Mademoiselle Page 3

  Such would be the pattern for the first decade of Gabrielle’s life. Albert roved the countryside leaving Jeanne behind to care for their expanding brood. When she became pregnant for the third time, in 1884, Albert finally agreed to legitimize their union, marrying her on November 17, 1884, in Courpière. The nicety of a marriage certificate in no way altered their relationship, although it did provide a modest dowry for Albert from the Devolle family, in the sum of about 5,000 francs, or about $20,000 in today’s dollars.

  In 1885, Jeanne gave birth to her third child and first son, Alphonse—once more in the charity ward, once more without Albert. This scenario, too, was part of a Chanel tradition. Virginie-Angelina had given birth to Albert all alone in a charity ward, and her sisters-in-law had endured similar fates repeatedly. Henri’s brothers, the Chanel boys, were well known for siring large families, but generally evinced little concern for either their many children or the exhausted women who bore them.

  That year, the family made its home in the town of Issoire, in Auvergne, where Albert set up shop at the local markets. They rarely stayed in one place long, and sometimes moved even from street to street within a single town. Albert preferred to station the family on the outskirts of cities, where rents were lower and he had easy access to roads. Typically Jeanne would follow Albert to the fairs, carting her children with her. The toddlers ran about with little supervision.

  The Chanel children did not attend school, but played together in and around the artisans’ shops amid which they usually lived—tallow candlemakers, potters, and rope makers who wove skeins of hemp. Via the easy osmosis of childhood observation, Coco absorbed from these neighbors a love and knowledge of craftsmanship—an almost unconscious, physical understanding of how the human hand lends shape and purpose to raw materials.

  Although largely absent and of no real help at home, Albert Chanel made his presence felt. Coco remembered her father as elusive but affectionate—a man who would come in, kiss her on the top of her head, and leave again, the clip-clop of his horse’s hooves growing fainter outside the door. She recalled his great sensitivity to smells and his love of cleanliness, which made him something of an anomaly for his class and era. Not only was clean water scarce at the time; bathing itself tended to be viewed as something of a health hazard. Albert, though, according to his daughter, was ahead of his time in matters of hygiene, insisting, for example, that the children’s hair be washed regularly with Savon de Marseilles, the traditional French soap made of Mediterranean seawater mixed with olive oil. Coco would develop a similar passion for freshness, and her preference for crisp, clean scents over heavy fragrances led to her later revolution of the perfume industry.

  By 1887, when Antoinette, the fourth Chanel child, was born, Jeanne’s health had begun seriously to deteriorate. She was what the French called at that time a pulmonaire, someone with lung trouble. Although Coco later said that her mother had contracted tuberculosis, claiming to recall bloodstained handkerchiefs, Jeanne more likely suffered from the less operatic but no less deadly condition of chronic bronchitis or asthma, aggravated by constant travel, exposure to the cold at those outdoor markets, fatigue, and back-to-back pregnancies. It ran in the family. Jeanne’s mother, Gilberte—who had been a seamstress—had also suffered from pulmonary ailments and had died prematurely, when her daughter was only six, after struggling for years to catch her breath. This legacy weighed heavily on Coco, who always fretted over the state of her lungs and throat, tying scarves around her neck to ward off chills.

  In 1889, after yet another pregnancy and the birth of baby Lucien, Jeanne packed up all five children and took them back to Courpière, to the home of her uncle Augustin Chardon—the man who had first thrown her out of his house and then relented and helped track down Albert. Taking pity again on his now-careworn niece, old before her time and wracked with an unshakable cough, Augustin agreed to care for the Chanel children so that Jeanne could set out on the road once more, trailing after Albert on his peregrinations. We can easily imagine what the Chardon relatives whispered about Jeanne and her blind devotion to the unscrupulous man who seemed to be slowly killing her. “I would hear people speak of my mother as, ‘that poor Jeanne.’… My father ruined her,” Chanel told journalist Marcel Haedrich, her friend and biographer.

