Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life

Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life Justine Picardie Justine Picardie has spent the last decade puzzling over the truth about Coco Chanel, attempting to peel away the accretions of romance and lies. In this critically acclaimed, bestselling biography she shares the history of the incredible woman who created the way we look now.Coco Chanel was an extraordinary inventor - she conjured up the little black dress, bobbed hair, trousers for women, contemporary chic, best-selling perfumes, and the most successful fashion brand of all time - but she also invented herself, fashioning the myth of her own life with the same dexterity as her couture.While Chanel was supreme innovator and vendor of all things elegant and beautiful, what lies beneath her own glossy myth is far darker. Throwing new light on her passionate and turbulent relationships, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at how Coco Chanel made herself into her own most powerful creation.Justine Picardie brings the mysterious Gabrielle Chanel out of hiding, to celebrate her great achievements. She examines Chanel's enduring afterlife, as well as her remarkable life, uncovering the consequences of what she covered up, unpicking the seams between truth and legend, yet keeping intact the real fabric of her past. © Apis/Sygma/Corbis Sleek. Chic. Notoriously guarded. Welcome to the secret world of Gabrielle Chanel. The story of Chanel begins with an abandoned child, as lost as a girl in a dark fairytale. Unveiling remarkable new details about Gabrielle Chanel’s early years in a convent orphanage, and her flight into unconventional adulthood, Justine Picardie explores what lies beneath the glossy surface of a mythic fashion icon. Throwing new light on her passionate and turbulent relationships, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at how Coco Chanel made herself into her own most powerful creation. An authoritative account, based on personal observations and interviews with Chanel’s last surviving friends, employees and relatives, it also unravels her coded language and symbols, and traces the influence of her formative years on her legendary style. Feared and revered by the rest of the fashion industry, Coco Chanel died in 1971, at the age of 87, but her legacy lives on. Drawing upon her unprecedented research, Justine Picardie brings Gabrielle Chanel out of hiding and uncovers the consequences of what she covered up, unpicking the seams between truth and myth, in a story that reveals the true heart of fashion. ‘Justine Picardie’s thoughtful and beautifully illustrated biography illuminates the iconoclast who might justifiably be said to have invented the twentieth-century woman’ Times Literary Supplement Copyright (#ulink_4553c7a3-1e95-5647-afac-3a5079a4d6de) HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 This revised edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017 © Justine Picardie 2010, 2017 Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 Cover photograph © Apis/Sygma/Corbis A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Justine Picardie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work While every effort has been made to trace owners of copyright material reproduced herein and secure permissions, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future edition of this book. 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Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/green) Source ISBN 9780007318995 Ebook Edition © JUNE 2017 ISBN: 9780007346295 Version 2017-04-24 ‘I imposed black;it’s still goingstrong today,for black wipes outeverything else around.’ Coco Chanel Contents Cover (#uf777903e-9b1c-576b-aeea-004a3e5f8129) Title Page (#ue5c3f1ab-1083-564b-a2ff-790014b45644) Copyright (#ulink_5af3b613-a8c5-5188-a84a-836b8835fc1b) Foreword: Chanel and I (#ulink_3f068ef2-d0e0-5132-bfd5-894d9f38cc5f) Mademoiselle Is at Home (#ulink_6a5998b5-1418-5128-9380-336d8b815cb1) Gabrielle (#ulink_d1ff5093-d42f-5d6f-9e87-52ca013f8810) In the Shadow of the Cross (#ulink_18e5b2da-8737-51fc-b06c-b056ddb19812) Coco (#ulink_f3cf7b90-1cb2-5563-93af-fe4852148ceb) Courtesans and Camellias (#ulink_edac83e2-14f4-5ec0-882d-e2b64892eef7) The Double C (#ulink_f1d378ae-3594-5792-8705-82b15710c273) The Little Black Dress (#ulink_6ba6d131-adf6-5b3f-a508-f8a5f5ffbda1) Misia and the Muse (#litres_trial_promo) Number Five (#litres_trial_promo) The Russians (#litres_trial_promo) The Duke of Westminster (#litres_trial_promo) Riviera Chic (#litres_trial_promo) The Woman in White (#litres_trial_promo) The Promised Land (#litres_trial_promo) Diamonds as Big as the Ritz (#litres_trial_promo) Through a Glass, Darkly (#litres_trial_promo) The Comeback (#litres_trial_promo) Celebrity Chanel (#litres_trial_promo) Scissors (#litres_trial_promo) La Grande Mademoiselle (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo) Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) List of Searchable Terms (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Foreword: Chanel and I (#ulink_ac2d6283-f0d9-5bde-93fa-20b6b482617b) I am writing this at the desk of Gabrielle Chanel, in her private apartment above the couture salon of the business she founded in 1910, in Rue Cambon. This is a place I first came to many years ago, not long after the death of my sister Ruth in 1997. The story that follows is not about my sister, but she is part of it, as is my mother, who married my father wearing a little black dress, cut from a Chanel pattern, eight months before I was born. That dress took on a talismanic quality when I was old enough to wear it as a young woman; it seemed to speak of elegance, but also of rebellion (for to marry in black is to break a powerful taboo). And Chanel appeared to be significant in other ways, too – for like legions before me, I came to associate her name with the scent of womanhood; in my case, via the flask of Chanel N°5 in my mother’s bedroom, and the vial of Chanel N°19 that her mother, my grandmother, gave me as a birthday present when I turned 18. Thus Chanel was written into our lives, but with a light touch (a spray of perfume; the feel of black satin against naked skin). And then my beloved sister died of breast cancer at the age of 33, when her longed-for twins had just reached their second birthdays. In the aftermath, I felt as if my heart was cracked and might never mend again; for Ruth was my best friend, my comrade since childhood, the girl I had always sought to protect, a lifelong companion whose journey I had shared for so long. As a consequence, perhaps, I discovered that grief has a strange communality (and also that mourning takes on many more forms than merely wearing black). This may also explain why I felt an unexpected rush of sympathy for Chanel herself, on that initial visit to her apartment; for it seemed to be the inner sanctum of a woman whose life had been marked by a series of savage losses. First came her mother’s death, when Gabrielle was 11 years old; swiftly followed by the disappearance of her father, who abandoned his five children; and then the demise of her two sisters (one committed suicide, having been rejected by the man she loved; the other drank herself to death after a failed marriage). All this I heard from my expert guide to the apartment – one of the remarkable women who work in Chanel’s archives – and later that day from Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s creative director since 1983, and a man who knows and understands every last detail of the life and work of the brand’s founder. But if the shadow of bereavement is perceptible in the place where I am writing today, so too is a sense of the life that Chanel created for herself. Just in front of me, looking directly into my eyes, is one of her favourite mementoes – a small painting of a lion – and there are a number of others elsewhere in the apartment. These act as a reminder that she was born under the sign of Leo, but also of her own fierce spirit in establishing her independence, at a time when women in France were still denied the vote. Fashion is often deemed facile – and indeed, there are moments when it does make itself look ridiculous – yet Gabrielle Chanel brought dignity to her conception of style, while also reminding us that beautiful surfaces may have hidden depths. She herself kept so much of her past concealed – the shame of her childhood abandonment; the pain of her years spent in an orphanage; the agony of lost loves and loneliness. She became the most famous woman in fashion – whose iconography remains as potent today as it was a century ago – but for all her elegance, she remained vulnerable, despite the protective qualities of her perfectly tailored clothes. It took me some time to feel brave enough to embark on a book about this complex and brilliant woman, although I wrote often about her, and her enduring legacy, in the years after my first visit to Rue Cambon. When I thought about Chanel – which was often, given that I worked for Vogue after my sister’s death; and subsequently for Harper’s Bazaar – I could not disentangle my feelings about its present incarnation, as a supremely powerful global fashion brand, from my instinctive emotional response to Gabrielle Chanel. She seemed to have everything, and nothing (though as I write those words, I am tempted to delete them, for fear of being misleading). Could it be that she was a tragic heroine, or someone else entirely, a more elusive figure than anyone could ever fully know? But for all my doubts, I continued searching for clues about Chanel, making notes, slowly gathering the confidence to write her biography, acknowledging my own ambition in doing so. Doors began to open – to the Chanel archives in Paris, and a number of others elsewhere (including several private archives in England and Scotland containing previously unseen material dating back to Chanel’s love affair with the Duke of Westminster in the 1920s, and her friendship with Winston Churchill). I was also fortunate to meet two women who had been close to Chanel: firstly, her friend Claude Delay, an author and psychoanalyst (and therefore a perceptive interpreter of Chanel’s complex emotions, dreams and nightmares); and Gabrielle Labrunie, Chanel’s great-niece, who might in fact have been her granddaughter. Both women were exceptionally kind to me, and generous with their time and memories; indeed, Gabrielle Labrunie even allowed me to stay with her at her country house, outside Paris, while I was researching the book. Their kindness may have had something to do with my own vulnerability when I first met them; for this coincided with the end of my marriage. My then husband, and the father of my two sons, had fallen in love with someone else; it was as simple, and as complicated, as that. In the chaotic, unhappy period following our separation, I travelled to Aubazine, a remote convent and Cistercian abbey, hidden away in the rural French region of Corr?ze, where Chanel had lived with her two sisters in the wake of their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance. It was winter when I went there – and I had been reluctant to go, longing to remain within the familiar sanctuary of home, yet also knowing that the opportunity to visit Aubazine and stay in the convent might never arise again. I still remember the journey – leaving London in tears, weighed down by anxiety and a corrosive sense of impending catastrophe; arriving in Paris, feeling as if I could not go on; catching another train to the town of Brive-la-Gaillarde, where Chanel’s mother had died; and then following the route that her father had taken her with her sisters, up through a circuitous mountain road towards Aubazine, where the grey stone walls of the ancient abbey looked more forbidding than I could ever have imagined. During Chanel’s residence there, in the late nineteenth century, the convent was filled with dozens of orphans and nuns; but by the time of my visit, the orphanage had been closed for decades, and the religious community had dwindled to a handful of nuns. The Mother Superior had agreed to my staying there, as long as I followed the daily routine of the nuns: prayers at dawn, noon, dusk, and night; silence except at meals; respect for their religious rituals and spiritual retreat. It was a bitter winter that year, and my prevailing memory of those days – and long nights – at Aubazine is of the chill of the little room where I slept in a narrow iron bed, a wooden crucifix of an anguished Christ above me. The chapel where I knelt with the nuns as they prayed was equally icy; the stone floor cold as the black earth of the abbey’s garden, where the trees were leafless and the plants frostbitten and decaying. When I was alone at night, I alternated between weeping and writing; although eventually, my focus shifted away from my own dreary unhappiness, as I became more absorbed in the unfamiliar surroundings. In the short hours of daylight, between the nuns’ prayer services, I explored the abbey, and at last began to feel a profound sense of wonderment: not because of a sudden religious conversion, but rather because Chanel’s symbols – the interlocked double Cs that appeared in her designs; the restrained aesthetic of black, white and beige; the stars and crescent moons that were her signature in jewellery and other decorative embellishment – were also apparent in the ancient world of Aubazine. As I retraced Chanel’s steps along the corridor to the dormitory where she slept, I saw the mosaic of five-sided stars that had been crafted from thousands of tiny stones by the Cistercian monks who inhabited Aubazine during its medieval era; while inside the dark abbey itself were stained-glass windows with a stylised design that seemed to reflect – or pre-figure – Chanel’s logo. The nuns themselves still wore black habits with white cuffs and collars – again, reminiscent of Chanel’s ascetic monochrome palette – and their rosaries looked unexpectedly similar to her pearl necklaces and crucifixes. By the time I left Aubazine, I had not experienced a miraculous recovery from the pain of the end of a marriage, but I did feel lucky: to have been allowed to stay at the abbey, and also to have been free to leave there, unlike the orphans who had been locked behind its iron gates. Before returning to Paris, I went to see Gabrielle Labrunie again and told her about my experience at Aubazine. And it was then that she led me to a simple bedroom in her house that I had never been inside before and showed me the wardrobe lined with Chanel’s own clothes; most of them in the colours of Aubazine (white silk and linen, like the whitewashed walls of the convent; beige tweed, reminiscent of the sandstone floors of the abbey; black chiffon, dark as the shadows that shrouded the chapel). And there, too, was a faint scent that I recognised from childhood – Chanel N°5 – the scent of a woman, still distinct today, in Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment … Gabrielle Labrunie died several years ago, but as I sit here on a winter’s morning, the pale sunlight filtered by the translucent curtains, I remember her face and her gentle voice; her compassion and her understanding; the touch of her warm hand on mine. The hidden mirrored door to the apartment is closed, but I can hear the sound of voices, from the women who are working in the couture salon below, the day after Chanel’s latest show (this one held at the Ritz, with a light-hearted parade of dancing models, wearing black wisps of chiffon, lustrous pearls and soft tweeds). There is a ripple of laughter, and I find that I am smiling, too. Chanel’s clock on the desk has stopped – it is forever 5.38 (a time that seems to have no significance, though I could be wrong, in this place where numbers remain powerful). But I am aware of how much time has passed since I first came here, and all that I have discovered about myself – as well as Gabrielle Chanel – in the intervening years. What would Gabrielle say to me now, I wonder, if she could speak to me? Would she chastise me for daring to think that I could understand the infinite mysteries of her life? Possibly; probably … But even so, I say to her, speaking out loud in the quiet room, thank you. Thank you for all that you have given me. Thank you for making me braver than before, and for showing that women can, and should, be independent spirits, while also recognising that it is love that makes and shapes us. And thank you for giving me the hope to believe in second chances; and to trust that endings can also lead to beginnings, even when all seems forever lost. Would I have fallen in love again were it not for Chanel? Perhaps, though my own propensity for magical thinking (a trait that I share with Chanel) allows me to believe she might have helped me along the way; for after all, when I first met the man who I am now married to, our initial conversation was about Chanel. Indeed, as a consequence of that unexpected encounter, he led me to the faraway places where Chanel had stayed in the Scottish Highlands, and unlocked the door to her Riviera villa, La Pausa. And when we married on a June day in Scotland, with my sons and friends around us, I was wearing an ivory silk dress by Chanel … Of course, my Chanel is just one version of her legend and her life; we none of us can ever fully comprehend someone else’s experience, nor pin them down, like butterflies, in a glass case, or