Free The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo

should have been the beginning of a relentless reproductive life, like the one that left many women at the end of the eighteenth century maimed or dead, either from complications of childbirth or from the barbaric medical interventions meant to save them. A woman had a one-in-twenty chance of dying as a result of the delivery, perhaps a victim of septic infection or puerperal fever, both agonizing deaths. If things took their natural course, Barbe-Nicole could expect in the years to come as many as half a dozen pregnancies, making those death rates a sobering statistic. Her baby had even slimmer chances of survival. French doctors estimated that nearly a third of the children born would die before the end of their second year of life.
    Perhaps it was because of this frightening outlook that some young women made a point of dancing at balls until dawn. Even as a new mother and wife, there were undoubtedly plenty of parties. That year, Barbe-Nicole’s brother, Jean-Baptiste, married a twenty-four-year-old widow named Thérèse and moved into a sprawling new home on rue de Vesle, not far from the Hôtel Ponsardin, which he was destined to inherit. Within months, there was word that her sister, Clémentine, now seventeen, would marry the young widower Jean-Nicolas Barrachin in a secret and still dangerous Catholic ceremony at dawn, in the cool splendor of the nearby cathedral.
    Clémentine and Thérèse quickly established themselves as elegant hostesses and social trendsetters. While Barbe-Nicole was plain and petite, Clémentine was lovely and statuesque, with a passion for the splendid silk dresses that had made French fashion famous. At extravagant parties and soirées, the young people rubbed elbows with the social elite of industrial Reims and with important and exciting visitors from farther abroad. Increasingly, those visitors spoke of Napoléon, the man destined, it seemed, to rule France and perhaps finally to bring peace.
    It was a privileged life, but it was still life in a gilded cage. And think how astonishing it is that we know anything about the lives of these young women at all. Barbe-Nicole and her sister had learned from the time the were small girls studying catechism in their convent school that the only women with public reputations were prostitutes or queens. Even the two most famous women of Barbe-Nicole’s day—Marie Antoinette and Joséphine Bonaparte—were famous only because of their choice of husbands. It is probably not a coincidence that the public still thought of them both as whores.
    Musing on the invisibility of women like Barbe-Nicole and her sister, Clémentine, the novelist Virginia Woolf wrote simply, “Anonymity runs in their blood.” Even one of Barbe-Nicole’s contemporaries, Lady Bessborough—born into one of Great Britain’s most important and most progressive political families—herself believed that “no woman should meddle with…any serious business, farther than giving her opinion (if she is ask’d).” Barbe-Nicole undoubtedly took a similar line with her husband. No man wanted to hear his wife rattling on about how he should run his business, especially when she didn’t have any training and knew nothing about it.
     
     
    Exactly how Barbe-Nicole, a woman destined for a sheltered life of domesticity, became educated in the gritty essentials of the wine trade has always been viewed as a great mystery. In fact, she lived at an especially unlucky moment. A century before, it was not impossible for middle-class women to participate in running the family enterprise. Most businesses then were still family affairs, run by an extended network of close relations. No longer. In nineteenth-century Europe, the combined forces of a postrevolutionary commodity culture, the rise of international manufacturing, and a new system of modern laws—the Napoleonic Code—meant a far narrower world for women. As the historian Bonnie G. Smith put it: “A prejudice against women acting in