Mademoiselle Page 4
We don’t know exactly what rations Chanel received during her years at Aubazine, but such fantasies of abundance sound like the inventions of a hungry child. Perhaps provisions at Aubazine were scarce. Perhaps Gabrielle dreamed that the nuns—the real “sisters” who raised her—might magically appear with heaping platters of sausages or roast pig. (Later in life, though, she carefully watched her slim figure and ate very sparingly, often only a bowl of soup for dinner.) Similarly, her remark about having been well prepared for future luxury only drives home how unprepared she really was.
Many people would be extremely proud to have overcome—and so spectacularly—such childhood challenges. But shame overshadowed Chanel’s relationship to her past, and she made a life’s project of concealing her years at Aubazine. She never mentioned the place or even uttered the word “orphanage.”
Whatever their obfuscations, Chanel’s descriptions of her early life always reveal more than they conceal. An intense fascination with death, even suicide, for example, recurs consistently in her accounts of the “maiden aunt” years. “I thought often of death,” she told Paul Morand.
And she told several biographers of her youthful attachment to cemeteries—even prior to the loss of her parents. Coco frequently recalled that her favorite playground during her earliest years had been a cemetery. There, she said, she found her two “best friends”—tombstones of granite and basalt, overgrown with weeds, which marked the graves of two people she had never known. Gabrielle would visit the graves, bringing flowers and sometimes other offerings: “I would return in secret to my tombs, bringing crumbs from a cake, a piece of fruit, poisonous mushrooms that I thought were pretty.… I thought the dead appreciated my offerings, my love, my games; I still believe they protect me and bring me happiness.”
For company, she also took her dolls to the graveyard—handmade rag dolls that she claimed to prefer to the expensive store-bought dolls she kept at home (which, of course, likely never existed): “I preferred my rag dolls, which everyone else found ugly and made fun of,” she told Vilmorin. Even as a child, Chanel was driven by her creative convictions, it seems. And her love for humble rather than ornate dolls suggests the first stirrings of that famous Chanel style dubbed “luxurious poverty,” which conjured elegance from the simplest of materials. Gabrielle and her misunderstood fabric dolls would sit and commune with their silent underground companions. “I was the queen of this secret garden.… The dead are not dead as long as we think about them, I would tell myself.”
From these girlhood memories (authentic or embroidered) emerge clearly the two key sides of Gabrielle’s personality: regal and determined, already fancying herself a “queen” in her little domain—and tragically bereft, a lonely child attempting to befriend death, trying to “think” the dead back to life. In her mother’s worsening cough Gabrielle had probably already sensed death’s looming shadow. As she acknowledged to Vilmorin: “Unlike children who could throw themselves into their mothers’ arms and just express their joy, their anger or their tears, we could only walk near our mother on our tiptoes.”
A few convent rituals offered a bit of solace to Gabrielle. She owed her lifelong love of music and singing to these years, and spoke sometimes of having sung in church, perhaps as a member of the convent choir. Later in life she showed a fond nostalgia for the pageantry of Catholic processionals of the sort in which she likely participated at Aubazine. But if she’d ever been a true believer, Chanel lost any real religious convictions early on, having found in the church a version of her own father’s hypocrisy and dissembling. In conversation with Marcel Haedrich, she recalled her confusion when, for her First Communion, she was obliged to come up with a sin to confess. Not knowing what to say, she settled on a sin she’d heard about but only vaguely understood: “I said, ‘Father I have had profane thoughts.’ And he calmly responded, ‘I thought you were smarter than the others.’ And that was the end of confession for me. The priest knew therefore that it was me [despite being in the supposedly anonymous confessional booth]. I was furious. I hated him.”
