Mademoiselle Read online

  Gabrielle and her sisters remained at Aubazine until each turned eighteen. Thereupon, each girl faced the first major choice of her life: to stay at the convent and enter the novitiate or leave for the wider world. This was an easy one. Unlikely candidates for a nunnery, the Chanels agreed to be sent to nearby Moulins, to the Pensionnat Notre Dame run by the Chanoinesses de Saint-Augustin. Making this prospect more enticing, their aunt Adrienne had already enrolled at this pension. The girls would be with family. A modest version of a finishing school, the pension offered young women lessons in the domestic arts, including sewing, embroidery, child rearing, and thrifty housekeeping, turning them into good Catholic wives.

  Aside from the presence of Adrienne, Moulins seemed to offer little to brighten Gabrielle’s spirits. For one thing, the Pensionnat Notre Dame made her lowly social status painfully evident. Even convent schools such as this one upheld class distinctions among the students, and here the world split neatly into haves and have-nots. Those whose families contributed to their upkeep were the payantes, or paying girls; those who had no support were the nécessiteuses, or needy girls. Gabrielle and her sisters fell into the second category. They were the charity cases and, unlike the payantes, they had to earn their keep. The nuns soon put them to work peeling vegetables, scrubbing floors, and making beds.

  The school also distinguished sartorially between the two groups: the payantes wore one uniform and the nécessiteuses wore another—a special black outfit that immediately telegraphed their poverty. On Sundays, when the entire school would go to Mass, the payantes sat in the church’s elevated center aisle, physically above the nécessiteuses, who made do with seats off to either side. As a teenager, then, Chanel learned a painful lesson she eventually turned to her own advantage: What you wear is who you are. She later redeemed the suffering caused by that uniform by inventing her own version of it, imposing it upon millions, and charging awfully high prices for it. A century later, latter-day payantes around the world still clamor to dress like the nécessiteuses of the Pensionnat Notre Dame.

  Chanel’s convent school, the Pensionnat Notre Dame in Moulins

  Adrienne and Gabrielle were nearly the same age, and they resembled each other strikingly. Their temperaments, though, could not have been more different. Calm, self-possessed, and soft-spoken, Adrienne carried herself with the air of someone who’d been looked after, someone warmly connected to others. Although Adrienne hailed from the same humble Chanel family, she had never lacked for company or familial supervision—she still had both her parents, as well as eighteen older brothers and sisters. By the time Gabrielle joined her at Moulins, Adrienne—who’d boarded there since the age of ten—had also developed affectionate relationships with several of the school’s teaching nuns.

  Trauma and loneliness had already hardened Gabrielle considerably. By her own account, she developed a rough, angry edge to her personality while still a youngster: “I was … a true Lucifer … nasty, enraged, a hypocrite,” she told Morand. At Moulins, in the daily company of her more gentle, look-alike aunt, Gabrielle saw a vision of herself in an alternate reality.

  And yet, things were changing. Moulins may have been a provincial town with a largely peasant population, but to a teenaged girl, newly sprung from a remote convent, it would have looked like a dazzling world capital. Brive-la-Gaillarde, home to the Aubazine congregation, lies in a deeply rural, desolate corner of France, which remains inaccessible by railway even today. Moulins, on the other hand, boasted a population of twenty-two thousand in 1900, and was a vibrant little city with its own train station. (Even into her old age, Chanel would always love trains, perhaps because of their early association with freedom and mobility.) Some of the town’s energy derived from its hippodrome where, during racing season, elegant crowds from throughout France gathered to cheer on world-famous jockeys and their prizewinning mounts.

  Moulins had horse racing in its blood, and many members of the local aristocracy were accomplished equestrians who raised thoroughbreds. The estates of these country gentlemen dotted the lush hills surrounding the town—stone châteaus with crenelated towers, sitting atop manicured gardens and sloping green pastures where horses grazed. Though many of them have since fallen into disrepair or been turned into tourist hotels, such provincial manors still radiate a powerful aura of ancient privilege. To Gabrielle, who could espy some of them on her walks to town, they were fairy-tale castles. These old country seats of Moulins provided her first glimpse into the world of the French upper class—outside the pages of her novels.

