Free The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo Page A

the marketplace appeared in the Napoleonic Code [which] pointed women toward an exclusively reproductive life.”
    But the Napoleonic Code was the invention of the first years of the new century, and Barbe-Nicole was beginning life as the wife of a wealthy industrialist at what we might think of as just the last possible moment. Industrialism already meant that most families were confining wives and daughters to the drawing rooms. Her fashionable sister, Clémentine, soon preoccupied with four small children—her infant son, Balsamie, and three stepchildren—would embody this new domestic pattern. Barbe-Nicole would follow in the footsteps of a fading commercial tradition, embracing the entrepreneurial family model that both she and François had learned as the children of old-fashioned businessmen. The different lives of these two sisters show how quickly the world was changing. If Barbe-Nicole had been more fashion-conscious or had she been beautiful, it might have seemed too great a sacrifice. Her decision must have marked her, even in those first years of the cult of domesticity, as a social eccentric. I will also hazard a guess that if François had had brothers—if there had been more than one son to carry on the family enterprise and if her interest had not actually been of some use—Barbe-Nicole would never have been allowed the haphazard commercial education that she found.
     
     
    In the beginning, I expect she was his sounding board. François himself knew next to nothing about the wine business when he first threw himself into developing the family sideline, and this was surely a critical factor. His period of self-education happily coincided with the early years of their marriage, when they were first getting to know each other. Like any two people thrown together, they were looking for things to talk about, and nothing could have been more natural than to talk about wine and his plans for the business.
    So it would not have come to Barbe-Nicole as any surprise when, as soon as the news came in 1801 that France had signed a peace treaty at Lunéville, François decided that he would have to take to the road as a traveling salesman. Selling wines internationally still meant sending someone to get the orders, and in the beginning this would have to be François himself. The peace, they hoped, would change everything. The country had been at war with the so-called Second Coalition—Great Britain, Austria, Russia, the Ottoman empire, several of the Italian states—since the year she and François were first married. Now, with the peace at Lunéville, only Great Britain remained as the declared enemy of France, and that spring it looked for a moment as though life might soon return to normal. After years of waiting, it seemed as if the closed markets to the east and to the south would begin to open again. François intended to capitalize on the new opportunities.
    Today, wine tasting is a multimillion-dollar tourist industry, but it was these traveling distributors, especially at the end of the eighteenth century—men like François and his competitors—who popularized wine tasting as a commercial strategy. At the time, caves and warehouses were not open for cellar visits, barrel tasting, and winemaker’s suppers, and the branding of wines was only in its infancy. It would be another twenty years before consumers would even expect to find their wines labeled and identified. Customers had to rely on the judgment and integrity of agents for their wine purchases.
    These agents, increasingly, brought the experience of wine tasting to their clients, discovering that it was, then as now, an effective way of selling wine. If on the road François would suffer rough conditions, broken carriages, miserable inns, and bad food, he would have little to complain about on his arrival. The goal of a wine sales agent was to discover the most alluring and fashionable hostesses of the city, charm them with his wit and grace,