  But like Jeanne, Gabrielle never faltered in her fervent love for Albert Chanel. While she acknowledged his shortcomings—“My father was not very good.… I learned this later”—she stalwartly defended his behavior, inventing changing fictions to embellish his life and career. Sometimes she echoed his own preferred lies and said Albert had owned a vineyard. Sometimes, he was an elegant, worldly man who spoke fluent English and traveled to America to make his fortune. But whatever fantasies she spun about him, the essence of the story remained the same: Her father was a glamorous and charming man who loved her. “One has a father, one loves him very much, one thinks he is a good person.… He would say all sorts of tender and kind things to me, the things a father says to his daughter.”

  Julia, Gabrielle, Alphonse, Antoinette, and baby Lucien lived with their great-uncle Augustin Chardon for about two years—the most stable and secure time of their childhood. For the first and only time in their lives, the three eldest attended school together and had time to play in the fresh air. They didn’t have to linger around their father’s peddler cart or hear their mother gasping for air.

  This temporary idyll ended abruptly when Jeanne returned alone to Courpière. Visibly weaker and more gravely ill than ever, Jeanne descended on her uncle’s house with her usual proof of having once more located Albert: another infant in her arms—her sixth child, baby Augustin, named in honor of her uncle, the only man who had ever shown her any real compassion. The odds against this unfortunate baby proved too great however, and Augustin died at the age of only six months—perhaps from malnutrition, perhaps from infection.

  Facing such tragedy, ground down by illness and poverty, another woman might have cut her losses and ceased running toward the husband who so consistently ran away from her. Not Jeanne. Soon after Augustin’s death Albert sent word that he had established himself in the town of Brive-la-Gaillarde, about 150 miles from Courpière. Jeanne packed up and headed off again. With her she took her two eldest children, Julia and Gabrielle, tearing them away from school, their three younger siblings, and from the new home life in which they had just begun to flourish.

  Jeanne moved back in with Albert who, while claiming to have become a gentleman innkeeper, was, in fact, a low-level employee working for an innkeeper, while still peddling. With the onset of winter, Jeanne’s lung congestion worsened. She developed a dangerously high fever and could hardly breathe at all. This time, she was too spent to rally. On February 16, 1895, Jeanne Devolle Chanel died at the age of thirty-three. Albert was not present to comfort his wife in her last, suffocating moments, but we don’t know the whereabouts of Gabrielle, then eleven, and Julia, just one year older. It is likely that they were there, watching helplessly as their mother gasped her last, and later sat vigil beside her body. If so, Gabrielle never told a soul about it.

  Did the two motherless sisters run out of the house desperately looking for their wayward father? Did Albert Chanel return on his own? We don’t know. It appears that Jeanne’s brother-in-law, Hippolyte, arranged her funeral, and soon after, Albert came back, rounded up the rest of his children, and divested himself permanently of all five within days.

  It is possible that Albert tried first to entrust his children to his parents. But Henri and Virginie-Angelina Chanel had little money and nineteen children, the youngest of which, their daughter Adrienne, was still a child, having been born just around the same time as their granddaughter Julia. (Adrienne was growing into an elegant and beautiful girl and resembled Gabrielle strikingly. Later this duo—more like sisters than aunt and niece—would become best friends and coconspirators.) Albert was certainly out of his depth in this dire situation, and so resorted to his usual solution—aband
onment. Having fetched Antoinette from Courpière, he took all three daughters in his horse-drawn cart to the town of Aubazine, about fifteen kilometers from Brive-la-Gaillarde. No written documents remain to prove definitively what happened next, but it appears indisputable that Albert then deposited his children at the gates of the convent run by the Congrégation du Saint-Coeur de Marie, an order founded in 1860 to care for children and the poor—especially orphans—and housed in a massive medieval structure of high stone walls, which had once served as a Cistercian monastery. According to Edmonde Charles-Roux and other early biographers, a number of Chanel relatives distinctly recalled hearing at the time that “the girls”—Gabrielle and her sisters—were “at Aubazine.” It was by far the most likely solution for Albert. Aubazine was the largest orphanage in the district, and Virginie-Angelina Chanel knew the nuns there, having worked as a laundress for the convent.