preserve them in amber. Instead, I prefer to think of Chanel as a beguiling, elusive ghost – endlessly close, yet just out of reach, slipping through the mirrors that reflect one another in this beautiful room. When I touch the leather surface of her desk, I can feel the marks of her pen, but there are no words visible in the abstract pattern scored by her sharp nib, no apparent meaning within the labyrinth of lines engraved during the decades that she lived and worked here. I could study these puzzling marks forever, and never turn them into words; and therein lies the genius of Chanel. The enigmatic lines are mysteriously beautiful … just like the woman who made them, the eternally alluring Gabrielle Chanel. Rue Cambon, 8 December 2016 Mademoiselle Is at Home (#ulink_5025cfcf-9a31-512d-9ad3-44e862fd10ce) When my customers come to me, they like to cross the threshold of some magic place; they feel a satisfaction that is perhaps a trace vulgar but that delights them: they are privileged characters who are incorporated into our legend. For them this is a far greater pleasure than ordering another suit. Legend is the consecration of fame. Coco Chanel, 1935 The House of Chanel stands at 31 Rue Cambon, a shrine to its dead creator, yet also a living, thriving temple of twenty-first-century fashion, the destination for pilgrims who travel here from all around the world. Outside, dusk falls on a grey wintry afternoon in Paris, the darkness and the drizzle mingling into an early twilight, the shadows of the surrounding buildings lying heavy on the narrow street. Inside, the air is perfumed and warm in the ground-floor boutique, a cocoon of luxury lined with cream surfaces and silvered mirrors, the customers hovering like hummingbirds above glass cases of enticing jewel-coloured lipsticks, or swooping on rails of silk-lined tweed jackets. Their eyes dart towards the film projection of the latest collection, comparing what they see in the shop with what is portrayed on the screen (and perhaps in their mind’s eye, a vision of themselves transformed, dressed all in Chanel). You can watch the video reflected in the mirrors, too; the porcelain-faced models riding on a white and gold carousel. But instead of wooden horses galloping in a ceaseless circle, there are the famous symbols of Coco Chanel: pearls and camellias and the interlocked double-C logo, as globally recognisable as the Stars and Stripes or the swastika. As the carousel revolves on the screen, the reflections in the mirrors are also spinning, and for a few seconds everything is in movement; nothing seems solid at all. This is as you would expect in the heart and headquarters of an international fashion brand, where mutability is integral to its business of selling new stock every season; yet there must always be something immediately familiar, suggestive of an iconography that denotes heritage and enduring value. The contradictions of such an enterprise are unavoidable – it’s a balancing act between constant change and constancy – as is evident in Coco Chanel’s own observations on the business of fashion: ‘A dress is neither a tragedy, nor a painting; it is a charming and ephemeral creation, not an everlasting work of art. Fashion should die and die quickly, in order that commerce may survive … The more transient fashion is the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead.’ And yet Mademoiselle protected her house, and here it still stands. Beside the entrance to the boutique is another doorway, closed to the public by a discreet dark-suited security guard, though not to select couture clients, who ascend Chanel’s mirrored staircase when they come for private fittings in the hushed salon on the first floor. Not a trace of dust or dirt marks the floor, dark and shiny as a lipstick case, and the ivory walls are perfectly smooth, as befits a ceremonial space where pieces from the current couture collection hang on rails, veiled in white shrouds like novitiates. Beyond here, the staircase continues to rise through the centre of the house, up to the place where Chanel watched her fashion shows unfold, hidden from the audience below, yet seeing everything beneath her, perched on the fifth step from the top of the spiralling stairs. Pause for a moment on the staircase, and it gives you the strangest sensation. The mirrors are simultaneously reflecting from all angles; there is no escape from the sight of your body bisected, slivers of face and limbs. So you must watch yourself as you climb the flight to the second floor, to the unmarked mirrored double doors that lead into Mademoiselle Chanel’s private apartment. Open the door, and it is as if she has never left the building; for here is her sanctuary, polished and preserved, decades after her death on 10th January 1971. You might call it a mausoleum, yet it feels too alive for that, for these rooms are still filled with her presence, along with her possessions. On the other side of the door is an entrance hall, the walls lined with early eighteenth-century Coromandel screens, their red lacquer patterned with a mysterious Oriental landscape, where women in kimonos fly on the back of white birds, and men are carried by fishes and turtles. There are pale mountains and wraiths of clouds and lakes on the screens, waterfalls and temples and precipices, a world beyond the walls of this Parisian apartment; and the sound of the city is silenced by the softness of thick beige carpet, the view concealed by the mirrors that reflect the Chinese screens. The hall seems hermetically sealed, the way out hidden by mirrors, but two life-size Venetian blackamoors gesture to go on, past a pair of reindeer that stand to attention on either side of a bunch of gilded wheat in a silver vase. The statues point into the salon, but the reflection of their painted eyes and hands is multiplied in a series of mirrored images, upending all sense of direction, skewing perspective within these looking-glass walls. Another door leads from the hall to the dining room where Chanel entertained guests, six beige suede-upholstered chairs at a walnut table; two lions on the tabletop; two gilt and crystal-encrusted mirrors in the alcoves; the ceiling curved like the vaulting of a Romanesque church. A smaller sitting room is lined with more antique Chinese screens, watched over by a stone statue of the Madonna and Child, his eyes at the door, hers cast down to the ground. But there is no bedroom in the apartment, for Mademoiselle slept across the street, on the top floor of the Ritz, with a view over the rooftops of Rue Cambon. Her hotel room was unadorned – white cotton sheets, white walls, austere like the convent orphanage where she was educated – but her apartment remains as ornate as it was in her lifetime. The walls are lined in gold fabric; not that much can be seen of them, for they are covered with books and screens and mirrors, conserved like the inside of a holy sanctum, or the final resting place of an Ancient Egyptian queen. If the mirrored staircase is the backbone of the House of Chanel, then Mademoiselle’s salon – the largest of the three main rooms in her apartment – is its hidden heart. The outside world is not entirely excluded, for there are windows reaching from floor to ceiling, overlooking Rue Cambon to the school on the other side of the street, where children still study in the first-floor classroom, just as they did when Mademoiselle Chanel lived here. But did she look out of the window at them, or keep her eyes fixed on the treasures within these walls? There are yet more Chinese screens hiding the doors (Chanel hated the sight of doors, she said, for they reminded her of those who had already left, and those who would leave her again). Look closer, and you could lose yourself within their intricacies, drawn into a landscape of boats and bridges, of graceful women kneeling beside the water; a place where serpents and dragons fly through the air, above unicorns and elephants; where the trees grow leaves like fine white lace, and camellias are perpetually in blossom. You could spend days in this room and never want to leave, such is the wealth of its riches. Two walls are lined with leather-bound books: antique editions of Plutarch, Euripides and Homer; the memoirs of Casanova and the essays of Montaigne; The Confessions of St Augustine and The Dialogues of Plato; the complete works of Maupassant and Moli?re in French, Shelley and Shakespeare in English; and two volumes of a weighty Holy Bible, published in London by the aptly named Virtue and Co. (If you happen to take down Volume Three of Shelley from the shelf, it falls open at a well-thumbed page from the poet’s preface to Julian and Maddalo: ‘Of the Maniac I can give no information. He seems, by his own account, to have been disappointed in love. He was evidently a very cultivated and amiable person when in his right senses. His story, told at length, might be like many other stories of the same kind: the unconnected exclamations of his agony will perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text of every heart.’) In front of one of these walls of rare books stands Mademoiselle’s roll-top desk, where her cream-coloured writing paper and envelopes are still in the compartment where she kept them. Above is a gilt-framed painting of a lion, signifying Chanel’s astrological sign of Leo, in commemoration of her birthday on 19th August, although she was less willing to remember the year of her birth, 1883, adjusting it when it suited her purposes; even tearing it out of her passport. ‘My age varies according to the days and the people I happen to be with,’ she told a young American journalist in 1959, when she was 76. ‘When I’m bored I feel very old, and since I’m extremely bored with you, I’m going to be a thousand years old in five minutes …’ Beside the lion is a vase of crystal camellias; on the leather desktop is her tortoiseshell fan, engraved with the stars that she constantly reworked into her jewellery designs, and a pair of her spectacles. Try them on, and the room dissolves into a blur of gold and red and shadows; quickly take them off again, to stop the walls from closing in. The drawers of the desk are unlocked; two are empty – and much was emptied from here, mysteriously vanishing on the night of Mademoiselle’s death; shadowy figures stealing down the mirrored staircase, disappearing with bags of her belongings, including most of her precious jewels (the priceless ropes of pearls and necklaces of rubies and emeralds, her dazzling diamond rings and bracelets). But the right-hand drawer still contains a few of her personal possessions: a pair of sunglasses in a soft leather pouch, another fan, this one even more delicate, fashioned in paper and fragile wooden frets, and a sheaf of photographs of Mademoiselle Chanel. The first is of her in 1937, elegant in a white jacket and pearls, standing beside the Coromandel screen in the hall. Her eyes do not look into the camera lens, but gaze sideways, towards something or someone unseen, somewhere beyond the screen, beyond the white birds and camellias. There are several more photographs in the drawer: Chanel as a young woman astride a white horse, head held high to the camera, but her eyes hidden in the shade of a wide-brimmed hat. A man stands beside her, her lover, Boy Capel, his hands lightly touching her foot in the stirrup; they are dressed in near-identical riding outfits, a boyish tie her only addition to the crisp white shirt and trim jodhpurs. Twenty years on, and Boy Capel is gone, while Chanel is balanced on the shoulder of her friend Serge Lifar, a handsome ballet dancer, his hair as glossily dark as hers. She is wearing her strands of pearls over a black sweater and white trousers, and smiling in the light of a Riviera morning. Sunshine dapples her face again in a picture of a younger Chanel on a countryside road, where she is standing beside her car, nonchalant in a striped matelot top and navy sailor trousers; a reminder of her life beyond Rue Cambon, of her villa beside the sea in the South of France. And then there is the photograph of Chanel in 1920 with her lover, the Grand Duke Dmitri, cousin of the Russian tsar, and one of the assassins of Rasputin. He is as handsome as a movie star; she is more beautiful than any of her models, hair cropped short, tanned skin glowing against iridescent pearls and white satin dress, gazing into his eyes. But mostly the pictures show Chanel alone: poised by the fireplace, or reclining on the long beige-suede sofa in the salon, studying a book, her hand hovering over a page of cryptic Indian illustrations. You cannot read her expression in these photographs of a solitary woman, the elegant lines of her face impassive, her eyebrows arched, a cigarette in her hand, its smoke rising like a decoy. And so you go back to searching the room, trying to decode the cipher, looking for clues that might explain its owner’s enigmatic face. There are bunches of dried wheat on either side of the marble fireplace, and two more made of gilded wood on the mantelpiece, emblematic of good fortune and prosperity. A golden lion raises its paw to a Grecian mask, a woman’s face with eyes as dark as Chanel’s; and in the centre of the mantelpiece is a first-century headless torso of Aphrodite, its marble curves reflected in the looking glass, so that it seems to be one of twins. The Baroque mirror above the fireplace is vast, reaching the high ceiling, framed by pillars of cherubs and grapes. Its reflections are refracted by yet another mirror, of darker, smokier glass, which hangs above the suede sofa; leaning against the faded gilt frame is a gold crucifix (a double-barred cross, typical of those seen in the Spanish holy town of Caravaca, a former stronghold of the Knights Templar). Beside the cross is a painting of a single wheatsheaf by Salvador Dal?, one of Chanel’s many artist friends and lovers. You could go on searching for meaning here, noting the quilted cushions on the sofa (diagonal quilting, the same pattern as her famous handbags); hunting for the lions in the room; counting the pairs of animals. There are the two bronze deer by the fireplace, almost life-size, a buck and doe, their cloven feet sinking into the carpet, and another tiny pair beside the sofa, in painted metal, with vases of pink flowers on their backs. Two camels on a side-table, two frogs (one glass, one bronze); two lovebirds made of pearl in a tiny jewelled cage; two porcelain horses, on either side of the smoky mirror; two golden fire-dogs in the empty hearth. Once you start looking, the doublings are everywhere: a second Grecian mask, staring at its twin from across the room; two Egyptian sphinx; two ceramic bowls on top of a bookshelf, one containing a broken shard of crystal; two clocks, one on the desk, which has stopped at 3.23, on the eleventh day of an unnumbered month, the other suspended, miraculously, on a mirrored wall between the two windows, its hands motionless at 1.18, a winged and vengeful angel of death wielding a scythe above the clockface. A collection of symbolic objects is scattered throughout the room: a Catholic icon, a Buddha holding a spray of roses in his hand, another Buddha beside a strange mythical creature (part lion, part dog, part man, with an expression on his face of a sorrowful Caliban); a crystal glass cross, a mariner’s navigational tool, a single bronze hand made by Diego Giacometti; a pack of Tarot cards (the number five is on top, Chanel’s lucky number, illustrated by a picture of a green tree, its roots visible above the ground). There is evidence of great wealth, and perhaps of great love: Chanel is said to have discovered her taste for Coromandel screens with the first and foremost love of her life, Boy Capel, the Englishman who also introduced her to theosophy and literature. Then there are the weighty solid-gold boxes engraved with the crest of a crown, a gift to Chanel from the Duke of Westminster, who showered her with jewels during their decade-long love affair, although there is no further sign of him here in the apartment apart from a novel by Alexandre Dumas, borrowed from the ducal library. The boxes stand empty on a low table in front of the sofa, flanked by a pair of fortune-teller’s glass globes: one is in white quartz, cool to the touch; the other of gold-flecked resin, unexpectedly warm beneath the hands. Gaze into the glass, and nothing is clear; both globes contain only the faintest reflections of the chandelier that hangs from the middle of the ceiling. It is a magnificent creation – designed by Chanel herself – adorned with dozens of crystal orbs and stars, camellias and grapes; sparkling from a black wrought-iron frame. Look long enough, and the hidden letters and numbers in the frame begin to emerge from the abstract pattern: at the top of the chandelier there are Gs for Gabrielle, Chanel’s name at christening; double Cs for Coco Chanel, the name under which she became famous; and fives – the number which made her fortune, as the label on the perfume that still sells more than any other brand in the world. Walk back to the desk, and dare to sit down on the beige suede-upholstered chair where Mademoiselle used to work; run your fingers over the marks of her pen still visible in the multiple scores and angry scratches on the ink-stained leather desktop. The hands of the clocks are fixed for ever, the room is silent, the cream linen curtains are still; nothing moves across the mirrors, the gleaming light from the chandelier remains caught in time, as if preserved in amber. You cannot see the reflections in the mirrors when you are writing at the desk, only the eyes of the painted lion in the gold frame, the hands of the blackamoors, disappearing through the half-open door; but the hairs on the back of your neck are prickling; and perhaps, if you could turn around quickly enough, who on earth might be reflected in the looking-glass walls? ‘Sometimes, when the boutique is closed, we feel her presence,’ said my guide to the apartment, on my first visit here, glancing over her shoulder at the sound of a creaking door, the murmur of voices on the staircase, nervous as if she were being watched. ‘After dark, even when the lights are on, you might glimpse her in the mirror, or hear her footsteps in the drawing room, very soft and quiet, too quick for anyone to catch up with her …’ Gabrielle (#ulink_7931373d-dbf4-59f5-be59-92b755108e43) ‘Those on whom legends are built are their legends,’ declared Coco Chanel to her friend Paul Morand, one of several writers to whom she tried, and failed, to tell the story of her life. ‘People’s lives are an enigma,’ she said to another friend, Claude Delay, not long before her death, when her face had already become a fixed mask to the world, and her myth apparently impenetrable. Delay was a young woman at the time, the daughter of a well-known French psychiatrist, but is herself now an eminent psychoanalyst, and an expert guide to the labyrinth of secrets and lies that Chanel constructed to conceal the truth of her past. Not that there is ever a single truth in a life, especially for a woman who built a career on refashioning women’s ideas of themselves; which may be why Chanel recounted so many different stories about herself, as if in each version something new might emerge from her history. ‘I don’t like the family,’ she told Delay, in one of a series of revelatory, rambling conversations in her final decade. ‘You’re born in it, not of it. I don’t know anything more terrifying than the family.’ And so she circled around and about it, telling and retelling the narrative of her youth, remaking history just as she remade the sleeves of a jacket, unfastening its seams and cutting its threads, and then sewing it back together again. ‘Childhood – you speak of it when you’re very tired, because it’s a time when you had hopes, expectations. I remember my childhood by heart.’ If Chanel’s memory did survive intact, she nevertheless obscured her past from others, reshaping its heartaches, smoothing away the rough edges. Even her birth certificate is misleading – her father’s surname, and hers, were misspelt due to a clerical error as Chasnel. But she could not keep all the details hidden: her mother’s maiden name was Eug?nie Jeanne D?volles, and despite attempts by Chanel in later life to erase the date, the official record shows that her mother gave birth to Gabrielle on 19th August 1883 in the poorhouse in Saumur, a market town on the River Loire. Eug?nie (known as Jeanne) was 20, Henri-Albert (known as Albert) was 28, and listed as a marchand, or merchant, on Gabrielle’s birth certificate. They were not yet married but already had one daughter, Julia, born less than a year previously, on 11th September 1882. ‘I was born on a journey,’ Chanel told an American reporter in answer to his question about the exact location of her birthplace. Although this was an evasion – she was born in a hospice for the poor, run by an order of nuns, the Sisters of Providence – her parents were generally on the move, itinerant market traders selling buttons and bonnets, aprons and overalls, travelling between towns, just as her paternal grandparents had done. Gabrielle’s father was the son of a peddler, and like her, he had been born in a poorhouse (in N?mes in 1856); his surname had also been misspelt on his birth certificate, but on this occasion as Henri-Albert Charnet. The mistake was not corrected in official records until over two decades later, in 1878, when a court decree stated that Charnet be replaced on the certificate by Chanel, ‘which is the true name’. ‘My father was not there,’ she explained to another journalist, Marcel Haedrich (editor-in-chief of Marie Claire, and a man who had spent enough time with Chanel to regard himself as her friend, drawing on his conversations with her in a biography he wrote soon after her death). ‘That poor woman, my mother, had to go looking for him. It’s a sad story, and very boring – I’ve heard it so many times.’ Thus she dismissed the beginning of her story, and never told it with any accuracy herself; never acknowledging that the truth was far from boring, but too troubling to reveal. Gabrielle’s father was not present at her birth, setting a pattern that was to be repeated thereafter. A man who often appeared to be on the run from his family, he had already vanished when Jeanne became pregnant with their first child, and refused to marry her when he was finally tracked down, a month before she gave birth to their daughter Julia. Consequently, both the girls were born illegitimate; it was not until Gabrielle was 15 months old that her parents eventually married, in November 1884. Soon afterwards, her mother was pregnant again, and on the move through the Auvergne in south-central France, an isolated region where Jeanne had been born into a peasant family in the village of Courpi?re. She would have found little refuge there: both Jeanne’s parents were dead by the time she had met her elusive future husband, and although her brother had done his best to protect her interests when she fell pregnant, her illegitimate babies did nothing to soften the weight of local disapproval. A boy, christened Alphonse, was born in 1885; another daughter, Antoinette, in 1887; a son, Lucien, in 1889; and the final baby, Augustin, who died in infancy, in 1891. Chanel rarely talked about the circumstances of her birth, but she did occasionally mention a train journey that her mother had undertaken just beforehand, in search of the elusive Albert. ‘What with the clothes of that time,’ she remarked to Haedrich with her customary, circuitous vagueness, ‘I suppose no one could see that she was about to have a baby. Some people helped her – they were very kind: they took her into their home and sent for a doctor. My mother didn’t want to stay there. ‘“You can get another train tomorrow,” the people said, to soothe her. “You’ll find your husband tomorrow.” But the doctor realised that my mother wasn’t ill at all. “She’s about to have a baby,” he said. At that point the people who had been so nice to her were furious. They wanted to throw her out. The doctor insisted that they take care of her. They took her to a hospital, where I was born. One of the hospital nuns was my godmother.’ The name of this nun was Gabrielle Bonheur, according to Chanel, ‘so I was baptised Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel. I knew nothing of this for a long time. There was never any occasion to check my baptismal certificate. During the war I sent for all my documents because one was always afraid of the worst …’ In fact, the name Bonheur does not appear on her baptismal certificate, but perhaps Gabrielle felt the right to make it her own in later life; to lay claim to its meaning, which is happiness. In yet another version of her birth, told to a different friend, Andr?-Louis Dubois, Gabrielle mentioned a train again, suggesting that her mother went into labour while travelling on the railway. ‘She talked constantly about trains, sometimes even claiming to have been born on a train,’ said Dubois, remembering Chanel to a French journalist soon after her death. ‘Why this obsession with trains?’ One possible answer is that she had an uncle who was a railway employee, but even so, trains seemed to have a deeper significance for Chanel than that; as if they were a connection to a past that was always on the move, yet ran along fixed lines, to a destination of her own choosing. Whatever her association with train travel, she was also a child of the poorhouse, plain Gabrielle Chasnel. And Gabrielle she stayed throughout her childhood – Coco was a creation that came later – although she invented a story that is revealing in its untruths: ‘My father used to call me “Little Coco” until something better should come along,’ she told Haedrich. ‘He didn’t like [the name] “Gabrielle” at all; it hadn’t been his choice. And he was right. Soon the “Little” drifted away and I was simply Coco.’ Or might it be that her father was complaining that he didn’t like Gabrielle herself; that he had not chosen to have children; for soon he left them, discontented with marriage and fatherhood, always on the lookout for something better. At times, Gabrielle declared Coco to be an ‘awful’ name; and yet she was proud of its recognition throughout the world, evidence of her indisputable presence, despite the lack of acknowledgement or recognition by her father. But still it was a cipher, a name that her father had never known, even though she declared otherwise. ‘If anyone had told me before the war that I’d be Coco Chanel to the whole world, I’d have laughed,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘Mademoiselle Chanel had four thousand employees and the richest man in England loved her. And now I’m Coco Chanel! Nevertheless, it isn’t my name … People stop me in the street: “Are you really Coco Chanel?” When I give autographs, I write “Coco Chanel”. On a train to Lausanne a couple of weeks ago, the whole carriage paraded past me. In my own premises I’m called “Mademoiselle”; that goes without saying. I certainly don’t want to be called Coco in the House of Chanel.’ (These seemingly disconnected sentences are as Haedrich transcribed them; the fleeting references to her name and the train exactly as he recorded them.) In truth, no one knew for certain what name Gabrielle answered to in childhood, nor where exactly Coco came from. In old age, Chanel told Claude Delay that her father spoke English – ‘that was considered something diabolical in the provinces’ – which seems highly unlikely, but it is possible that the story formed a link in her mind with the English-speaking men that she loved in adulthood (Boy Capel and the Duke of Westminster, both of whom were to prove unfaithful to her). She also told Delay that her father gave her a present when he returned from one of his numerous trips away: a penholder made of a knucklebone, with Notre-Dame depicted on one side, and the Eiffel Tower on the other; and that she had dug a hole for this decorated bone in a cemetery, and buried the gift, as an offering to the dead. If Chanel’s own account is to be believed, by the age of six she was spending as much time as possible in a graveyard. ‘Every child has a special place, where he or she likes to hide, play and dream,’ she said to Paul Morand (who set down her memories in his evocative book, L’Allure de Chanel). ‘Mine was an Auvergne cemetery. I knew no one there, not even the dead.’ And yet the dead seemed to become alive for her there, although they remained as silent as their graves. ‘I was the queen of this secret garden. I loved its subterranean dwellers. “The dead are not dead as long as we think of them,” I would tell myself.’ She became attached to two unnamed tombstones, decorating them with wildflowers – poppies and daisies and cornflowers – bringing her rag dolls to the cemetery; her favourite dolls, because she had made them for herself. ‘I wanted to be sure that I was loved,’ she told Morand, ‘but I lived with people who showed no pity. I like talking to myself and I don’t listen to what I’m told: this is probably due to the fact that the first people to whom I opened my heart were the dead.’ Her mother figures only as a shadowy invalid in Gabrielle’s memories; though there are a few splashes of crimson that stain the blank pages within Chanel’s shifting narratives – her stories of the blood that a sick woman coughed onto white handkerchiefs, and an interior which bears some resemblance to the sinister red room where Jane Eyre was incarcerated as a child. Chanel, in later life, was a fan of the Bront?s, returning repeatedly to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (stories of near incestuous passion, of locked doors and unhinged minds). But her description of the red room is also reminiscent of another nineteenth-century novel, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which a woman goes mad after the birth of her child, and peels the paper from the walls of the room that imprisons her. In Chanel’s story (as told to Paul Morand), the wallpaper was red. She was five, and her mother already very ill, when she was taken with her two sisters to stay at the home of an elderly uncle. ‘We were shut away in a room covered in red wallpaper. To begin with, we were very well-behaved; then we noticed that the red wallpaper was very damp and could be peeled off from the walls.’ The girls started by peeling small pieces, then climbed onto chairs, and stripped the entire room down to its bare pink plaster: ‘the pleasure was sublime!’ When their mother came into the room, she was silent, saying nothing to her daughters, simply contemplating the disaster, and weeping without making any sound. Chanel was to claim that her mother died of tuberculosis, which was not necessarily an accurate diagnosis of what killed Jeanne; poverty, pregnancy and pneumonia were as likely to blame. In her account to Delay (subsequently published in Chanel solitaire), the family lived in a large enough house for the children to be kept in isolation from their sick mother. In fact, they were crowded with her into one room in the market town of Brive-la-Gaillarde, while their father abandoned them for his road trips. But the story Chanel told Delay had her father present, kissing her sister Julia and her on the head as they were eating lunch (no mention was made of the other siblings). ‘He hated the smell of hair and always asked how long it was since we’d had ours washed.’ Who knows how often the Chanel children were able to wash their hair, while their mother lay sick in bed, and their father was gone; but in Chanel’s memory, she would answer to her father that her hair was clean, washed ‘three days ago, with yellow soap’. She also imagined herself as her father’s favourite. ‘I didn’t so much love as want to be loved,’ she told Delay. ‘So I loved my father because he preferred me to my sister. I couldn’t have borne for him to feel the same about us both.’ But she also claimed to have had a rival, a servant who she believed was poisoning her. ‘I knew she slept with my father – that is, I didn’t know, I didn’t understand anything about that sort of thing, but I guessed, and I used to frighten her by saying I’d tell my mother.’ Once upon a time, in this dark fairytale, her parents went away together, and Gabrielle and her sister set out in search of them, to escape from the evil servant. When they finally reached their parents, Gabrielle fell asleep on her father’s shoulder, and the next day he bought her a blue dress. In another of her confessions to Delay (narratives in which the truth may or may not be unravelled from the fictions), Chanel said that as a child she was frightened of ghosts and what lay hidden beneath the bed in the darkness. Gabrielle’s graveyard offerings were not enough to protect her, and in the night the dead seemed more sinister than they did in her daylight games at the cemetery. But in the story as she told it – one of a series that could have been designed more for herself than for her listener – her father came to her; he was there to soothe her fears. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said to her, as every good father should. ‘No one is going to hurt you.’ Even so, she was still terrified of a man under her bed, throwing wheat at her. ‘But wheat is very good,’ her father said, taking her into his arms. Ever since then, she explained to Delay, she had always kept a bunch of wheat close to her: in her bedroom at the Ritz, and in each room of her apartment in Rue Cambon. Yet all the goodness of the wheat could not keep her mother from dying. Gabrielle maintained that she was 6 years old at the time; in reality, she was 11. Her father was absent again, travelling away from home, when Jeanne was found dead in her bed in a freezing room in Brive, on a bitterly cold February morning in 1895. History does not relate if Gabrielle watched her mother die, or for how long she and her siblings remained alone with the corpse; and Mademoiselle Chanel never revealed the truth, either. In the Shadow of the Cross (#ulink_04addeda-7564-547c-bb2d-4cc14e4baf4d) Brive-la-Gaillarde is a traditional railway town, a junction on the main line from Paris to Toulouse, occupying a central position in the vast heartland of France; as good a starting point as any for a pilgrim in search of Chanel. Take the road eastwards from the station; it runs through the centre of the town, then follows the curves of the river across a flat plain, towards forested mountains in the distance. After a few miles there is a narrow turning off the main road, climbing in serpentine twists, apparently coiling in on itself up the steep ascent. But at last it leads to Aubazine, a medieval village dominated by the dark bulk of a twelfth-century Cistercian monastery and abbey, founded by St Etienne in 1135. This is the place to which Gabrielle’s father drove her in a cart from Brive, along with her two sisters, Julia and Antoinette, soon after the death of their mother. The boys were left elsewhere – deposited with a peasant family; foundlings used as unpaid labour – and the three girls were handed over to the nuns who ran an orphanage within the abbey walls, the sisters of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary. The children’s father promptly disappeared. Gabrielle later claimed he had gone to America in search of a fortune in a promised land, the New World, far away from the ascetic cloisters where he had abandoned his daughters. Not that Gabrielle ever described it as abandonment; nor did she use the word ‘orphanage’. Instead, she told a number of embroidered stories about being left with her ‘aunts’, while her sister (she was vague about which one) was sent to a convent. There were two ‘aunts’ in her various narratives: black-clad, cold-eyed, stern and always nameless. ‘Actually, they weren’t my aunts, but my mother’s first cousins,’ she once remarked to Marcel Haedrich, adding that she lived with them in ‘the remotest corner of Auvergne. My aunts were good people, but absolutely without tenderness. I was not loved in their house. I got no affection. Children suffer from such things.’ Then, in a longer outburst, she gave away something of the misery she had felt, in a denial that also serves as a kind of confession: ‘People say I’m an Auvergnate. There’s nothing of the Auvergnate in me – nothing, nothing. My mother was one. In that part of the world, though, I was thoroughly unhappy. I fed on sorrow and horror. I wanted to kill myself I don’t know how many times. “That poor Jeanne” – I couldn’t stand hearing my mother talked about in that way anymore. Like all children, I listened at closed doors. I learned that my father had ruined my mother – “poor Jeanne”. All the same, she’d married the man she loved. And having to hear people call me an orphan! They felt sorry for me. I had nothing to be pitied for – I had a father. All this was humiliating. I realised no one loved me and I was being kept out of charity. There were visitors – plenty of visitors. I heard the questions put to my aunts: “Does the little one’s father still send money?”’ But there were no visits, and no money; just stern nuns and locked doors. Gabrielle spent seven years in the orphanage, until she was 18. Her father never returned to see her or her siblings, although she created a version for Marcel Haedrich in which he did visit; but even in that fantasy he did not rescue her: ‘When my father came to visit, my aunts did themselves up for him. He had a great deal of charm, and he told many stories. “Don’t listen to my aunts,” I said to him. “I’m so unhappy – take me away …”’ Like her father, Gabrielle told many stories, and she used them to protect his memory, identifying herself with him, rather than her sickly mother. It was as if she felt her father had been right to leave his wife and children, and sought to portray his flight as an act of youthful strength. In this version of her past, Gabrielle reinvented him as a far younger man – ‘not yet thirty’ – and the father of only two daughters, rather than a man approaching 40, who had cast off five children, along with a dead wife. ‘He’d made a new life,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘I understand that. He made a new family. His two daughters were in good hands. They were being brought up. He had more children. He was right. I would have done the same thing. No one under thirty could have coped with the situation. Imagine, a widower with two daughters! He really loved me. I represented the good days, fun, happiness …’ In reality, happiness was scarce in the orphanage, nor was there much love there. Gabrielle Chanel went to live in Aubazine not long after her mother’s death in February 1895; over a lifetime later, at the same time of year – a season when winter has not yet loosened its grip on the mountains – I came to stay in the abbey myself. Little has changed in the last century: only the orphans have disappeared. But you can still see their bedrooms in the original monastery building that adjoins the abbey, the simple iron beds lined up against whitewashed walls hung with crucifixes. Each of the rooms has the name of a saint on the door, and when the wooden shutters are open, a view of the forests that surround Aubazine. Beyond the forests, far away, is the railway track out of Brive, but you cannot see a trace of it from here; only the groves of chestnut trees and the mountains wreathed in a pale, frosty mist. Visitors seldom come in winter, and the dwindling community of nuns spends much of its life in silence: silent prayer, silent meal times, silent contemplation of God. If ever there was a place to feel close to God, it should be here, high on the hill, nearing the sky; yet somehow, sometimes, the walls that enclose the monastery seem to get in the way. Inside the abbey is darkness, the stone floor as cold as the unadorned walls, a chill rising from the ground that feels as if it has been frozen since St Etienne walked here. A few shafts of light pierce the shadows through the opaque grey and pearl-white windows; there is no figurative stained glass in this Cistercian abbey, but the panes form geometric patterns, knots and loops that look eerily like the double C of Chanel’s logo. Did Gabrielle gaze through these windows? Did she stare up at them, when she should have kept her eyes down to the ground, her head bowed in prayer? Towards the end of her life, Chanel told a story of sitting with other children in a wooden pew in church. A nun poked her with a stick when Gabrielle sang ‘Ave Maria’ too loudly; meanwhile, alone on another bench, was a hunchback. ‘I’d have liked to sit down beside him and touch his hump,’ she said to Claude Delay, ‘and tell him that it didn’t matter, he could still be loved.’ The abbey is empty when I walk through its pews, my steps the only sound in the silence. To the right of the altar is the stone tomb of St Etienne, a shrine where his sacred relics are preserved; to the left, a Madonna and headless Child. Along the walls are wooden misericords, ledges for the monks to rest against during the long night vigils, with strange leonine creatures carved into the ends (and in their faces you can see something of the lion that watches over Chanel’s apartment from above the fireplace in her salon). On the far side of the church, so shadowy that it takes a little while for one’s eyes to make out the detail, is a stone staircase that leads up to an ancient wooden door, heavy and blackened by the centuries. This is the staircase that Chanel walked up and down every day on her way to and from her prayers; 36 steps from the orphanage to the abbey, from Vespers to Matins, from dim morning to dark night, over and over again. Climb the stairs, and push the black door open. It leads into a long corridor on the first floor of the monastery; on one side are more doors, into the sober bedrooms and offices of the nuns; on the other side are high windows, their frames painted beige, overlooking the central walled courtyard and the fountain in the middle, carved out of a huge boulder by the followers of St Etienne. The corridor is paved with an intricate mosaic, thousands of tiny pebbles formed into patterns of stars and a moon; a bishop’s mitre and a Maltese cross; flowers with eight petals each; and another, more cryptic pattern (of loops and a square formed of circles and triangles) which the current inhabitants of the monastery cannot decipher. But the nun who acts as my guide accepts it as a holy symbol of God’s plan, a creation that leads to the Creator. ‘All we know is that it was made by the monks, like everything else here,’ she says, ‘and it has a special meaning.’ ‘Of what?’ I ask her. ‘Of the language of numbers, the mystery of the Holy Trinity,’ she says. ‘The meaning of God, which we cannot always understand, and yet we know to be the truth.’ There is no more that she can tell me about the magic or the logic of the mosaic, and by now it is time for prayers again, so I follow her down another stone staircase, the steps worn into hollows by legions of faithful feet, to the chapel on the ground floor where the nuns gather for the six o’clock service. They seem to lose themselves in prayer – their eyes remain closed, as darkness falls; they kneel in silence, motionless, even though it is icy cold – and I try to concentrate on the mystery of the Holy Trinity. But my mind and my eyes wander, counting the windows, searching for the geometry in the stones, 12 stones in an arch around each window. (Do they represent the 12 disciples, or the 12 tribes of Israel; or am I searching for significance, seeking a pattern that does not exist amidst these random stones?) Here is the place that Gabrielle prayed, and sewed, and slept; here is a world contained by high walls, where the hours are divided into devotions. How did she feel, within these immovable confines, knowing that outside her father was always travelling, always beyond her reach? On Sundays, the orphan girls walked to the Calvaire, a cross on the hill beyond Aubazine. They came out through the gate that separated them from the village – a gate kept locked and bolted at all other times – and walked up the path behind the abbey, following the mountain stream that provided water for the followers of St Etienne. The path is steep, through chestnut woods and pine forests; and it is still quiet here, footsteps muffled by fallen leaves and damp earth, the silence broken only by the occasional cry of a bird. In a clearing, you can look down the gorge to the monastery, and it seems smaller when seen from this perspective, yet monolithic nevertheless, as much a part of the landscape as the forested hillsides. This was where Gabrielle walked; though the contours of the landscape were still taking shape in Chanel’s imagination decades afterwards, when she looked back to Aubazine from the sumptuous salon of Rue Cambon. She told her friend Claude Delay about the woods into which she escaped from the house of her aunts; fleeing there early in the morning, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, hoping that the gypsies would steal her away. The horses were wild in her legend, unshod and reared for the cavalry officers who came to see her aunts once a year. The aunts never dreamt that she could ride; nor did they know that she was accompanied by a red-headed farmer’s boy. She spun a story of romance, telling Delay of the time she was given a present of rose-scented soap by one of her boy cousins. The fragrance was intoxicating for both of them: ‘My cousin kissed me passionately, I let him. The frenzy of the provinces … I didn’t see him again for three months. That’s the sort of thing that makes a woman of one.’ Did Gabrielle truly become a woman at Aubazine? She lived in the convent until she was 18, as did her sisters. One of them, Julia, fell pregnant here in mysterious circumstances; a nominal father was found to give the baby boy a name – on his birth certificate he was registered as Andr? Palasse – but when Julia died in 1910, the boy was left an orphan. Chanel seldom referred to her elder sister; on the occasions she did, her remarks were contradictory. ‘She only loved the convent,’ she told Delay, yet also claimed that Julia had loved her husband, that she killed herself by slitting her wrists when she discovered that he had a mistress. Whatever the true circumstances of Andr?’s birth and his mother’s death, Chanel took on her six-year-old nephew and brought him up as her own – indeed her lover, Boy Capel, became his godfather – yet she chose not to keep him in Paris with her, but sent him to be educated at an English boarding school. People used to speculate about Andr?’s origins, as they still do. Even now, if you talk to the elderly lady who lives in a house across the road from the abbey, where she was born, just as her mother and grandmother were before her, you might hear another story, that the baby was Gabrielle’s, not Julia’s. ‘That’s what I heard,’ says the old lady, ‘but who knows if it is true?’ What she does know for certain is that Mademoiselle Chanel returned to Aubazine from time to time, long after she had become rich and famous. ‘She arrived here in a big black car, we used to see her, but she was always very discreet, very private. Mademoiselle Chanel would visit one nun in particular, who still lived in the convent, and I wondered if she came to visit her whenever she was broken-hearted? She used to give money to the nuns, and she would stay and talk to them for a while, but she never stayed the night here. No, she never again slept within the walls of the abbey …’ Mademoiselle Chanel did not mention Aubazine to her friends; nor even utter its name to her great-niece Gabrielle Labrunie, the daughter of Andr? Palasse, to whom she was very close. ‘I wouldn’t have dreamt of asking her about the past,’ says Madame Labrunie, when I question her about Aubazine. ‘And if I had asked, she would have told me it was none of my business. She always said she was interested in what was ahead of her, not what had already finished.’ But Chanel did allow some stories to slip out. To Claude Delay, she spoke of being taught to sew by the aunts, hemming and seaming her trousseau; and of how she wore a white shift in which to bathe herself, because it was a sin to look at one’s body. She said that she sewed cross-stitches on her nightgowns, to make them look Russian. Sometimes she used to rub her nose to make it bleed at night; the blood dripped on her white nightdress, and when she cried out for someone to come to her bedside, a nun would emerge. Slashes of red appeared elsewhere in her narratives: two cherries that she stole to eat before her First Communion, before she panicked and sought absolution from the priest for her wickedness; the bloodstains on her nightdress when she reached puberty, not understanding what had happened to her but believing she had hurt herself; and her reddened skin, when the aunts beat her. ‘I remember that they used to take my knickers down to spank me. First there was the humiliation. Then it was very unpleasant, your bottom was as red as blood.’ She talked in vivid detail about the dresses and linen she remembered from childhood, elaborate stories that may have contained a kernel of truth, though perhaps they came from the serialised romances that she read as an adolescent (‘I found them in the attic of my aunts’). Her aunts had huge cupboards filled with shelves of freshly laundered white linen that smelled of verbena and rosewood. When they went to mass, the aunts wore jade crosses and veils over their faces, their throats edged in white material, in contrast to their black dresses. When Gabrielle saw a school of black-clad orphans go past, she said, she hid away to weep for them; she felt sorry for them in their black aprons. But Gabrielle insisted that she was not an orphan; nor was she to be pitied like them. Her father sent her a white dress from America for her First Communion. It was all ruffles and lace, she told Delay, with layers of billowing organdie petticoats and a long veil, two rosaries, a string of pearls, and a pair of silk stockings to wear underneath. Gabrielle loved the dress as a child, but in later life she declared that it must have been chosen by her father’s girlfriend, a ‘tart’ with dubious taste. She gave a slightly different version of the story to Paul Morand: ‘Shortly before he left for America, my father bought me a first communion dress, in white chiffon, with a crown of roses. So as to punish me for being proud, my aunts said to me: “You’re not going to wear your crown of roses, you’ll wear a hat.” What agony it was, on top of so many other things, such as the shame of having to confess to the priest that I had stolen two cherries! To be deprived of the crown!’ Yet another version of the story (to Marcel Haedrich) did not involve a white dress from America, nor her father. Instead, in this telling of the tale of the First Communion, her aunts wanted her to wear a cap like a peasant girl’s, but Gabrielle insisted on something different, and in the end she got her way, and wore a white paper crown of thorns with artificial roses. Such victories were rare, however. Gabrielle was more often thwarted by the aunts, as she explained to Haedrich, with all the minutiae that you might expect from a woman whose early career was as seamstress and milliner. Unlike the orphan girls at the convent, who wore black uniforms, she claimed to have had a little tailored black alpaca suit; her aunts gave her a new one every year in the springtime. ‘I should have liked a pink dress or a sky-blue one,’ she said wistfully. ‘I was in mourning all the time, while the peasant girls wore blue and pink. I envied them.’ In the summer, the aunts gave her ‘a horrible leghorn hat’, the details of which still haunted her, with its ‘little piece of velvet and a rose above the brim’. In the winter, she was made to wear a cloche, ‘very hard, with a kind of feather on it. I was told it was an eagle’s feather, but I knew it was a turkey’s, stiffened with paste. There was a little rubber band in the back that went under one’s hair, to hold the hat in place when it was windy. I thought the whole business was very ugly.’ At last, at the age of 15, Gabrielle was allowed to order a dress of her own, without intervention from the aunts, and she chose ‘a clinging mauve material’, but her body was still that of a child, ‘with nothing for it to cling to. The dressmaker had put a bit of taffeta at the bottom, with a flounce. Parma violet underneath!’ She’d come up with the idea for the flounced dress from a novel – and perhaps this is the closest to the truth that Gabrielle could admit, in her account of a loveless teenage girl who lost herself in fiction. ‘I thought that Parma violet was ravishing. My heroine wore it on her hat. The dressmaker didn’t have any more, so she put a twig of wisteria on mine.’ But when the long-awaited morning came for Gabrielle to wear the dress for the first time, to Sunday mass, her aunts told her to take it off, and they sent it back to the dressmaker, along with the twig-trimmed hat. Had Gabrielle ever even seen herself in the violet dress, summoned up from the paper pages of a romance? In the house of her aunts, there were no mirrors. She could not glimpse her reflection anywhere; she was nowhere to be seen. If she made up stories from then on, you can understand why; for out of these loose threads, Gabrielle created an image of herself. Coco (#ulink_dbe7afe8-e487-54e2-874e-64d93edc84a0) When Gabrielle turned 18, she finally left the nuns at Aubazine, who kept on only those girls with a religious vocation to join the order’s novitiate. She was not completely abandoned, however; nor was she without family, despite her father’s continuing absence. He had been one of 19 children, and his parents were still very much alive; indeed, their youngest daughter, Adrienne, was only a year older than Gabrielle. Although her father’s family seem not to have figured in her early life, or when he abandoned the children after their mother’s death, several relatives did appear thereafter. That they included two aunts (neither of them nuns, nor at all like the ‘aunts’ Chanel described in her subsequent stories of childhood) has added further confusion to the task of her biographers. But at some point during Gabrielle’s later years at Aubazine, she began to spend an occasional holiday with her paternal grandparents and Adrienne, to whom she became as close as if they were sisters, and also with another of their daughters, her aunt Louise, who had married a railway employee, Paul Costier. Louise and Paul had no children of their own, and invited Adrienne and Gabrielle to visit them in Varennessur-Allier, a station on the Vichy to Moulins line, where Paul was employed as stationmaster. And it was to Moulins that Gabrielle was sent at 18 to the Notre Dame school, a religious institution run by canonesses where her aunt Adrienne was already being educated. It is not entirely clear whether Gabrielle’s sisters, Julia and Antoinette, accompanied her to Moulins; according to one of the stories that Chanel told Claude Delay, Julia had left an orphanage at 16 and was married. But she also spoke to Delay of a holiday spent with her sister at a convent in Corr?ze. The food there was awful, she said, and the nuns were foolish little country girls who played shuttlecock, not at all like the fierce aunts in whose house Gabrielle had been raised. In this strange and unlikely sounding convent, Gabrielle played the organ and sang, impressing the nuns, who were amazed at her talent; just as they had been astounded by Julia’s piano playing: ‘When my sister had been playing the piano they used to look at her fingers to see what she had on the ends of them. Little peasants!’ But no one was impressed by Gabrielle in the Notre Dame school in Moulins, for she was one of the charity pupils who were provided with a free place, and therefore treated differently to those whose family could afford to pay for their education. Here it was Gabrielle who was dismissed as a little peasant – the kind of girl who might be made to feel inferior to those who had piano lessons; a girl who wore a plain pauper’s uniform with second-hand shoes rather than the more expensive outfits of the fee-paying students. It was here, too, that she was given further instruction in how to sew, which had already formed a substantial part of her education at Aubazine. If she was not to be a nun, then she must earn her living like other orphans, and there was always work available for a seamstress. More sewing took place during Gabrielle’s holidays with her aunt Louise, from whom she learned how to trim and embellish hats, to add to the practical needlework skills she had acquired from the nuns. Adrienne also visited, and as well as darning, the girls fashioned new collars and cuffs out of remnants of white linen to trim their sober black convent uniforms. In the evenings they read the romances that Louise had cut out and saved from magazines and periodicals, hand-sewn together, and carefully stored in the attic. ‘You don’t know the damage country attics can do to the imagination,’ Chanel told Delay, recalling the stories that she had absorbed as a girl. Her favourites had been by Pierre Decourcelle, a prolific author of romances who also wrote for Le Matin and Le Journal. Chanel described him to Delay as ‘a sentimental ninny’, yet also acknowledged his influence on her as her ‘one teacher’. But to Marcel Haedrich, she admitted that her ‘aunts’ had educated her to recognise the ‘solid substance’ of orderliness, ‘for having things done right, for chests filled with linens that smell good, and gleaming floors’. While the nuns taught her the value of cleanliness, Pierre Decourcelle gave her a taste for the forbidden. As Chanel remarked to Haedrich, she lost herself in his stories, ‘melodramas in which everything happened in a wild-eyed romanticism’, and longed to live in their world, instead of in her aunts’ house: ‘I thought all that was awful because in my novels there was nothing but silk pillows and white-lacquered furniture. I’d have liked to do everything in white lacquer. Sleeping in an alcove made me miserable, it humiliated me. I broke off bits of wood wherever I could, thinking, what old trash this is. I did it out of sheer wickedness, for the sake of destruction. When one considers all the things that go on in a child’s head … I wanted to kill myself.’ It was not the only time that Chanel talked about her desire to kill herself as a child – as if her longing to escape, and her craving for glamorous romance, could be fulfilled in suicide. ‘At the time, I often used to think about dying,’ she told Paul Morand. ‘The idea of causing a great fuss, of upsetting my aunts, of letting everyone know how wicked they were, fascinated me. I dreamt about setting fire to the barn.’ If her suggestion was that in being wicked she would reveal the wickedness of others, then perhaps she believed that by dying she might find her rightful place in life. Gabrielle grew up to discover that suicide was not her way out; yet in a sense (however nonsensical it might appear to others), she did need to kill something of herself in order to make her escape. She felt unloved – by the ‘aunts’, by the family who had abandoned her to the care of nuns, by her absent father – although the stories she read had taught her that love conquered all; that desire and passion set men and women alight. An element of her conflict emerges in the tales she told of love (and the lack of it); of the sacred and the profane. Given her aversion to providing any detail about her family – other than the fictional aunts who stand in for the nuns at Aubazine (and possibly those at the convent school in Moulins) – the occasional mentions are significant. To Claude Delay, she referred to her uncle Paul Costier, the stationmaster, sending her a first-class railway ticket (‘because I wouldn’t go second-class – it was a bore’). In other versions, Chanel described her abortive attempt to escape to Paris with Adrienne from her uncle and aunt’s house in Varennes. They had only enough money for second-class tickets, but Gabrielle insisted on sitting in the first-class carriage, for which they were fined by the conductor; without any funds to sustain them in the capital, the runaway girls were forced to return home. Except that Gabrielle did not feel herself to be at home anywhere – not at Aubazine, nor at school in Moulins, nor in the Costiers’ house. When she arrived to stay with Paul and Louise, she told Delay, her uncle was warmly affectionate, but her aunt was detached and cold. At night, Paul came into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight, and said, ‘You’ll stay a nice long time, won’t you?’ But Gabrielle sensed that her aunt didn’t approve of her, and so she left the next day. According to Claude Delay, more than half a century later, Chanel ‘still felt the chill’ of rejection, expressing it as if she had been left entirely alone. She was also without God, or at least that was what she told Delay. Gabrielle’s loss of faith had occurred in Aubazine, at her First Communion, after her father had supposedly sent her the dress from America. It is unclear from her account whether she was actually wearing this unsuitable dress in church – instead, she spoke of her fascination at the sight of the barefoot mendicant monk who conducted a three-day retreat with the children before their First Communion, a man in a long home-spun robe with a girdle (a description reminiscent of St Etienne himself). ‘When I got there – the monk and his bare feet and his oration – that was the life I’d been waiting for. Inside the church it was like a mirage. It got dark at five, the candles were lit, I could hear the breathing of the boys and girls around me, in the half-light, almost asleep. I said at confession afterwards it had inspired profane feelings in me.’ When the priest instructed her to meditate upon the Stations of the Cross in front of the other girls as a penance, Gabrielle refused, saying that she would do so in bed later that night. ‘The Catholic religion crumbled for me,’ she told Delay. ‘I realised I was a person, outside all the secrecy of confession.’ And yet, despite the confessions she made to Delay – a young woman at the time, but who was to come to understand the confessional aspect of her career as a psychoanalyst – Chanel could never quite admit to what followed next. To Paul Morand, she spoke of horses. Her aunts bred horses, she said, and sold them to the army. Gabrielle was wild – ‘untameable’ – and ran wherever she pleased. ‘I mounted our horses bare-back (at sixteen, I had never seen a saddle), I caught hold of our best animals (or occasionally other people’s, as I fancied) by their manes or their tails. I stole all the carrots in the house to feed them.’ (This was not the only time Chanel recalled stealing food as a child; she described hiding away from the aunts and cutting herself huge slices of bread that she took to eat in the lavatory. But the cook saw her, and said, ‘You’ll cut yourself in half.’) With the horses came the soldiers, arriving at her ‘aunts’ house’ to buy their mounts: ‘Fine hussars or chasseurs, with sky-blue dolmans and black frogging, and their pelisses on their shoulders. They came every year in their beautifully harnessed phaetons; they looked in the horses’ mouths to see how old they were, stroked their fetlocks to check that they weren’t inflamed, and slapped their flanks; it was a great party; a party that for me was fraught with a degree of anxiety; supposing they were going to take my favourite horses away from me?’ One wonders if Chanel knew what she was doing as she told this story to Morand when she was in her sixties; whether it was a story that she was telling herself, or if she was teasing him. Whatever her motive – unconscious or not – her tale takes on a darker, almost sadistic tone. The officers could not choose her favourite horses; Gabrielle said she had made sure of that by galloping them unshod on flinty ground so that their hooves were ruined. But one of the soldiers caught on: ‘“These horses have hooves like cattle, their soles have gone and their frogs are rotten!” he said, referring to our best-looking creatures. I no longer dared to look the officer in the eye, but he had seen through me; as soon as my aunts had turned away, he whispered in a low voice: “So you’ve been galloping without shoes, eh, you little rascal?”’ It seems highly unlikely that Chanel encountered any army officers while she was under the care of nuns in the orphanage at Aubazine; but she undoubtedly came across them in Moulins, after she had left the Notre Dame boarding school. The town was dominated by the military, for several regiments were garrisoned there, including the Tenth Light Horse, the 10?me Chasseurs, who wore scarlet breeches and rakish peaked caps. The Mother Superior at Notre Dame had found employment for Adrienne and Gabrielle as shop assistants and seamstresses in a draper’s store on the Rue de l’Horloge, which sold trousseaux and mourning clothes to the local gentry, as well as layettes for newborn babies. The girls shared an attic bedroom above the shop, and also worked at the weekends for a nearby tailor, altering breeches for cavalry officers. It was there that Gabrielle and Adrienne were spotted by half-a-dozen men, who started taking them out at night to La Rotonde, a pavilion in a small park in Moulins, where concerts were held for audiences from the local barracks. They were rowdy affairs – a combination of music hall and soldiers’ saloon – but Gabrielle was determined to start singing on stage, and eventually found a regular evening slot, accompanied first by Adrienne, and then as a solo performer. She had only two songs in her repertoire: ‘Ko Ko Ri Ko’ (its refrain was the French version of ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’) and ‘Qui qu’a vu Coco?’, a ditty about a girl who had lost her dog. Soon the audience greeted her with barnyard cockerel calls, and christened her with the name of the lost dog. Thus Gabrielle became Coco, a metamorphosis that might have been humiliating rather than liberating, but nevertheless led to the birth of a legend. Chanel never talked to her friends about this episode of her life, even in the most guarded of terms; other than to deny it to Paul Morand, dismissing it as foolish legend, along with the other stories in circulation: ‘that I have come up from goodness knows where; from the music hall, the opera or the brothel; I’m sorry, for that would have been more amusing.’ She did, however, mention the name of the cavalry officer who was to become her lover, Etienne Balsan, and referred to his horses as providing the means of her escape. To Morand, she declared, ‘horses have influenced the course of my life’, and told a story of being sent by the aunts to the Auvergne spa town of Vichy, to spend the summer with her grandfather, who was taking the waters there. ‘I was so glad to have escaped … from the gloomy house, from needlework, from my trousseau; embroidering initials on the towels for my future household, and sewing crosses in Russian stitching on my nightdresses, for a hypothetical wedding night, made me feel ill; in a fury, I spat on my trousseau.’ In this version, she knocked five years off her age, and had herself sewing (and loathing) her own trousseau, rather than those of wealthier women in the shop where she laboured in Moulins. But her desire to be freed from the aunts and their legacy was manifest. ‘I was sixteen. I was becoming pretty. I had a face that was as plump as a fist, hidden in a vast swathe of black hair that reached the ground.’ And Vichy, with its casino and caf?s and Belle Epoque opera house, its boulevards and gardens landscaped for Napoleon III, was to be the backdrop that she chose for her adventure: ‘Vichy was a fairyland. A ghastly fairyland in reality, but wonderful to fresh eyes … Vichy was my first journey. Vichy would teach me about life.’ It was in Vichy, she said, that she went to a tea party and ‘made the acquaintance of a young man, MB [Monsieur Balsan]; he owned a racing stable’. They arranged to meet the following day, in fields where horses grazed beside the river. There, she heard the roar of a fantastical torrent of water, whereupon Balsan asked her to go with him to his house in Compi?gne. She said yes, and ran away with him: ‘My grandfather believed I had returned home; my aunts thought I was at my grandfather’s house.’ Chanel told a similar story to Bettina Ballard, a young Vogue editor in Paris whom she befriended in the Thirties; although in this version she was even younger. ‘She escaped the aunts before she was sixteen,’ recounted Ballard. ‘She went to visit her grandfather at Vichy and was so afraid that she would be sent back to the aunts that she stopped a handsome young officer in the park and asked him to take her away with him. He did just that, but he took her home to his father’s chateau. It was Etienne Balsan.’ Claude Delay heard a more embellished tale of Chanel encountering Etienne Balsan at a Vichy tea party: she had been taken there by her aunt Adrienne, who was by then involved with the Baron de Nexon (a relationship that was in fact a real one, and although the Baron’s parents were fiercely opposed to the affair between their son and a seamstress, the two eventually married, many years afterwards, in a romance worthy of those that Adrienne and Gabrielle had read as teenagers). In this gothic account, Chanel told Balsan that she had been beset by bad luck ever since the death of her mother and her father’s departure to America, and announced to him that she was going to kill herself: ‘All through my childhood I wanted to be loved. Every day I thought about how to kill myself. The viaduct, perhaps …’ Despite this somewhat unorthodox introduction, Balsan was sufficiently intrigued to provide a different way out by inviting her to see his stables and house, a former abbey named Royallieu. And so Coco went with him there, to an abbey that had become a house of pleasure, leaving Gabrielle behind her, locked away in a shadowy place where no one might find her, nor the torn remnants of her past. Courtesans and Camellias (#ulink_72a77f7c-8535-5afb-a298-9b44cd862320) Since I am not yet of an age to invent, I must make do with telling a tale. I therefore invite the reader to believe that this story is true. Alexandre Dumas, La Dame aux cam?lias There are many mysteries in the myth of Coco Chanel, but few more perplexing than her years with Etienne Balsan at Royallieu; perhaps because Balsan never gave away her secrets, however often he was questioned in later life, when Chanel was far more famous than him. In the drama of Chanel’s life – a drama in part of her own making, as well as of others – Balsan has been cast as a rich playboy, the rou? who introduced the little orphaned seamstress into the decadent world of the Belle Epoque, deflowering her in an unsentimental education. While there may be some truth in this portrait, Chanel also used Balsan as a stepping stone from Moulins to Paris, gaining poise in place of an innocence already lost. The two of them continued to be friends until his death in 1953, and if their initial sexual relationship had been characterised by his infidelities, Balsan nevertheless displayed a lifelong loyalty to Chanel and remained unfailingly discreet. Balsan’s father had died when he was 18, his mother a few years later, leaving Etienne and his two older brothers heirs to a solid fortune made in textiles. The family business, based in Ch?teauroux, a traditional wool town in central France, had been well established for a century, supplying the French army with uniforms and the British military during the Boer War. As a boy, Balsan was sent to boarding school in England, where he showed more interest in horses than anything else: he arrived with his dog, bought himself two hunters, and rode to hounds more often than he attended classes. After his parents’ death, he made it clear to his more industrious brothers, Jacques and Robert, that he had no intention of following them into the family business. (Both of them continued to run it with the same success as their forebears; Jacques also went on to distinguish himself as a fighter pilot during the First World War, and in 1921 married Consuelo Vanderbilt, after her divorce from the Duke of Marlborough.) Instead, Etienne enlisted in the army and was posted to Algiers with a light cavalry regiment, the Chasseurs d’Afrique. As his nephew Fran?ois Balsan later reported in a privately printed family history, Etienne fell asleep on sentry duty one afternoon, and having been discovered in this compromising position by the governor of Algiers himself, was thereafter confined to the guardhouse. During his period of punishment, the regiment’s horses were afflicted with a mysterious skin ailment. Balsan sent a message to his commanding officer proposing a deal: if he were to come up with a cure for the disease, he would be released. The young officer duly applied a successful remedy (the recipe for which he had learned in England), and, much to his relief, was subsequently transferred from Algeria to Moulins. By the end of 1904, when he was 24 (and Chanel was 21), Balsan had completed his military service as a cavalry officer and elected to pursue more sporting equestrian activities. He found a suitable estate to purchase in Compi?gne, in Picardy, about 45 miles north-east of Paris. The region was formerly a vast forest where the kings of France hunted in the Middle Ages, and while large expanses of woodland remained, the area had become established as a leading centre for racehorse trainers and thoroughbred stables. As such, it was a perfect location for Balsan’s new property. Royallieu had originally been built in 1303 as a monastery, was later remodelled as a royal hunting lodge, and then converted into a convent for Benedictine nuns in the seventeenth century. The nuns were driven out by the Revolution, but the portrait of its first abbess, Gabrielle de Laubespine, was still hanging on the staircase when Balsan moved in. And there she remained, a silent witness to his reign, during which Royallieu was devoted to the worship of horses and the pursuit of amusement and pretty women. At some point in 1905 Chanel followed him there, in circumstances that remain quite unclear. They had met at Moulins, and that they became lovers is certain. But Balsan already had a mistress in residence at Royallieu, Emilienne d’Alen?on, a famous courtesan-turned-actress. She was 14 years older than Coco, and although past the first bloom of youth, still widely regarded as one of the leading beauties of the day. Decades later, however, when Chanel described Emilienne to Marcel Haedrich, it was as if the two women had been separated by great age, as well as by experience. ‘Etienne Balsan liked old women,’ she said, with some terseness. ‘He adored Emilienne d’Alen?on. Beauty and youth didn’t concern him. He adored cocottes and lived with that one to the scandal of his family.’ But it wasn’t as simple as that. Emilienne came and went from Royallieu as she pleased, and at one point took a new lover, Alec Carter, a famous English jockey. Balsan was similarly diverted by other girls, some of whom would come to stay at Royallieu. No one knows how this curious arrangement was reached and maintained, or where Chanel fitted into the hierarchy. Several French writers, including Marcel Haedrich, have related gossip that Coco had to eat her meals with the servants in her early days at Royallieu, particularly when Balsan had his upper-class friends or family to stay. But Chanel herself gave little away, even to Claude Delay, beyond portraying Emilienne as having worn ‘heavy gowns and spotted veils’, like an ancient Miss Havisham. She described herself, in contrast, as free and unencumbered, dressing ‘neither as a great lady nor as a scullery maid’: a young tomboy, spending her days galloping on horseback through the forests. ‘I didn’t know any people; I knew the horses,’ she said, as if to protect herself from the memory of the isolation she suffered at the time, not understanding her position in the household (neither servant nor ch?telaine). And yet, as always, she sought to define herself by her idiosyncratic choice of clothes. Unlike Emilienne, Coco wore simple riding breeches and equestrian jackets from a local tailor, thus distinguishing herself as somehow unique; if not yet the one and only Coco Chanel, then at least not just another cocotte in Balsan’s stable of women. But whatever she chose to wear, she was also kept in her place. And for all the freedoms of Royallieu – a house where social conventions seemed not to apply; where courtesans and aristocrats drank champagne together, and men were free to enjoy more than one girl at a time – it was also a form of imprisonment. To Morand, Chanel described herself as having been a minor, below the age of consent; too young to be away from home, and desperately homesick. ‘I was constantly weeping,’ she said to Morand, and then gave him a curious blend of truth and falsehood about the lies that she had previously invented for Balsan. ‘I had told him lies about my miserable childhood. I had to disabuse him. I wept for an entire year. The only happy times were those I spent on horseback, in the forest. I learned to ride, for up until then I hadn’t the first idea about riding horses. I was never a horsewoman, but at that time I couldn’t even ride side-saddle. ‘The fairy tale was over. I was nothing but a lost child. I didn’t dare to write to anyone. MB was frightened of the police. His friends told him: “Coco is too young, send her back home.” MB would have been delighted to see me go, but I had no home any more.’ Thus she cast herself and Balsan as caught in a trap of their own making; but as she elaborated on her story to Morand, emphasising Balsan’s fear of the authorities, Chanel remade herself into a helpless girl with no control over her destiny (which may well be how she felt at the time), while also acknowledging the damage done by her lies (even as she told lies about her lying). ‘MB was afraid of the police, and I was afraid of the servants. I had lied to MB. I had kept my age a secret, telling him that I was nearly twenty: in actual fact I was sixteen.’ In actual fact, she was over 21 when she arrived at Royallieu, and she continued to live there well into her twenties. But the biggest secret of all was whether or not Coco became pregnant during the course of her relationship with Etienne Balsan. Several of her friends believed that she did: some speculated that she had an abortion that left her infertile, others that she had the baby boy who she claimed was her nephew rather than her son. Balsan ended up in later life as a neighbour to Chanel’s nephew, Andr?, and to Andr?’s daughters, Gabrielle and H?l?ne, and was certainly close to the family. Beyond that, it is impossible to establish the truth of the rumours. Chanel told Delay that her sister Julia had married at 16, given birth to a son, and then killed herself because of her husband’s infidelity. But even if this were a veiled clue to a possible pregnancy of her own, the date would be as blurred as the rest of the dates that she shifted and erased. Julia was born in September 1882, and would therefore have been 22 when her son Andr? was born in 1904; a year older than Gabrielle, who was by then already involved with Balsan. Nevertheless, the idea of being a frightened 16-year-old seems to have been in some sense real to Chanel, however unreliable her stories appear in retrospect. Hence her description to Morand of herself at 16, venturing out to the races at Compi?gne while she was still living with Balsan (a man supposedly so scared of the authorities that he had to hide her away, like a timid Bluebeard, to keep her out of view of the police). ‘I wore a straw boater, set very low on the head, and a little country suit, and I followed events from the end of my lorgnette. I was convinced that no one was taking any notice of me, which shows how little I knew about life in the provinces. In reality, this ridiculous, badly dressed, shy little creature, with her three big plaits and a ribbon in her hair, intrigued everybody.’ Perhaps this was the consoling story that Coco told herself when it appeared that no one cared (not the police, nor her family, nor anyone else, for that matter): that she was intriguing, even when it seemed that she was never the centre of attention. At least Emilienne d’Alen?on took a certain interest in Coco, while apparently unperturbed by her presence, if Chanel’s description of her to Claude Delay is to be believed. ‘Emilienne d’Alen?on used to ask me, “Well, are you happy?” I answered, “I’m neither happy nor unhappy – I’m hiding. It’s like home here, only better.”’ But she was sufficiently unhappy to write to her aunt Adrienne – who was still the mistress of the Baron de Nexon, though not yet married to him – to ask her to send the money for a train fare. In telling this story to Delay, Chanel did not specify where the train might take her; but in any event, she claimed that Adrienne wrote back to say that Coco should not leave Royallieu: ‘Whatever you do keep out of the way or they’ll put you in a reformatory.’ Who were ‘they’, that could lock up a woman for bad behaviour? Except, of course, as Chanel reiterated to Delay, she was still a little girl; so young that she used to fall asleep at the table and weep, because she was up past her bedtime, and at her aunts’ house she would have been asleep long before. But in this version Bluebeard was transformed into a perfect gentleman: ‘“I’ll take you home,” said Balsan. “I’ll tell them that I’m bringing you back just as I found you and you’re still only a little girl.”’ The idea of herself as a little girl was to permeate the rest of Chanel’s life, and yet, as is evident in Truman Capote’s description of her in 1959, it was also suggestive of a particular blend of innocence and experience that was so profitably displayed in her own appearance, and upon which she went on to make her fortune in couture. Capote observed: ‘Chanel, a spare spruce sparrow voluble and vital as a woodpecker, once, mid-flight in one of her unstoppable monologues, said, referring to the very costly pauvre orphan appearance she has lo these last decades modelled: “Cut off my head, and I’m thirteen.” But her head has always remained attached, definitely she had it perfectly placed way back yonder when she was thirteen, or scarcely more, and a moneyed “kind gentleman”, the first of several grateful and well-wishing patrons, asked petite “Coco”, daughter of a Basque blacksmith who had taught her to help him shoe horses, which she preferred, black pearls or white?’ Capote’s portrait of Chanel was written just a year after Breakfast at Tiffany’s, his glittering depiction of the balancing act undertaken by a beautiful girl dependent on the patronage of rich men; and he was alert to the imaginative possibilities of modern fairy tales. But it would be unkind not to recognise the real pain that Chanel suffered, even as she distanced herself from the past in storytelling (for telling stories is, amongst other things, a way in which to imagine a happy-ever-after, and for the misunderstood to come to an understanding of their tribulations). So there she was; poor little Coco (‘Qui qu’a vu Coco?’), imprisoned in another abbey, surrounded by the forest of Compi?gne. The nuns’ regime had vanished, and in pride of place was a courtesan – the famous Emilienne, a former mistress of the king of Belgium, among others; a cocotte so highly prized that Leopold II had in turn introduced her to King Edward VII, to whom she allegedly declared that French aristocrats were the only men who knew how to make love to a woman. Emilienne had been heaped with diamonds and endearments; men had lost their hearts and their fortunes to her; although some had come up with a more practical arrangement, such as the eight members of the Jockey Club who had pooled their resources in order to procure her attention on a regular basis. Coco was still the outsider looking in, the girl with no money and no father, just as she had been at school, with all the unease and uncertainty that such a position entailed. Even so, if her years in Aubazine had taught Gabrielle everything she knew about needlework, then her time in Royallieu gave her an equally thorough education in how to stitch the empty hours together, to make something of herself. She spent six years there – a period of apparent idleness, punctuated by fancy dress parties and horseriding; of lengthy boredom and occasional debauchery; of setting herself apart from the courtesans who came and went from Royallieu. But for all her efforts at distancing herself, she was intrigued by the beauties who entertained the men; along with Emilienne, there was another cocotte-turned-actress, Gabrielle Dorziat, a charming young singer named Marthe Davelli, and Suzanne Orlandi, the mistress of Balsan’s friend Baron Foy. Coco watched and waited; she saw the manner in which Emilienne ceased to be Balsan’s lover but remained his friend. And Coco listened to Emilienne’s stories, as well as telling her own, taking heed of the woman who had come from nothing – the daughter of a Parisian concierge in Montmartre, who had made a teenage debut scantily clad in a circus act – and ended up with something more precious than her ample wealth. ‘The only serious person I met in those days was Emilienne d’Alen?on,’ Chanel remarked to Haedrich; for Emilienne not only wrote the poetry to prove it but was turned into prose by Marcel Proust. (She was said to have inspired the writer’s portrait of Rachel in A la recherche du temps perdu, a demi-mondaine who ensnares the heart and jewels of the young aristocrat, Robert de Saint-Loup.) After a time, Coco realised that she preferred the courtesans to the sneering society women. At least Emilienne was clean, she said; unlike the supposedly respectable wives and mothers, who smelled dirty to Coco. ‘I thought the cocottes were ravishing with their hats that were too big and their heavy make-up,’ she observed to Haedrich. ‘They were so appetising!’ Not that she wanted to dress like them – all her efforts went into creating herself as a gamine, choosing sober androgyny over their crinolines and whalebone corsets, their feathers and lace and chinchilla. She wore softly knotted schoolboy ties, and simple white shirts with Peter Pan collars; and little straw boaters, as plain as a convent uniform. But her taste for romance did not leave her, and neither did her sense of loss. Perhaps this is why she responded with such heightened emotion to Alexandre Dumas’s novel La Dame aux cam?lias, and its stage version starring Sarah Bernhardt as Marguerite Gautier, a courtesan who nevertheless remained the embodiment of purity, a tragic lover who dies of consumption, having stayed untainted by the vice all around. ‘La Dame aux cam?lias was my life, all the trashy novels I’d fed on,’ she said to Delay, who recognised the link between Marguerite and Chanel’s story of her mother’s deathbed – the drops of red blood coughed onto white sheets and a snowy handkerchief. But in this particular narrative, Chanel placed herself centre-stage, as a provincial 13-year-old on a trip to the theatre in Paris with her aunts. She sobbed her way through the entire performance of La Dame aux cam?lias, she told Delay; and her grief was so noisy that the rest of the audience complained. Nevertheless, she was dressed for the part that she had assigned herself: ‘I was in black. It looked nice, with my white collar. In the provinces, you wear your mourning until it falls off you in pieces! People told my aunts I ought to have another dress. “But she’s an orphan,” they said. “When she’s 16 we’ll see.”’ On other occasions, however, Chanel said that she was already living at Royallieu when she went to see La Dame aux cam?lias, accompanying her aunt Adrienne and the Baron de Nexon; and her account veered between disdain and distress: either she wept so loudly that the rest of the audience hissed at her, or she declared her disgust for Bernhardt as grotesque, like ‘an old clown’. Something of that abhorrence and fascination remained: when Sarah Bernhardt died in 1923, Chanel joined the lines of other sightseers, then found herself troubled by the difference between the staged beauty of Marguerite’s death in La Dame aux cam?lias and the grim reality of the cadaver before her. ‘It was terrible,’ she told Delay, ‘they were queuing up. Sarah was dead and all I saw was a poor little lifeless ruin with a scrap of tulle … I was pale as death. The sordidness of it all …’ In Delay’s sympathetic interpretation, the inconsistencies of Chanel’s response to La Dame aux cam?lias suggested ambivalence, rather than an aversion to the truth; not least because of the earlier experience of her mother’s deathbed, and the unavoidable sight of the pale corpse lying beside the children as they waited for their father to return. But if Chanel was haunted by this memory, she was also aware of its potency, an archetypal scene for others as well as herself. Later, many years later, when Chanel had slipped away from her life as a kept girl, replacing its shadowy uncertainties with what looked like the security of a self-made woman, the white camellia would appear in her work: in fabric prints, or shaped into diamonds and pearls; embossed on buttons, preserved in corsages. And in her salon, they glittered as crystals from her chandelier, and were carved into her Coromandel screens. These replications were in some sense true to life, in that they had no scent – for the camellia is without fragrance, and therefore does not decompose from sweet-smelling purity to the odour of decay. It is, perhaps, the perfect symbol of death as portrayed on stage in its least brutal way; the death of a courtesan or an abandoned woman, tragic yet compelling for an audience; stripped of the horror of visceral pain and fear and animal smell. After her mother died, Chanel told Delay, she had been instructed to kiss her dead body, to kiss the corpse on the lips. For ever afterwards, she was possessed of a highly developed sense of smell, and was revolted by anything redolent of dirt. The courtesans smelled good, she said, but the society women were filthy. And Coco always kept herself clean. The Double C (#ulink_22e10b69-2c1d-55fb-b0bf-4042f6584048) His name was Arthur Capel, but his friends called him Boy, in an Edwardian era when English gentlemen were still able to celebrate their continuing freedoms long after they had turned from boys to men. Boy’s origins were swathed in romance, and he came to Paris amidst murmured speculation that he was connected in some mysterious way to the British aristocracy through the Capell family, who were descended from the Earls of Essex; or that he was the illegitimate son of a rich French father, possibly a Jewish financier. But the more prosaic truth is that he was exactly who he said he was: the son of Arthur and Berthe Capel, raised with three sisters in comfortable circumstances in an industrious Catholic family. His ambitious father had risen from being a clerk to a business entrepreneur; his French mother had moved to London as a schoolgirl. Born in Brighton in September 1881, educated at Beaumont (under the instruction of Jesuit priests) and Stonyhurst (a distinguished Catholic college), Capel subsequently went into his father’s business, expanding his family’s investments with energetic determination. But for all his Catholic education and hard-headed work ethic, Capel was an accomplished playboy and polo player, sharing an enthusiasm for fast horses and pretty women with his friend Etienne Balsan. It was at Royallieu that Coco came across Capel, and there that a curious triangular relationship developed between Boy and Balsan and the girl who was mistress to no one. What was in reality a lengthy and convoluted process became, in Chanel’s retelling of it, an instant and dramatic incident that began on a trip away from Royallieu. ‘MB took me to Pau,’ she told Paul Morand, and conjured up for him a vivid scene set against the blue sky and snow-capped Pyrenees: ‘the babbling mountain streams that flow down to the plains; the fields that are green in every season … the red coats in the rain, and the best fox-hunting land in Europe …’ In this verdant landscape – the fertile territory of Chanel’s half-imaginary past – there was a fairy-tale castle with six towers, and galloping horses, and the sound of their hooves on cobblestones. And there, too, centre-stage in this glorious place, was Boy Capel. ‘In Pau I met an Englishman,’ she said to Morand. ‘We made each other’s acquaintance when we were out horse-trekking one day; we all lived on horseback.’ They drank wine together; it was ‘young, intoxicating and quite unusual’, and so was the Englishman. ‘The young man was handsome, very tanned and attractive. More than handsome, he was magnificent. I admired his nonchalance, and his green eyes. He rode bold and very powerful horses. I fell in love with him. I had never loved MB.’ Yet at first, she and Capel did not speak. ‘Not a word was exchanged between this Englishman and me. One day I heard he was leaving Pau.’ She asked him to tell her the time he was travelling to Paris; no other conversation was necessary. ‘The following day, I was at the station. I climbed onto the train.’ It was 1909, and Chanel was 26 by then, just under two years younger than Capel; though she told Claude Delay that Boy called her ‘my dear child’ when she declared that she was leaving Balsan for him. She held out the letter she had written to Balsan to explain her decision – ‘My dear Etienne, I shall never be able to repay the kindness and comfort you’ve given me while I’ve been with you.’ Boy wouldn’t listen to her, wouldn’t allow her to leave, in this retelling of a story that Chanel often told (always a variation on a theme); but she followed him, and dashed onto the train with her suitcase. Three days later, Balsan arrived in Paris, having pursued her there from Pau; jealousy had made him realise that he loved her after all. This version of the love affair with Capel – Coco’s most romantic love story and a defining episode of her life – cast her as a girl who was not yet a woman. Indeed, she suggested that she was a virgin, and needed to consult a doctor in Paris before the love between a girl and Boy could be consummated. By then, she told Delay, Balsan had taken himself off to Argentina to mend his broken heart, and Capel had asked a doctor in Paris to take care of her. At this point, her narrative becomes unusually physical in its details, as if flesh and blood had overtaken whimsical romance. Boy was a man with a string of women, as well as polo ponies, and his mistresses would ask him when he was going to leave little Coco, but his reply was certain: ‘I’d rather cut my leg off.’ Instead, Coco was dispatched to the doctor, who performed a mysterious gynaecological procedure with a snip of his scissors. ‘The seat of pleasure is a question of structure,’ she told Delay, with a peculiar blend of the graphic and the cryptic. ‘As far as I’m concerned, if it hadn’t been for that little snip of the scissors … After that, it didn’t hurt any more.’ It was at about this time, she continued, that she ordered a tightly fitted dress from Ch?ruit, a fashionable Parisian couturier, in blue and white grosgrain: ‘I looked like the Virgin Mary.’ But it was so constrictive around the waist that when she wore the dress out to dine at the Caf? de Paris with Boy, she had to ask him to undo it for her. Afterwards, she couldn’t close its fastenings – Coco was undone in public – and didn’t have an evening coat to cover herself up. At that moment, she vowed never to wear corsets again. There are echoes of a similarly uneasy shifting between freedom and subjugation, liberty and compulsion, in Chanel’s description to Morand of her relationship with Boy. They lived together in Paris, and he meant everything to her – ‘he was my father, my brother, my entire family’ – and there he instructed her as if she were his child. ‘Our house was full of flowers, but beneath the luxurious surroundings Boy Capel maintained a strict outlook, in keeping with his moral character, which was that of the well-brought-up Englishman. In educating me, he did not spare me; he commented on my conduct: “You behaved badly … you lied … you were wrong.” He had that gently authoritative manner of men who know women well, and who love them implicitly.’ But his implicit love manifested itself in explicit abandonment and infidelities; although Chanel seemed to accept that this ‘lion of London society’ had every right to be unfaithful to her. She maintained to Morand that Capel adored her as much as she adored him; that he was a perfect gentleman. ‘His manners were refined, his social success was dazzling,’ and yet he was ‘only happy in the company of the little brute from the provinces, the unruly child who had followed him. We never went out together (at that time Paris still had principles). We would delay the delights of advertising our love until later, when we were married.’ At the same time, Boy continued to enjoy the diversions of other women. Coco said she didn’t care – or at least, that is what she claimed to Morand – and yet her description of Capel’s behaviour hints at an anxious imbalance between anger and acceptance; and then there is that odd phrase of his again (or was it hers?) about chopping off his leg. ‘Boy Capel’s beautiful girlfriends would say to him angrily: “Drop that woman.” Not being in the least jealous, I pushed him into their arms; this baffled them and they kept on repeating: “Drop that woman.” He replied in that utterly natural way he had … “No. You might as well ask me to chop off a leg.” He needed me. But she also needed him – financially, as well as in every other way – and she was aware that he had the capacity to run away from her whenever he chose to; just as her father had run from her mother, and from her, too. Perhaps there were times when Coco felt angry enough to want to chop her lover’s legs off. Instead, she turned her scissors on his clothes. These she stole and cut up, so that he could no longer wear them out again. Yet in doing so, she transformed them into something new and uniquely her own, eventually building an empire upon the desire of other women to possess her creations; women who sought her, Coco Chanel, rather than Boy Capel. That came later, however. First, she had come up with a plan to sell hats, although the question remained as to who, precisely, was to back her business, and where she was to live, and whether Balsan had been abandoned altogether. Many years later, confiding in Marcel Haedrich, Chanel said that she went on seeing Etienne Balsan after she left Royallieu, and he continued to declare his love for her. ‘We lunched and dined together – Etienne, Boy and I. Occasionally Etienne talked about killing himself, and I wept. I wept so! “You aren’t going to let Etienne kill himself,” I said to myself. “You’ll set them both free. Go throw yourself into the Seine!”’ Other, less torrid versions give more emphasis to Etienne and Boy’s financial discussions about who should pay what to keep Chanel. To Morand, Chanel claimed that Balsan returned from Argentina with a bag of lemons, which had gone rotten, as a gift for her. It remains unclear whether or not he intended this to be symbolic, in some unspecified way, or if Chanel herself had conjured up the rotting lemons as a mystifying metaphor, or was simply for once telling the truth. All that emerges with any certainty from her account to Morand was that matters between the three of them were confused: ‘there were tears and quarrels. Boy was English, he didn’t understand; everything became muddled. He was very moral.’ But to Haedrich, Chanel presented herself as the muddled one of the threesome, a little girl who didn’t understand the machinations of two older men. ‘I was just a kid,’ she said, insisting that she had celebrated her eighteenth birthday with Capel when she came with him to Paris. ‘I had no money. I lived at the Ritz and everything was paid for me. It was an incredible situation. Parisian society talked about it. I didn’t know Parisian society … It was very complicated. The cocottes were paid. I knew that, I’d been taught that. I said to myself, “Are you going to become like them? A kept woman? But this is appalling!” I didn’t want it.’ What she did want was to earn her own living. Eventually, after protracted negotiations, Balsan and Capel agreed to share the cost of setting her up in business to sell the hats that she was already making for herself, and for her friends (and their girlfriends). Among her first clients were Emilienne d’Alen?on, Suzanne Orlandi and Gabrielle Dorziat, the cocottes-turned-actresses who began to wear Chanel’s designs on stage and in magazines. Capel covered the running costs; Balsan provided the Paris premises at his bachelor apartment in Boulevard Malesherbes. ‘They had decided to give me a place where I could make my hats,’ she said to Haedrich, ‘the way they would have given me a toy, thinking, “Let’s let her amuse herself, and later we’ll see.” They didn’t understand how important this was to me. They were very rich men, polo players. They didn’t understand anything about the little girl who came into their lives to play. A little girl who understood nothing of what was happening to her.’ It seems highly likely that Coco did understand something of her circumstances, or at least the practical arrangements that had been put in place; but her constant emphasis on her youth and innocence, when she was already in her late twenties, is perhaps more indicative of real confusion on her part, rather than her simply being disingenuous. After all, her status was ambiguous with these men who said that they loved her but treated her like a plaything. And troubling questions still remained. What were their real feelings for her, and how long would they be sustained? How would she survive without them and which of them would be left heartbroken? The one certainty was her decisive approach to fashion. Just as at Royallieu, Coco dressed like a young convent girl or a schoolboy, and made hats that were stripped of embellishments, of the frills and furbelows that she dismissed as weighing a woman down, and being too cumbersome to let her think straight. They weren’t entirely original – at first, she bought simple straw boaters from the Galeries Lafayette department store, and then trimmed them with ribbon herself – but they were chic. ‘Nothing makes a woman look older than obvious expensiveness, ornateness, complication,’ she said to Claude Delay in old age, still wearing the little straw hats of her youth. ‘I still dress as I always did, like a schoolgirl.’ And in doing so, Coco began to edge her way to the centre of attention, elbowing past her rivals and competitors, whether the society ladies or the cocottes or couturiers. (Paul Poiret, whose fame at the time was such that he dubbed himself the ‘King of Fashion’, said of Chanel’s early days as a milliner, ‘We ought to have been on guard against that boyish head. It was going to give us every kind of shock, and produce, out of its little conjuror’s hat, gowns and coiffures and jewels and boutiques.’) Thus the day came, she told Morand, when she felt able to insist that Boy should dine with her at the casino in Deauville, rather than attend a gala there without her: ‘All eyes were on us: my timid entrance, my awkwardness, which contrasted with a wonderfully simple white dress, attracted people’s attention. The beauties of the period, with that intuition women have for threats unknown, were alarmed.’ Whether they were prompted by alarm or jealousy or simple curiosity, the beauties flocked to buy hats from Chanel at her milliner’s establishment. Soon, her business had grown too successful for Balsan’s apartment, and backed by Capel – whose own fortunes were prospering further – she opened new premises on 1st January 1910 at 21 Rue Cambon. ‘I still have it,’ she told Paul Morand. ‘On the door, it read: “Chanel, modes”.’ She summoned her sister, Antoinette, and her aunt Adrienne to Paris to help – both of them beautiful, as well as skilled seamstresses; Adrienne still the consort of Baron de Nexon – and Chanel worked alongside them, but also went out and about, as her own best model. ‘In the grandstands, people began talking about my amazing, unusual hats,’ she said to Morand, ‘so neat and austere … Customers came, initially prompted by curiosity. One day I had a visit from one such woman, who admitted quite openly: “I came to have a look at you.” I was the curious creature, the little woman whose straw boater fitted her head, and whose head fitted her shoulders.’ But still, she sensed danger all around. Eventually, she told Haedrich, she ventured out to Maxim’s for the first time, accompanied by three escorts (‘one of them was an Englishman who was determined not to be impressed by anything’). It was in 1913, and respectable women did not eat dinner at the restaurant, but Coco was happy to be there with Capel and his friends. ‘I’d been told that the cocottes went to Maxim’s,’ she remarked. ‘I liked the cocottes: they were clean.’ But as in the convent at Aubazine, even amidst cleanliness, there was blood. A couple sat down at the next table, and immediately, another woman appeared, and asked the man to come outside. Coco watched as the man shook his head, a gesture met with a volcanic eruption of violent rage. ‘She broke a glass and began to slash at his face with the base of it. There was blood all over. I fled at once, I went up the stairs, the little spiral stairway. I ran into a room and crawled under a table covered by a cloth. I didn’t want to see any more of that quarrel and that blood. How horrible! I was weeping because the three men I was with had done nothing. All that mattered to them was that they shouldn’t be spattered by the blood.’ Thus Boy, her supposed protector, nevertheless left her vulnerable; and all she could do was to hide beneath a cloth. She had lost her heart to Capel, and he proved himself capable of being heartless, at least in the ease with which he conducted his infidelities. ‘He really understood me,’ she told Haedrich, 60 years later. ‘He handled me like a child. He said to me, “Coco, if only you’d stop lying! Can’t you talk like everyone else? Where do you dig up the things you imagine?”’ But she was not imagining his affairs with other women, even though she pretended not to care (and in doing so, was perhaps false to herself). ‘I couldn’t have cared less whether he was unfaithful,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘I found it rather dirty, but it didn’t count between us.’ And to Morand, she claimed to have had so much fun with Capel that nothing else mattered. ‘“Tell me who you’re sleeping with, it would amuse me greatly,” I would say to him.’ Boy Capel laughed, she said, but in other accounts she did not seem to be as amused as he was, nor quite as nonchalant as she had claimed to be. True, to the outside world, they were a glamorous and successful couple. Chanel’s business was growing, and she began to sell clothes, as well as hats. As always, she based her designs on what suited her – boyish jersey pieces, many of them inspired by Capel’s own English sportswear – and he backed her taste with his capital. But it was as if she had put away her dreams of romance – of the mauve dress she longed for as a young girl – and seemed to accept that bridal lace would never be hers. ‘The age of extravagant dresses, those dresses worn by heroines that I had dreamt about, was past,’ she said to Morand. ‘I had never even had those convent uniforms, with capes, adorned with pale blue Holy Ghost, or Children of Mary, ribbons, which are a child’s pride and joy; I no longer thought about lace; I knew that extravagant things didn’t suit me. All I kept were my goat-skin coat and my simple outfits. ‘“Since you are so attached to them,” Capel said to me, “I’m going to get you to have the clothes you have always worn remade elegantly, by an English tailor.” Everything to do with Rue Cambon stemmed from there.’ But for all the outward success of her designs – and the impeccable surface that she presented to the outside world – inside, something was troubling her. ‘I often fainted,’ she told Haedrich, recalling a day at the racetrack when she had collapsed three times. ‘I had too much emotion, too much excitement, I lived too intensely. My nerves couldn’t stand it. And all at once … I was standing beside a gentleman who had a horse running. Suddenly I had the feeling he was slipping away from me, fast. What a terrible feeling. I fell to the ground, thinking, this is it, it’s all over.’ She did not name the gentleman slipping away from her; but if she did fear the loss of Boy Capel (her lover who was also ‘my brother, my father, my whole family’), it may have contributed to her sense of overwhelming emotion. ‘Several times I’d been brought home unconscious,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘These weren’t any hysterical woman’s swoons. I fell down, my eyes turned black … I was taken for dead.’ Chanel returned to these episodes again and again in her conversations with Haedrich. ‘They talk to me about attacks of nerves,’ she said (without specifying who ‘they’ might be). ‘For two years I couldn’t cross a street or go into a church. So I stopped going to Mass …’ Yet whatever the true cause of her dread and anxiety, she believed that Capel had a miraculous ability to heal her: ‘Boy Capel cured me, with exceptional patience, simply by repeating: “Faint if you want to.” He took me wherever there were people, and said: “I’m here. Nothing can happen to you. Faint while I’m here.”’ But he wasn’t always there; he came and went; he appeared and disappeared. When she worked, she said, her health recovered; and although she never admitted it, the House of Chanel seemed to give her more stability – a sense of where she stood in the world – than she gained from Boy Capel. Hence the story she often told of her distress at discovering that Capel had deposited bank securities as a guarantee for her business and overdrafts, and that the money she believed she was making had not yet repaid her debt. On the evening he told her this, they had been on their way to dinner in Saint-Germain; she immediately insisted that they return to the apartment they now shared in Paris. ‘I felt sick,’ she told Morand. ‘Impossible to eat … We went up to our flat in the Avenue Gabriel. I glanced at the pretty things I had bought with what I thought were my profits. So all that had been paid for by him! I was living off him … I began to hate this well-brought-up man who was paying for me. I threw my handbag straight at his face and I fled.’ She rushed outside, running through a downpour of rain as stormy as her outburst, not knowing where she was going. But Capel ran after her, caught up with her on the corner of Rue Cambon, and took her home to the apartment that he paid for. The following morning, she told Morand, she went back to Rue Cambon at dawn. ‘“Ang?le,” I said to my head seamstress, “I am not here to have fun, or to spend money like water. I am here to make a fortune.”’ A year later, Chanel was earning sufficient money to have no more need of Capel’s financial support, and she rejoiced in her independence. Her clothes looked simple – sleek and fluid, designed to be worn without corsets and with insouciance and she sometimes gave the impression that her success as a designer had come as easily as slipping on a cardigan. It may be that her aesthetic subverted the clich? that appearances can be deceptive (whatever the subterfuges Chanel practised in reshaping her life, the twist she gave to modern fashion was that the line of beauty need not necessarily be misleading). ‘Fashion, like landscape, is a state of mind, by which I mean my own,’ she declared to Morand; but her territory of effortless chic took far more planning and hard-headedness than she let on. The rewards, however, were considerable, for her work, like her clothes, liberated Chanel from other constrictions. ‘I was my own master, and I depended on myself alone,’ she told Morand. ‘Boy Capel was well aware that he didn’t control me: “I thought I’d given you a plaything, I gave you freedom,” he once said to me in a melancholy voice.’ Even so, the House of Chanel still linked them together; for in some unspoken way they had set it up as partners. There was no business contract to bind them together, just as there was no marriage certificate, but it nevertheless joined them, as the double C logo seems to suggest; Chanel and Capel; overlapping, but also facing away from each other. Something of this capacity for closeness, combined with an ability to turn their back on one another (and others, too), is apparent in the role that both played in the upbringing of Andr? Palasse. Chanel had some support from Capel when she assumed responsibility for her nephew; and although she revealed little about the circumstances of his childhood, she did tell Delay that Capel had called Andr? his son, and that every time the little boy saw a coal barge on the Seine, he would say, ‘Look, that’s ours.’ (Capel had already expanded into coal transportation, as well as mining.) ‘It’s not ours, it’s Boy’s,’ Coco would tell him; and she smiled as she told Delay the answer that Andr? gave her: ‘But he told me you’re going to marry him.’ No marriage transpired, and Coco sent Andr? to boarding school in England, to Beaumont, where Boy had been educated. Here the little boy was taught to speak perfect English, and to behave with British reserve, remaining at a distance from his aunt, who may have been his mother, and from her lover, who called him his son. Andr?’s daughter, also named Gabrielle, was born in 1926, and recalls her childhood with absolute clarity, but learned quickly never to question her father or her great-aunt (whom she still refers to as ‘Auntie Coco’) about anything relating to the family history. Gabrielle accepts with apparent equanimity the circumstances of her father’s childhood, and the possibility that Coco might have been her grandmother rather than her great-aunt. ‘Several people who were close to her were sure that this was true,’ she says, but also acknowledges that she will never know the truth. ‘There were so many things she invented – she invented a fairy tale that had nothing to do with reality – even though she lived her own fairy tale, by making her way from the orphanage in Aubazine to Rue Cambon. But the truth hurt her too much – she preserved herself by hiding the truth – and she found a way of putting aside the things that hurt her.’ While Andr? was cared for in England, Chanel’s business flourished, even in the shadow of the First World War. She had opened her first shop in Deauville in 1913; the following summer, after the outbreak of hostilities, Capel (by then a captain in a British army division in France) suggested that she withdraw from Paris to the safety of the seaside resort. There, according to the story she told Paul Morand, Boy ‘rented a villa for his ponies’. Along with the polo ponies, there were legions of fashionable women who had retreated to Deauville that year, all of whom needed new clothes. Chanel had brought several milliners with her, rather than dressmakers, but soon adapted to the wartime restrictions, and set her employees to work. ‘There was a shortage of material,’ she explained to Morand. ‘I cut jerseys for them from the sweaters the stable lads wore and from the knitted training garments that I wore myself. By the end of the first summer of the war, I had earned two hundred thousand gold francs!’ A less romantic version of the story is that jersey was the only fabric she was able to buy in sufficient quantity from textile manufacturers; but in any case, Chanel rose to the occasion, even as France seemed to fall around her. Royallieu had been taken by the German forces, reclaimed by the French and then turned into a front-line hospital; Antoinette and Adrienne left Paris, along with thousands of other women, and came to join Coco in Deauville. Meanwhile, a letter arrived from her brother, Alphonse, saying that both he and their younger brother, Lucien, had joined up – Lucien in the infantry, and Alphonse as a mechanic repairing army tanks. Coco wrote back to Alphonse, sending money and encouragement, in a letter that appears to suggest that he had been injured or sick: ‘I am happy to hear that you have a month of convalescence to get better. Rest and take good care of yourself. I am busy with lots of things and have practically no time for myself. I will write to your wife – don’t be too anxious – perhaps everything will finish sooner than we think …’ Despite the horrors of the front line, her sales continued to increase in Paris and Deauville, and a new boutique, which she had established in Biarritz in 1915. For Chanel’s simple jersey jackets, straight skirts and unadorned sailor blouses looked more and more like the only appropriate fashion to be seen in amid the sombre anxieties of war. They were chic, but not showy; monochrome, in keeping with the mood of the times; clothes that could be worn to drive an ambulance or an army car, as relevant to women’s wartime work as to a seaside promenade. ‘Fashion should express the place, the moment,’ Chanel would later observe to Paul Morand, and even if her words were spoken with the benefit of hindsight, she had seized her moment just as old certainties seemed to be giving way. ‘I was witnessing the death of luxury, the passing of the nineteenth century, the end of an era.’ She watched its demise without sympathy, knowing that her time was coming, that the grandeur she had witnessed would soon crumble, choking on its own excess. Chanel had come of age in a period of magnificence, but also of decadence; in her words, ‘the last reflections of a baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-embellishment had stifled the body’s architecture, just as parasites smother trees in tropical forests. Woman was no more than a pretext for riches, for sable, for chinchilla, for materials that were too precious. Complicated patterns, an excess of lace, of embroidery, of gauze, of flounces and over-layers had transformed what women wore into a monument of belated and flamboyant art. The trains of dresses swept up the dust, all the pastel shades reflected every colour in the rainbow in a thousand tints with a subtlety that faded into insipidness.’ But Coco was going to change all that; Chanel was going to impose black. The Little Black Dress (#ulink_eee1a4ab-8c03-53be-9566-0bc7eaef85f4) In July 1918, an aristocratic beauty named Diana Wyndham wrote a letter to her friend Duff Cooper, from Beaufort Castle in Scotland, where she was visiting her sister Laura and enjoying balmy days in ‘a sea of bluebells, gorse and broom’. The youngest daughter of the fourth Lord Ribblesdale (a former government chief whip in the House of Lords), Diana Wyndham was possessed of connections that placed her at the heart of upper-class society. Her father’s portrait by John Singer Sargent reveals why King Edward VII admired him for his courtly stateliness (the king referred to Ribblesdale as ‘The Ancestor’, because of the impression he gave of having stepped out of an oil painting). Diana was 25, 10 years younger than Coco Chanel, but she had already been married, in 1913, and widowed the following year. Her first husband, often described as one of the handsomest men in London, was Percy Wyndham, half-brother to the Duke of Westminster. An officer in the Coldstream Guards at the time of their wedding, he was killed in action in France on 14th September 1914; his death was followed less than a year later by that of Diana’s brother. ‘Dearest Duff,’ she wrote to a man as well connected as herself, who had joined the Foreign Office after Eton and Oxford, and was currently serving in the Grenadier Guards, ‘Lots of things have happened since I saw you – I’ve been ill, we’ve nearly lost the war, and I think I’m going to marry Capel after all – so next time I see you, you’ll be staying with me in my luxurious apartment in the Avenue du Bois.’ Diana had had a brief flirtation with Duff Cooper three months previously, and so had no need to explain the family references that followed in her letter – to her sister Laura, who had married Simon Fraser, the 14th Lord Lovat, or to her aunt Margot Asquith, the wife of the former prime minister. But it appears she did want to justify her actions to Cooper, following the disapproving responses she had received from Margot Asquith and another of her aunts to her decision to marry Boy Capel. Diana had met the handsome captain while she was driving an ambulance for the Red Cross in France, close to the front line; and their relationship may have been more passionate than Coco Chanel preferred to admit. If Diana was not yet pregnant with Capel’s child when she wrote to Duff Cooper, she would have been soon afterwards, given the birth of her first baby the following April. Not that an unplanned pregnancy was the cause of her aunts’ condemnation: they already had other grounds on which to object to Capel, which emerge in Diana’s letter to Cooper: ‘I wrote, the other day, to Lucy and Margot, breaking [to] them the news and have today received masterpieces from them – Lucy’s letter worse than a farewell dinner, saying her heart has never ceased aching since she received mine, that Paris did not lead to high ideals or morality, that it was selfish of me to marry and leave father, that he [Capel] was half French and not fond of country life, and Margot [wrote] much on the same lines, giving some well-aimed hits at the Versailles Council, since he [Capel] has become political secretary on the Council.’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/justine-picardie/coco-chanel-the-legend-and-the-life/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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