The Widow Clicquot Read Free Page B

revolutionary France: in disguise. After she dressed the child in the clothes of the working poor, they hurried. The shapeless tunic must have itched, and Barbe-Nicole’s first steps in the coarse wooden shoes—so different from her own soft leather slippers—were surely unsteady.
    In another moment they had slipped out into the frenzied streets of Reims, praying to pass unnoticed. No one would bother a dressmaker or a peasant girl, but the convent-educated daughter of a bourgeois civic leader—a man who had personally helped to crown the king only a decade before—would make a compelling target for abuse. Much worse would happen to some of those whom Nicolas and Jeanne-Clémentine had entertained on those long summer evenings in the splendid halls of their family estate before the Revolution.
    The roads beyond the convent were a brilliant red tide of men in Phrygian caps, classical symbols of liberty once worn by freed slaves in ancient democracies, singing familiar military marches with new words. In the distance was the sound of beating drums, and heels striking the cobble pavement echoed off the stone facades of the grandest buildings in Reims, as the men organized themselves into makeshift militias. There were fears throughout France of an imminent invasion, as the other great monarchs of Europe roused themselves to send troops to crush the popular uprising that had electrified the masses across the continent.
    Hurrying through those chaotic streets must have been terrifying for a small girl. All around her was uproar as the mob gathered. They moved quickly past. Then, perhaps in the crowds of angry men, one or two looked at Barbe-Nicole with the perplexed stare of dim recognition. Perhaps she witnessed some of the many small atrocities of the Revolution—the vandalism, the beatings. The day was something no one who experienced it would ever forget.
     
     
    We can only speculate about what small horrors made up Barbe-Nicole’s memory of that day, and we will never know precisely what happened next. Only the broadest outlines of this dramatic story have survived as family legend. We have one other fact: After their escape, during the first days of the Revolution, the dressmaker hid the girl in the small apartment above her shop, not far from a small, dingy square on the southern outskirts of Reims, where there are still a few eighteenth-century buildings. Not much in Reims survived the bombings of World War I, but looking at these tilting structures, I find myself wondering if one of those apartments, with the faded linen curtains, was where Barbe-Nicole looked out on a changing world. The square is still known today as Place des Droits de l’Homme—Plaza of the Rights of Man.
    After more than two hundred years of retelling, some people now even question whether it was Barbe-Nicole or her little sister who made this dramatic escape through the streets of a city in the grip of a revolution. But in the few early documents that record the details of her private life—a nineteenth-century biography of her family by a local historian and a breezy mid-twentieth-century sketch by the aristocratic wife of the company president—this has been the central legend of Barbe-Nicole’s childhood.
    In fact, this one family anecdote is the only story about that childhood to survive. Apart from the barest outlines of birth and parentage, nothing of Barbe-Nicole’s girlhood remains. This silence might be the most important part of her story. Like other girls from privileged genteel families of the time, she was meant to be invisible. She should have lived a quiet and unexceptional life in a small city in provincial France. There would have been days filled with the duties of a wife and needs of children and aging parents. There would have been hours spent planning pretty dresses and dinner parties. There would have been the triumphs and tragedies of daily living. Had everything gone according to plan, Barbe-Nicole would have