  Her new home offered another considerable attraction for Gabrielle: like her birthplace of Saumur, Moulins was a garrison town. This meant that when the students of the Pensionnat Notre Dame walked to town for Mass, they had a good chance of crossing paths with the handsome young officers of the Tenth Light Brigade (Dixième chasseurs à cheval). Although quartered on the other side of Moulins, across the Allier River, these officers enjoyed strolling through town in their off-hours, striking in their gold-buttoned dolman jackets with goatskin closures. An evening might find the same cavalrymen at one of Moulin’s café concerts, where they danced and drank and cheered when the performers took the stage—pretty local girls mostly, with dreams of big-city stardom.

  Moulins offered exciting new possibilities, but obstacles remained. Gabrielle still lived under the supervision of Catholic nuns; she still toiled at dismal, unpleasant tasks. Although she loved being near the beautiful and charming Adrienne—whom she preferred over her own sisters—Gabrielle surely felt her isolation more keenly in Moulins, for it was here that she confronted the stark and disappointing truth about her family. At Aubazine, she had been aware she was a charity ward—aware that no one had rescued her or her sisters from their fate. But to a traumatized child living in a remote and isolated place, such facts, while painful, would have been abstract. Moving to Moulins brought Chanel and her sisters easily within the compass of their extended family. Henri and Virginie-Angelina Chanel had settled permanently in Moulins, and uncles Marius and Hippolyte lived nearby. Another relative, their aunt Louise—Adrienne’s eldest sister—lived just twenty kilometers away in Varennes-sur-Allier. By far the most settled and prosperous member of the Chanel clan, Louise—unlike most Chanel women—had married well and happily. Her husband, Paul Costier, did not peddle trinkets, but earned a steady living as a railway stationmaster. The couple lived in a solid, comfortable home. Nineteen years Adrienne’s senior, Louise had always been something of a second mother to the girl, and the two remained close while Adrienne boarded at Moulins.

  Given Louise’s age and respectability, the nuns felt comfortable entrusting all the Chanel girls to the Costiers’ supervision for occasional visits. Aunt Louise would take the train into Moulins, pick up her sister and three nieces, and escort them all back to Varennes for some home-cooked meals and downtime away from the convent. At least one summer was spent entirely in Varennes.

  Had such holidays been possible at Aubazine, they might have attenuated some of Gabrielle’s anguish. Now, though, it must have felt like too little too late. Where had all these relatives been when she was contemplating suicide behind the stone walls of an orphanage? This belated reacquaintance with her family carried with it a bitter truth: Gabrielle had been abandoned not just by her blameless mother and the father she tried so hard to excuse, but by an entire clan of relatives who’d never been far away and who had been perfectly aware of her plight all along. Till the end of her life, she held herself at a great and chilly distance from nearly all of her Moulins relatives and their descendants. Family, she later told Morand, is nothing more than a series of “charming illusions … mirages that make you believe that the world is inhabited by other versions of yourself.” A hardened cynic before she was even out of her teens, Chanel fell for no such illusions—although, arguably, she later populated the world with “other versions” of herself, creating a kind of global illusion of extended family.

  Gabrielle did little to hide t
he disdain and anger she felt, openly telling Adrienne how much she disliked the Costier household and the little town of Varennes, which she claimed to find boring and bourgeois. And yet these family excursions held a certain charm for Gabrielle, since Aunt Louise was something of an amateur fashion designer. Possessing a version of the Chanel style gene, Louise had a quick, creative touch with fabrics, and a special flair for accessories. With a few deft stitches or some fancy scissor work, she could turn plain handkerchiefs into charming flowers to adorn a hat. In her hands, stray scraps of fabric morphed into fetching new bodices that revived old dresses. She added crisp white cuffs and collars to liven up blouses (details that would appear later in Chanel’s own work).