Still, Chanel formed bonds with the sisters who raised her, and maintained some contact with the congregation of Saint-Coeur de Marie for a time as an adult, writing to the bonnes soeurs, sending donations, and occasionally visiting them after she had become famous, arriving in a big black car that set the neighbors talking. “Woe to anyone who dared make any smart remark [to Chanel] about nuns,” recalled Edmonde Charles-Roux. “She always retained immense gratitude toward them—thanks to them she learned to sew.” And while no known correspondence exists between Chanel and the sisters who raised her, the archives of the Maison Chanel hold several letters written by Gabrielle in the 1930s to nuns of her acquaintance in southeastern France—the Dauphiné region. These brief notes, signed “G. Chanel,” and not “Coco Chanel,” display a softer, more respectful tone than do most other examples of Chanel’s writing. The letters suggest an ongoing correspondence between Chanel and these sisters. In several, she thanks the nuns for their prayers and kind words and offers the same in return. In one, dated January 5, 1933, she invites her correspondent, a Sister Marie-Xavier, to “make use of her” should the necessity arise—presumably a politely veiled offer of funds.
Chanel did not continue to practice Catholicism actively as an adult, aside from attending the occasional Mass. Nevertheless, the ambiance—particularly the political atmosphere—of the Church during the Aubazine period found its way into Chanel’s worldview in later years. It is worth pausing briefly to consider what Gabrielle would have experienced in a rural Catholic convent at this time, especially since between the ages of eleven and eighteen, Aubazine defined her entire existence, with no parents and little exterior life to counterbalance the opinions or practices she encountered there.
By 1895, when Gabrielle and her sisters entered Aubazine, France had already endured a quarter century of ongoing conflict between the government and the Roman Catholic Church. Although Napoléon’s 1801 Concordat with the Vatican had established the Catholic church as a state institution in France, the Third Republic, inaugurated in 1870, strove to minimize religion’s role in civic life, especially in education. The church reacted with outrage and hostility to this campaign of “dechristianization,” as it was known. Anti-republican sentiment, along with monarchism, ran very high in Catholic circles, especially in the still heavily religious areas such as the Massif Central—where Chanel and her sisters lived. Later in her life, Chanel—despite her highly democratic sense of fashion—would evince great sympathy and enthusiasm for monarchical causes, and a distinct aversion to republicanism and democracy.
Along with her staunch anti-republicanism, Chanel’s anti-Semitism may well find its earliest roots in these Aubazine years, when Catholic discontent acquired a distinctly anti-Jewish cast. For centuries, many European Catholics had mistrusted Jews as a matter of course, blaming them for the death of Christ. Now politics intervened. Seeking scapegoats to blame for their country’s dangerous drift to secularism, many on the Catholic Right identified the usual culprits: Protestants, Freemasons, and especially Jews—whom they accused of inciting the moral decay of France. (The Right blamed those same groups for inciting the Paris Commune of 1870.) In a presaging of Nazi-inflected arguments that surfaced during the interwar years in France, influential Catholic political journals, such as La Croix and Le Pèlerin, condemned those groups it deemed “foreign” enemies of France, particularly those Jews and Protestants working in high finance.
Antipathy toward Jews in Auvergnat Catholic circles was likely exacerbated by perhaps the most momentous historical event to unfold in France during Chanel’s Aubazine years: the highly polarizing Dreyfus affair. The 1894 arrest of Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus on the grounds of treason, his subsequent trial, conviction, and imprisonment, all seemed to validate France’s deepest anti-Semitic prejudices. Dreyfus was vilified and depicted as an animal or subhuman monster, and his example served to justify increasingly institutional
ized anti-Semitism. Not even the indisputable evidence later exculpating Dreyfus (leading to his retrial and pardon in 1899) could placate those factions who fervently believed in a conspiracy between the Republicans and the Jews.
No French citizen could avoid news of the Dreyfus case, which took on the quality of a national obsession. Given where she lived and with whom, Chanel would have been surrounded by powerful anti-Semitism during her time at Aubazine. We also know that her grandfather Henri Chanel, who lived nearby and with whom the Chanel sisters may have maintained some minimal contact, was an outspoken anti-Dreyfusard and passionate admirer of Emperor Napoléon.
