The Widow Clicquot Read Online Free PDF Page B

handsome son of another wealthy and prosperous textile merchant, a man who also dabbled increasingly in the local wine trade.
    Barbe-Nicole must have dreamed of a church wedding, with candles and a choir and the strong scent of incense in the air. Perhaps she and the family’s loyal dressmaker, the woman who had saved her from a revolutionary mob, now pored secretly over fashion plates from Paris, astonished at the fanciful dresses worn by the vibrant Madame Tallien and the other women who helped create the patriotic costumes of the new French Directory government. She knew, of course, that her father would never approve of such provocative attire for his daughter. It would only attract attention.
    Besides, her dreams of a church wedding were illegal and dangerous. The practice of religion had been ended officially in France in 1794, and the Catholic rites were criminal. Her father had been part of the National Assembly that outlawed them. But the Ponsardin family was still Catholic. In fact, despite Nicolas’s public embrace of radical party politics and a new secular society dedicated to reason, he remained not only a Catholic but a staunch royalist. Nicolas, after all, had helped to crown a king, and he still dreamed of the day when he could boast a noble coat of arms. Privately and with great secrecy, Catholic families throughout France began to arrange dangerous, furtive religious ceremonies, while conforming outwardly to the new civic rituals of the republic.
    So, in the early hours of a June morning, Barbe-Nicole, dressed simply but not unfashionably in the plain white muslin gown of a young revolutionary, married François, the only son of Philippe and Catherine-Françoise Clicquot, in a damp cellar before a small and anxious group of their families. Perhaps it was even in the cellars beneath her family’s grand estate: Since one of the passageways led underground to the new home where she and François would begin their lives together on rue de l’Hôpital, it would have been an obvious and convenient place for a secret gathering of the two families.
    Interconnected cellars like this ran for three hundred miles underneath the city of Reims. According to legend, when the Romans built the ancient city of Reims (pronounced unaccountably to the Anglo-Saxon ear as “Rans”), then known as Durocortorum, they set thousands of enslaved men to digging out great blocks of limestone from quarries. These stones formed the foundation for the lively city of Barbe-Nicole’s girlhood, with its cool white-and-gray palette and soaring Gothic cathedral.
    The vast empty spaces these Roman quarry workers left behind—dark and silent underground cathedrals of a different kind—became the town’s cellars and caverns. Businessmen such as her father employed them as storage depots, and for generations the monks, priests, and Knights Templars, whose presence in Reims dated back centuries, had used them as passageways beneath the cathedral and its nearby palace. The Hôtel Ponsardin stood in one of the most ancient and holy parts of the city, in what once was the heart of medieval Christendom. In modern times, wine merchants had already discovered that these passageways could serve as the climate-controlled wine cellars absolutely necessary to the production of the local sparkling wine that we enjoy as champagne.
    Barbe-Nicole surely carried that day the traditional French bridal bouquet of roses and orange blossoms, and the soft breezes, which began somewhere in the distant tunnels that ran for miles underneath Reims, would have infused their summer scent into the empty coolness that surrounded this small party. The priest spoke quietly, conscious of the resounding echoes. The nerves of the assembled party were alert to every noise from outside. Discovery meant certain arrest and imprisonment. Later, the families completed the required secular contract, which confirms that Citizen Clicquot married Citizen Ponsardin on June 10,