  When the four girls came down from Moulins, Louise would invite them to work alongside her. The Chanel women spent many hours together during those visits, lost to the pleasures of ribbons and bows, lace and velvet. Louise especially loved making hats, and Adrienne and Gabrielle would help her invent new designs. Such a pastime felt natural; all the girls sewed well—the nuns had seen to that. But for Gabrielle, this was more than an amusing hobby—she was developing her talent. In convents, the girls had learned practical sewing—to make bed linens or simple dresses. They learned to make perfect, even stitches. But with Aunt Louise, they stretched their imaginations.

  In truth, her aunt developed Chanel’s vision more than she did her craftsmanship. Gabrielle had a vivid imagination and a keen, original eye, but she never acquired the skills necessary for complex or ornate sewing. Nor did she ever learn to sketch her own patterns. In later life, Chanel would rely upon teams of experienced seamstresses to give life to her creations.

  Helping Aunt Louise came with another bonus, too: the privilege of accompanying her on her annual trip to nearby Vichy to shop for sewing supplies. Vichy dazzled Gabrielle even more than Moulins had. The entire world flocked to this “thermal spa” town. Ever since the Romans discovered it in 52 B.C., Vichy had been enticing visitors with its spring water, whose medicinal powers remain legendary. In 1901, when Gabrielle discovered it, the city was reaching its peak of Belle Epoque glamour, known as France’s premier water resort. Crowned heads of state, aristocrats, diplomats from all over—including Africa and the Middle East—and much of Europe’s fashionable set descended every year on the town. As many as forty thousand visitors arrived annually, all seeking healing in the famous waters. (Instead of touristes, these visitors were called curistes.) With a grand, Art Nouveau–style casino and opera house, and a crop of newly built luxury hotels, turn-of-the-century Vichy glittered with a special luster. Gabrielle had never heard so many foreign languages—which she regarded as “passwords to a great secret club.” She had never seen people of such diverse backgrounds and dress. She drank it all in.

  Chanel (left) and her aunt Adrienne on a trip to Vichy, 1902

  Hard as they were, those two years at the Pensionnat Notre Dame afforded Gabrielle an important period of transition. She still lived in a convent but now enjoyed regular (if limited) access to a city. These years also cemented the bond with her boon companion, Aunt Adrienne, the only member of her family she had ever really enjoyed. Adrienne had an innate poise that seemed to awaken something in Gabrielle. Decades later, Chanel reminisced to Paul Morand about girlhood tea parties that Adrienne would stage for the two of them—parties at which Adrienne would insist they “play at being great [aristocratic] ladies” together.

  In 1902, Gabrielle, then nineteen, and Adrienne, twenty, finally bade good-bye to convent walls. As was customary, the sisters of the school found a suitable “placement” for their students—in this case, work as seamstresses for a local Moulins establishment known as the Maison Grampayre, on the rue de l’Horloge, specializing in bridal trousseaus and layette sets for infants. Upon request, the shop also created outfits for women and girls. The locals soon took note of the lovely Chanel girls’ marvelous way with a needle. Ladies began requesting their services specifically.

  The girls began to taste some of the simple pleasures of independence. Out from under the nuns’ watchful glare, they set up housekeeping together, sharing a rented furnished room on the rue du Pont-Ginguet. To help make ends meet, they took in odd sewing jobs and began helping out at a tailor shop catering to cavalrymen—a setting, at last, with some real social possibilities.

  A 1905 view of the Maison Grampayre, on the rue de l’Horloge, Moulins, where Chanel and her aunt Adrienne worked as seamstresses

  The young officers of Moulins wasted no time chatting up the two new young and pretty seamstresses they discovered mending uniforms in the back of the shop called Modern Tailleur. The gentlemen began by inviting Adrienne and Gabrielle to accompany them on chaste outings—to take tea or enjoy fruit sorbets under the vaulted ceilings of the Grand Café or La Tentation, Moulins’s historic watering holes. The girls soon found themselves at the center of a circle of aristocratic admirers. Tea dates turned into excursions to the Hippodrome to watch the races, and then into evenings at the café concerts. For most of her new gang, these little cabarets were just informal hangouts, places to catch some lighthearted entertainment. To Gabrielle, they meant something else entirely. This was her first experience of any kind of theater, and she felt drawn toward the stage. Here at last was an escape route. Gabrielle would become a star.