Not all the lessons learned at Aubazine would necessarily have been this narrow-minded, however. The bonnes soeurs might well have exerted a progressive influence upon Gabrielle as well. To begin with, these sisters at Aubazine were technically congréganistes as opposed to religieuses—a subtle yet meaningful distinction. Congrégations represented a relatively new model of female religious order, which grew more popular as the nineteenth century progressed, partly in response to an increasing demand for social services. Unlike the more traditional religieuses, the congréganistes practiced “social Catholicism,” and led an engaged community life—teaching, nursing, or helping the poor—which took priority over religious practices such as prayer or meditation. The congregations, furthermore, were far more diverse and egalitarian than were traditional religious orders, recruiting not only from more urban and educated social classes, but also from the rural peasantry—sometimes even for high-ranking positions. As historian Ralph Gibson points out, “The congregations afford [ed] women unrivalled possibilities.… They provided a function in life … for those unwilling or unable to marry.”
This last point is key. In nineteenth-century France, these religious orders stood alone in offering women—particularly peasant women—a powerful alternative to becoming a wife and mother, one that did not involve domestic or factory labor. At a time when nearly no professional options existed for women, especially those of modest background, female congregations offered many types of employment, at all levels of responsibility. And those at the helm, the mothers superior, wielded authority and commanded respect to a degree unheard-of for women at the time, often supervising hundreds of women.
In other words, Aubazine presented young Gabrielle Chanel with a picture of adult womanhood strikingly different from the memories of her mother and other female relatives, whose lives hinged entirely on their relationships to men. They worked—sometimes literally to death—to support their many children, and they had no control over their own futures. What a contrast Gabrielle must have noticed in the lives of these congréganistes. Having largely renounced men and marriage, these sisters did not “fall pregnant” (tomber enceinte in the French expression) or subjugate themselves to men. They exercised a socially relevant profession. Most of us would see little freedom in nineteenth-century rural convent life, but perspective is everything. For an observant and imaginative girl, who had watched family life destroy her mother, these bonnes soeurs, in their impressive starched white headdresses and flowing black pleated skirts (Chanel’s future trademark colors), all taking orders from their mother superior—a female boss—might have struck a deep chord. They were the first independent “career women” Gabrielle had ever seen.
This is not to say that living at Aubazine brought Chanel happiness. Although she always glossed over having lived in a convent, she never described her childhood as anything but lonely and sad. Aubazine is an imposing and severe venue, and Gabrielle was certainly not the type destined for religious vows. Apart from the domestic skills she learned there—especially sewing—what little instruction she received likely consisted of reciting aloud from prayer books—a method of rote learning permitting no questioning or interpretation. The church used this teaching method to create obedient Catholic wives, to tamp down individual personalities and homogenize the group as far as possible. Gabrielle surely chafed under such monotony, her lively mind resisting. “I have hated when people try to put order in my disorder or into my spirit,” she told Paul Morand.
Blessed with a sharp eye for the workings of society, Chanel took the measure of her new surroundings and began coolly planning her escape. In her recollections, the “aunts” often taunt her with her low social class and poor prospects. Perhaps the nuns actually spoke to her this way; perhaps Gabrielle was simply watching the world around her. In either case, even as a child she understood and then rejected the ignoble rung she’d been assigned on the social ladder. The only way to outwit her fate, she grasped, would be to acquire her own wealth:
I was a child in revolt. Proud people desire only one thing: freedom. But to be free, one must have money. I only thought of money as a way to open the door to the prison.… My aunts would repeat to me …“You will never have money. You will be lucky if a farmer will have you.” Very young, I had already understood that without money, one is nothing, and that with money, one can do everything. Or that one had to depend upon a husband. Without money I would have had to remain sitting, waiting for a man to come find me. And if you don’t like him? Other girls resigned themselves, but not me.… I repeated to myself: money, is the key to the kingdom.… It wasn’t about buying objects.… I had to buy my liberty, to purchase it at any cost.
Trapped in a dreary convent, any lonely girl might have dreamed of riches. But only one in a million would ever have found a way to acquire them. It would be years before Gabrielle acquired her independence, but while she bided her time, she found some fuel for her fantasies: external evidence that change was possible and that miracles could occur. She found one of her most potent sources for fantasy in the sentimental novels she devoured in secret, particularly the melodramas of one of the most successful popular authors of the turn of the century, Pierre Decourcelle.
