The Widow Clicquot Read Online Free PDF

Now, middle-class citizens embraced fashion, which also became democratic. For the first time, the dresses of working people imitated the styles of the rich. And in revolutionary France, the upper classes, if they had any sense, pretty quickly started imitating the style of the peasants.
    Fashion was at the heart of the Revolution. Another word for a member of the radical Jacobin Club was a sans culottes —someone who didn’t wear a rich man’s pants. During the months when people were haphazardly guillotined in the streets of France as public entertainment, ladies mimicked the look, cutting their hair in dramatic bobs and wearing blood-red ribbons around their necks. In Paris, the wives of republican politicians made a competition out of such fantastic costumes. In Great Britain, there was a special word for the men who imitated the revolutionary fashions of France and the United States: dandies. The word lives on in the old tune “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
    As a young woman, Barbe-Nicole was not immune to fashion or to the social statements that it could make. Her sister, Clémentine, a local beauty, was notorious in Reims for her love of the latest styles. When she learned that everyone in London was wearing their hair stacked to towering heights and decorated with ribbons and trinkets, Clémentine had her portrait done, her granddaughter later remembered, “wearing a cloudy coiffure of white tulle and celestial blue ribbons.”
    No one has identified a picture of Barbe-Nicole as a young woman, although there must once have been one. Small miniatures painted on ivory were common—the snapshots of the era. Even without a portrait, it is easy enough to imagine Barbe-Nicole at sixteen. Unlike her willowy sister, she was not conventionally pretty. She was plain and tended to be chubby. Her citizen identification card describes her at that age as very petite, a mere four and a half feet tall, but with gray eyes and hair that even the stern bureaucrat conceded was a poetic “ardent” blond. The word in French evokes the color of live coals or a glass of tawny spirits.
    Like so many other daughters of revolutionary France, she wore the simple white muslin gowns that were patriotic symbols of a rustic and more egalitarian future. These white dresses were more than just a popular—and populist—fashion. Almost immediately, the more dogmatic leaders of the new republican government began calling for a required national dress code. By the end of the 1790s, it was foolhardy to wear anything else. Men wore their trousers tucked into working boots. Women’s simple gowns often had just one ornament: the national cockade. In her missing portrait, Barbe-Nicole surely has one pinned at her breast, in imitation of the great hostesses of Paris—a tricolor festoon of ribbons in the revolutionary colors of red, white, and blue.
    If Barbe-Nicole appeared as the daughter of a French revolutionary and committed radical, appearances were deceiving. The Ponsardin family was living an elaborate lie—or at least a carefully constructed public deception. Her father had not only saved the family fortune; he had prospered during a peasant revolt. Embracing the revolutionary cause of the common man, he had risen to even greater political prominence while continuing to live a private life of upper-middle-class affluence and privilege that was essentially unchanged from the days of the ancien régime. This was all because Nicolas and his family understood the importance of keeping their secrets.
     
     
    Barbe-Nicole’s marriage was part of that collective silence. In 1798, the new century was swiftly approaching, and so was a new chapter in Barbe-Nicole’s life. Although the most terrible excesses of the Revolution had waned, France remained politically and socially unsettled in this new era of republicanism. In this climate, the twenty-year-old Barbe-Nicole was about to be married. Her intended was a catch—the dashing François Clicquot,