  The Aubazine abbey, which housed the orphanage where Chanel spent part of her childhood (illustration credit 1.1)

  Convent records for the period when the Chanel girls would have been admitted have been destroyed or otherwise lost, but, as Edmonde Charles-Roux astutely points out, this absence of documentation “might well confirm the hypothesis [of the girls’ presence at Aubazine] rather than invalidate it,” given Chanel’s well-known penchant for effacing all evidence of her true childhood. Yet Chanel did permit herself, at least once, to make a veiled reference to this orphanage. She told Louise de Vilmorin that her grandparents sometimes sent her and her sisters away to a convent during several weeks in the summers: “a vast, ancient and very beautiful abbey … where the nuns … would stroll serenely. Their steps accompanied by the clicking of their long rosary beads hanging from their belts.” (Years later, Chanel would acknowledge the abbey’s importance to her when she commissioned an architect to copy some of its elements for the summer villa she built.)

  Set in the lush, forested hills of the Corrèze Valley, Aubazine dates to the twelfth century. To this day, the Abbey of Saint-Etienne, which had been turned into a convent in the nineteenth century, remains the peaceful town’s crowning glory. Devoid of nearly any adornment, save for its intricate mosaic floors and subtle, nonfigurative stained-glass windows, this somber, austerely beautiful place would be the girls’ home for more than six years.

  Albert earnestly promised to return for them soon, but Julia, Gabrielle, and Antoinette never saw their father again. “They tore everything away from me and I died,” Gabrielle said in a rare moment of candor. “I knew that at twelve years old. One can die many times in the course of a life you know.”

  The Chanel sons fared even worse than their sisters. Albert had Alphonse, ten, and Lucien, only six, declared enfants des hospices, or “children of the poorhouse.” With this, he effectively turned the boys over to whatever families agreed to take them, in exchange for a fee. Barely supervised, this system resembled nothing so much as a forced labor market for children. Treated often as free farmhands, such children rarely benefited from the payments disbursed to the caretaking families and almost never went to school. Few learned to speak or write standard French, but spoke mostly the various regional patois that had not yet been fully eradicated in France, and Lucien and Alphonse, no exception, knew their local dialect far better than they did French. Poorhouse children had no rights, and no social workers kept track of them. Abuse and beatings were routine, as was the most egregious kind of basic neglect. The Chanel boys endured these conditions until each turned thirteen, when both became peddlers, like their father and grandfather before, setting up their carts in the Auvergne town of Moulins, perhaps with some minimal help from Henri Chanel, who still worked in that region.

  At six years old, I was already alone. My father dropped me like a burden at my aunts’ home, and left immediately thereafter for America, from which he never returned.…“Orphan”—that word has filled me with terror.

  —COCO CHANEL

  As ever, Chanel doctored the facts slightly in this account. She was actually eleven at the time, not six; her father would never set foot out of France; and no aunts ever cared for these girls. Yet these remarks to writer Paul Morand convey with honesty the emotional tenor of Chanel’s life after Jeanne’s death. During this one brief period she lost in quick succession the congenial household she’d enjoyed in Courpière, the camaraderie of all her sisters and brothers, and her young mother. The cruelest blow, though, the one she could never assimilate, was her father’s abandonment of the entire family. Ridding himself, with barely a backward glance, of all five young children, Albert seems to have shattered permanently Gabrielle’s faith in human relationships. Surely by this age, she had seen enough of her mother’s life to acquire a healthy mistrust of men, marriage, and motherhood. She had seen that, for women, love and attachment led to disgrace and humiliation. But Albert’s betrayal was of another order of magnitude.

  Although it seems that Albert never once visited his daughters at Aubazine, Coco did invent a memory of a single such visit. He returned once, she said, to the aunts’ home, to bid her good-bye (siblings rarely figure in her memories—occasionally she would mention having had just one sister):

  A little before he left for America, my father brought me a dress for my first communion, in white crepe, with a crown of roses. To punish me for my pride, my aunts told me, “You will not wear your rose crown, you will wear a bonnet.” … I threw myself on my father, “take me away from here.” “Come my poor Coco, everything will be fine, I will come back, I will come back for you.… We will still have our house.” Those were his last words. He never came back.