Chanel openly acknowledged loving Decourcelle—“I had a tutor, a sentimental hack, Pierre Decourcelle,” she told psychoanalyst Claude Delay, her friend and biographer. “I lived my novels.… M. Decourcelle was very useful to me. I identified with his heroines,” she recalled—although it is not entirely clear where she procured his books or the illustrated newspapers that serialized them. However she came by them, Gabrielle quickly became a passionate devotee of melodrama, or les mélos, and especially the work of Decourcelle.
A prolific writer of stage dramas as well as novels, Pierre Decourcelle (1856–1926) concerned himself less with style than with creating heart-pounding, emotional stories brimming with perfect love, tragic loss, mistaken identities, and implausible coincidence. Among the earliest authors to understand the power of cinema, he promoted the new art form vigorously and turned many of his own works into films.
Decourcelle particularly loved the motif of dramatic social reversal—stories in which the very poor suddenly grow rich or vice versa. Like a fin de siècle Danielle Steel, he churned out Cinderella tales of ravishing heroines triumphing over adversity. A quick look at just some of Decourcelle’s titles reveals his typical preoccupations: The Charwoman; The Two Marchesas; Brunette and Blonde; A Woman’s Crime; Beautiful Cleopatra; The Queen’s Necklace; The Working Girl; The Chamber of Love; The Woman Who Swallows Her Tears.
Decourcelle was also something of a social critic, hinting at the arbitrary unfairness of social distinctions. In his one-act play The Dancing Girl of the Convent, for example, a rich and gorgeous star ballerina at the Paris Opéra renounces everything to become a humble nun. Before leaving for her cloister, the dancer bequeaths all her worldly goods to Yvette—a beautiful peasant girl. Yvette travels to Paris to step into her new life, acquiring the dancer’s fashionable wardrobe, priceless jewels, apartment, servants, and even—somehow—her many suitors. Although crude and uneducated, preferring cabbage soup (a lifelong favorite of Chanel’s) to caviar, the girl takes to her new life quickly. Blessed with a brilliant mind and a knack for business, she makes fools of the hapless aristocrats around her by swiftly settling all their dilemmas—from adu
lterous lovers to stock market crises. Yvette then selflessly uses her newfound fortune to save her family farm from bankruptcy. When Decourcelle published this play in 1883—the year of Chanel’s birth—such a tale of meteoric social ascent would have seemed outlandishly escapist. Peasant girls did not become millionaire Parisian femmes fatales and shrewd businesswomen—at least most peasant girls did not.
Similar twists of fate beset the heroine of Decourcelle’s most famous novel, the 1880 Two Little Vagrants. In this potboiler, Hélène, a beautiful orphan raised in a convent, grows up to marry a wealthy count. She meets with misfortune when her husband, believing her unfaithful, gives their son away to an alcoholic drifter and banishes Hélène from their château. Once more penniless and alone, Hélène endures with Christian forbearance, devoting herself to charitable works, while searching for her lost son, Fanfan. In a parallel narrative, Fanfan, the once-pampered child, comes of age amid the itinerant underclass of rural France. Eventually, all is sorted out; mother and son are reunited, and Hélène returns to her picture-perfect life.
Chanel lost herself easily in such books, where the elements of life she knew all too well—convent orphanages, loneliness, peddlers, and poverty—hovered alongside their exact opposites: palaces, romantic bliss, aristocrats in elegant clothes (always described in detail), and boundless wealth. Gabrielle had yet to experience such heady pleasures, but reading of them ignited her imagination, stoking her hunger for not just a better life, but a spectacular one. Decourcelle made miracles seem possible.
Given the uncanny extent to which Chanel’s eventual trajectory actually resembled a Decourcelle plot, we have to wonder whether that might have been her intention. Blessed as she was with a highly theatrical sense—an instinctive talent for emulation—young Gabrielle might consciously have set out to refashion herself as a Decourcelle heroine. “Those novels taught me about life; they nourished my sensibility and my pride,” she confided to Paul Morand. Chanel even attributed her dreams of beautiful dresses to Decourcelle’s novels. In later years, Chanel got to meet her favorite author when he was quite elderly. She told him of the lofty fantasies he’d inspired in her—and of the disappointment that came when she couldn’t fulfill those fantasies as a young girl: “He was already an old gentleman and I said to him, ‘Ah my dear, you have caused me … some very difficult months.’ ”