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to the goddess of a new secular religion. There, old married couples renewed their vows on the streets as a symbol of faithfulness in a new order, and in the central square children decorated liberty trees with ribbons and flowers. Nicolas is said to have planted one of these trees himself. In Paris, the women marched bare-breasted through the streets, and even in Reims young women were lifted indelicately aloft by the crowds and paraded along the avenues, scantily draped in loose-fitting togas and wearing crowns with a simple word on their foreheads: LIBERTY . The image of these young women is still a familiar symbol of freedom and democracy: Look no further than America’s Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France.
    Although other parents decked their daughters in white gowns and flowers to parade through the streets, Nicolas was not about to put his children on public display. In fact, despite his political prominence in the new revolutionary movement, he would do everything in his power to calm local politics and keep his family from drawing any unnecessary attention. Perhaps it is another reason we know so little about the childhood of Barbe-Nicole.
    Nicolas had the best motives for wanting to keep his family out of the public eye, for shrouding life at the Hôtel Ponsardin in silence. Anything else was simply too dangerous. Behind the precarious facade of republicanism, the Ponsardin family guarded an explosive secret for the next decade. Despite her father’s public role as a Jacobin patriot and willing convert to the cult of secular reason, there was a very different reality. Barbe-Nicole was less a child of the Revolution than a child of the Champagne—a place rich in the legend and mysteries of kings, where, even from the distant rolling vineyards, the eye could find on the horizon the spire of the great cathedral of Reims.

Wedding Vows and Family Secrets
     
    B arbe-Nicole was the member of a uniquely important generation, perhaps one of the most important in Western history. Scholars tell us that modern society—with its emphasis on commerce and the freedom of the individual—was invented in the wake of the French Revolution. For a thousand years, the social fabric of France had remained essentially the same. People thought of themselves as part of an extensive network of relationships that stretched back over generations. They were defined by the social roles they had inherited, roles they accepted as absolute.
    For this new postrevolutionary generation, which grew to adulthood after 1789, that network unraveled. What the Revolution taught them was that the world could change in the most radical ways. Peasants could become politicians. Kings—once esteemed as gods—could face the executioner. The young Italian soldier Napoléon Bonaparte, who would soon rule one of the world’s great empires but had spent much of his childhood at an impoverished boarding school in the Champagne, became one of his generation’s best representatives.
    The structure of society in this new modern era was based on commercial relations and on the display of commodities. In many ways, it was not very different from the world in which we now live. Because people started to see their dreams reflected in the goods they purchased, there was a second economic revolution. Before long, champagne would become one of those defining products that told people who they were. The explosion of the fashion industry hit closer to home for Barbe-Nicole and her family. Their luxurious lifestyle, after all, depended on the textile trade.
    In the 1780s and 1790s, the world went crazy for fashion in a way it never had before. A generation earlier, clothes were a sign of whatever good fortune you had inherited. The aristocracy had always spent recklessly and famously on fashion, of course. Marie Antoinette couldn’t get enough diamond shoe buckles or silk petticoats. They were symbols of power and privilege that she manipulated shrewdly.