  Local residents and former army officers who’d known Chanel as a young woman in Moulins recalled for decades thereafter her exceptional charisma. Rough around the edges, skinny, and flat chested, she hardly resembled the voluptuous beauties who were typically trailed by admirers. But even in her earliest youth, long before she’d made any mark on the world, Gabrielle knew how to captivate. This quality was not lost on the management of Moulins’s most popular café concert, La Rotonde, which agreed to give Gabrielle her first onstage gig. She became what was known as a poseuse, one of a group of girls who “posed” onstage in a semicircle behind the star, looking pretty. Between sets, the poseuses got the chance to sing a few songs. They received no regular wages but were permitted to pass through the audience to collect tips. It was a start.

  Despite her very modest singing talents, Gabrielle charmed the crowds at La Rotonde and soon became a favorite poseuse, raising cheers from the crowd for her renditions of the ditties that earned her her famous nickname. Gabrielle earned her new name by singing either “Ko-Ko-Ri-Ko” (“Cock-a-doodle-doo”) or “Qui qu’a vu Coco?” (“Has anyone seen Coco?”)—or possibly both—songs about a rooster and a lost dog, respectively. To French ears at that time, “Coco” sounded not like a woman’s name but like an affectionate nickname for a pet or, by extension, like a diminutive of cocotte, the word that meant literally “small hen” and figuratively a sort of upper-level prostitute. Shouted night after night, the name stuck—perhaps with a little encouragement from Chanel, who would later prove quite adept at labeling new products.

  But this Coco was no cocotte—at least not yet. While she loved the adulation of the men in the audience, her convent modesty ceded only slowly to the freewheeling ways of a cabaret dressing room. Other girls may have wandered around half-dressed backstage but not Coco. “She was a prude,” according to a woman who’d known her in Moulins, “double-locking the door when she had to change.” Traces of Chanel’s sense of decorum about the naked body—her reluctance ever to reveal or exploit bare flesh—would remain visible as a signature element of her future style. But her personal discomfort with the looser mores of her new milieu began to abate under the admiring eyes of La Rotonde’s handsome and distinguished patrons.

  Society women … I found hideous. [But] … the cocottes were gorgeous … eccentric, very beautiful, appetizing. They went well with my novels.

  —COCO CHANEL

  Life could be unforgiving for poor young women in fin de siècle France. Girls like the Chanel foursome—pretty and charming but lacking dowries or family connections—courted disaster in their dealings with men. Yet men—particularly men of means—presented one of the only pos
sible escape routes, the hope of acquiring some peace of mind and personal security. Although they attracted plenty of attention among the well born young men in Moulins, the girls’ destitute backgrounds rendered them essentially unmarriageable. They were simply unfit to enter society. Options, then, for finding a husband were few indeed. They could marry peasants or peddlers, ensuring a life of backbreaking labor and dire poverty, or they could remain unmarried and brave the hard choices attending that decision. The unmarried woman could eschew all sensual pleasures by entering religious life, she could seek employment as a servant, or she could negotiate the most treacherous territory of all: offering herself to men outside of marriage, in exchange for varying degrees of comfort and respectability.

  Common prostitutes occupied the lowest end of this spectrum, and at its uppermost reaches figured the courtesans, or femme galantes, women often connected to the theater. Also known as cocottes or—when involved with just one man at a time—as irrégulières (for their irregular social status), these were the glamorous women attached to wealthy and titled men, women whose beauty, style, and worldliness often put “respectable” wives to shame. At a time when virtuous young women were still being taught to regard bathing as a dangerous, immoral activity and were ignorant of virtually all sexual matters, femmes galantes bathed regularly, smelled wonderful, and knew their way around the bedroom.