myself destitute”: Chimay, pp. 32, 38.

  plus free accommodation with her in the family home: On conventional family arrangements in nineteenth-century France, see David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli, Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and Frederic Le Play, La reforme sociale (1872), reprinted in Catherine Bodard Silver, ed., On Family, Work and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

  “awaiting the rest of the inheritance—which shouldn’t take long”: Chimay, p. 35.

  the wedding was planned in Reims on the tenth of September: A facsimile of the wedding invitation is reproduced in Diane de Maynard, La descendance de Madame Clicquot-Ponsardin, preface de la Vicomtesse de Luppé (Mayenne: Joseph Floch, 1975).

  “Arrange as you like with Monsieur de Chevigné about the trousseau”: Chimay, p. 36.

  “Clémentine is no longer shy with her husband, she tutoies him”: Gmeline, p. 23; Chimay, p. 37.

  locker-room references from his friend Richard Castel: Chimay, pp. 40–41.

  “The Comte de Chevigné, who had not yet written his [erotic] fables”: Barbat de Bignicourt, Un salon à Reims en 1832 (1879), quoted in Eugène Dupont, La vie rémoise, ed. Jean-Yves Sureau, available at www.lavieremoise.free.fr.

  In London, the Duchess of Devonshire: See Amanda Forman, Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (New York: Random House, 1999).

  the lowly sandwich was a sign of the times: According to a contemporary travel account, the sandwich was invented at the gambling table by John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792); see Pierre Jean Grosley, A Tour to London, or, New Observations on England and Its Inhabitants (London: Lockyer Davis, 1772).

  “a protest against bourgeois and capitalist modernity”: E. J. Carter, “Breaking the Bank: Gambling Casinos, Finance Capitalism, and German Unification,” Central European History 39 (2006): 185–213, 186.

  Philippe Clicquot…died in the final months of 1819: His death is recorded on October 23, 1819; see Lallemand, Le Baron Ponsardin.

  her father, Nicolas, passed away at seventy-three years old: Fiévet, Madame Veuve Clicquot, records the date as Octob
er 25, 1820; p. 50.

  “pliable and pragmatic in his beliefs”: Ibid., p. 51.

  “skillful in his acquaintances”: Ibid., p. 50.

  He slipped off an icy bridge: Crestin-Billet, p. 89.

  she intended to retire—and to give George the entire business as a gift: Ibid., p. 91.

  At the beginning of the century…there were ten champagne houses: Details from website of the Union des Maisons de Champagne, available at www.maisons-champagne.com.

  “There is no country where you can make a fortune so easily”: See “L’insertion de la maison Pommery dans le négoce du champagne,” available at www.patrimonieindustriel-apic.com, p. 8.

  German named Matthieu-Édouard Werler: Crestin-Billet, pp. 91–94.

  “Werler…came a poor boy to Rheims from the Duchy of Nassau”: Tomes, p. 87.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: FLIRTING WITH DISASTER

  In one room, the ceiling was decorated with sculpted figures: Paul Vitry, L’Hôtel le Vergeur, notice historique (Reims: Société des Amis du Vieux Reims/Henri Matot, 1932), p. 11. According to town records, a gentleman by the name of Vanin-Clicquot, a manufacturer in Reims and probably a family relation, purchased the building on 27, brumaire an II. He updated and renovated the mansion and sold it in 1822 to Barbe-Nicole. The building was subsequently sold in 1895 by the Werlé family, who had come into possession of the building after Barbe-Nicole’s death.

  More solid companies are destroyed by overreaching expansion than almost anything else: See, for example, Carlos Grande, “Stretching the Brand: The Risk of Extension,” Financial Times, June 4, 2007, available at www.ft.com; and Dennis Berman, “Growing Danger: Relentless Prosperity Is Forcing a Choice on Many Small Companies: Expand or Die,” Business Week, October 8, 1999, available at www.businessweek.com.

  “bankers played a secondary role…in the production cycle”: Desbois-Thibault, p. 80.

  typically required to loan his personal savings: George V. Taylor, “Notes on Commercial Travelers in Eighteenth-Century France,” Business History Review 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1964): 346–353, 348.

  Jean-Rémy Moët started self-financing his production costs as early as 1819: Desbois-Thibault, pp. 80–81.