  As for what really became of Albert, it seems he continued his aimless life as a peddler in the region, and may have fathered at least one more child with another woman.

  Chanel’s retelling of her father’s disappearance only throws its cruelty into starker relief. While softening her depiction of Albert—painting him as a generous man offering pretty gifts and affectionate nicknames (in reality, she became “Coco” only years later)—she can’t sugarcoat her own experience of the situation. Even in this embellished memory, the child Gabrielle is desperately unhappy, begging her father to stay. And while there never was a special white dress or rose crown (although many Catholic girls would certainly have worn just such a costume for their First Communion), the description of her sense of deprivation likely stems from real-life memories as well. The fictional aunts’ refusal to let Coco wear her fictional crown—the Catholic-tinged disapproval of the sin of pride—may well have been Chanel’s fantasy translation of real treatment she received at the hands of the Sisters of Saint-Coeur de Marie. Nuns such as these would have been vigilant in stifling vanity or attachment to material goods. Late-nineteenth-century Catholic teaching manuals warned especially of the dangers inherent in a girl’s love of beautiful clothes—a weakness feared to be the first step on the path toward fornication. It was even considered sinful for a young girl to look down at her own naked body while bathing.

  Coco was eleven and a half—just on the cusp of womanhood—when she moved to Aubazine, likely feeling her body change, growing aware of her beauty, and surely already possessed of her exceptional instinct for style. How bitterly she must have borne the moral rebukes of the provincial nuns who controlled every aspect of her days. As if to prove how much it rankled, Chanel manufactured at least one other, similar memory, recounting to Paul Morand an episode when her “aunts” yet again coldly deprived her of a dress she adored—in this case, a formfitting, ruffled gown of violet taffeta. Chanel claimed that the violet dress had been designed for her by a local seamstress, but that her aunts, finding it too revealing, angrily confiscated it. Her story insists particularly on the aunts’ grim, humorless nature: “In a normal family, where children are loved, we would have laughed about it. My aunts did not laugh at all.” Although Chanel could never have owned this romantic frock, clearly she had dreamed of one, and clearly such longings were expressly forbidden—by the nuns.

  Des
pite its near total alteration of the facts, Chanel’s story of her father’s last visit and disappearance sheds much light on her own subsequent life. Faced with Albert’s blithe disregard, Gabrielle arrived at a terrible conclusion: She was utterly and permanently alone. She knew that the only way to cope with such pain, or to retain her dignity, was to make it seem logical or inevitable—to claim to agree with her father’s decision, identifying herself with the powerful one in the situation: “I understand my father. Here was a man who wasn’t even 30 when he left [he was actually 40]. He remade his life.… Why would he have worried?… He knew [we] were in good hands.… He didn’t care. He was right. I would have done the same.” The remark reveals the final lessons Chanel absorbed from her father: that even the greatest emotional pain was unworthy of consideration, and that inflictors of such pain might still be worthy of admiration and imitation. Via such lessons, wounded children can grow up to be deeply wounding adults.

  While many of Chanel’s invented stories about her youth would change over time, the unyielding maiden aunts remained constant characters. Routinely, Chanel described for biographers and journalists the household of these sisters who raised her—cold and withholding, well-to-do but miserly. In Coco’s account, the aunts were wealthy enough to keep servants, earning their income by raising fine horses that they sold to the military: “How I loved … the gentlemen officers … who came to see our horses,” she told Morand. She even went so far as to claim that her aunts’ prosperity—especially the lavish table they set—had prepared her for a luxurious adult life: “Eggs, chickens, sausages, sacks of flour and potatoes, hams, whole pigs on a spit. So much I grew disgusted with food.… When I lived in England in a luxury you cannot imagine … the most marvelous luxury … well that did not surprise me, because I’d spent my childhood in a fine house where we had everything we could ever need.”