Arthur’s intention to marry left Gabrielle feeling weak and abandoned. She had lost, perhaps forsaken, the only man she had ever really loved. In company with the courtesans and the mistresses whose lives she had struggled to transcend, it appeared she still wasn’t good enough to marry. More than any other person, it was Arthur who had helped Gabrielle to become the person she wanted to be. But it now seemed as if the independence she had so striven for had been earned at the cost of her heart. With an awful resignation, Morand’s Irène tells Lewis that she now believed she had been wrong to work so much. But she also recognized that now she could not turn back:
It is not a game one is free to take up or abandon. Laziness is an ornamental art, and it makes one lighter. Labour is a heavy law, with grave consequences I’m only beginning to make out today… everything that is happening is my fault… I will explain to you what you don’t dare tell me: that you [were with me] to be happy, at peace, and not to turn your house into a trading post.1
Gabrielle was unable to alter what she had become. But if her intuition had prepared her for Arthur’s news, so that she was able to conceal from him the depth of her feelings, when his rejection finally came, it broke her heart. Unforeseeably, the war had changed Arthur’s notion of commitment and he had felt honor bound to make a choice.
Once he had broken the news of his impending marriage to Gabrielle, she could no longer remain at the apartment they lived in together. Then while the Germans approached Paris and those thousands were fleeing the embattled city, Misia Edwards came to her rescue. She knew of a beautiful apartment hastily abandoned by a friend and told Gabrielle she really must take it on. The large ground-floor windows at 46 quai Debilly overlook the Seine on one side and the Trocadéro on the other. While mirrors lined the walls of the entrance hall and more filled an alcove, the ceiling shone with fine black lacquer. A huge Buddha dominated the low-level furniture and a slight scent of cocoa hung upon the air. The recent occupant was a devoted opium smoker and had been fearful that remaining in a fallen city would leave him without sources for his habit. Gabrielle was for the first time in an apartment paid for out of her own purse. She set about arranging it exactly to her liking.
In addition to finding Gabrielle a place of refuge, Misia “sent” a couple to look after her: Joseph Leclerc and his wife, Marie. These two were to prove Gabrielle’s devoted servants. In the same way, in 1913, Arthur had sent a woman named Mme. Aubert to Gabrielle at rue Cambon. Her real name was Mademoiselle de Saint-Pons, and it was she whom Gabrielle would give credit for “advising me and guiding me.”2 Despite Mme. Aubert’s flaming-red hair, she remained discreetly in the background. Invisible to the public, she helped everything at rue Cambon run smoothly and was indispensable to Gabrielle, even more so in difficult times. Her discretion was such that Gabrielle’s great-niece would later say, “Hardly anyone knew her”; she would remain as Gabrielle’s amanuensis until the Second World War.
Meanwhile, Arthur wrote to Diana one of those letters in which he both strived for her and tried to be realistic about their difficulties: “Don’t bother about your qualms, they are fully justified… but what does it matter if we love one another — my Buggins?”3
Having finally made her decision to marry, Diana wrote to tell her friend, the diplomat Duff Cooper. All the same, she was defensive and gave the impression that there were those who disapproved. The fact that Arthur was “half French and not fond of country life” was, for example, in her aunt’s eyes a black mark against him indeed. Diana did, however, find support from her father and sisters. Family opinion has it that her sister, Lady Laura Lovat, was an extremely competent, even controlling, young woman, who would never have “permitted” her younger sister to wed someone of whom she did not approve. Meanwhile, Diana said to Duff Cooper: “I’ve been ill, we’ve nearly lost the war, and I think I’m going to marry Capel after all… I look for nothing but abuse from the world, but I prefer this sort of marriage to the… mariage de convenance and feel quite certain that this one is fraught with great possibilities & charm.”4
She implored him to write to her “and say you’re pleased about it. And that you like my ‘darkie’, I adore him.”5 In preparation for this married life, Arthur had found a grand apartment on the avenue du Bois. He then asked his sister Bertha to live with him as a kind of chaperone, by way of announcing to the world that he no longer lived with Gabrielle.
The bloody battle to repulse the German army from Paris had begun, and Arthur was kept very busy in his role as assistant political secretary. Owing to the extraordinary circumstances, all leave was canceled, and preparations for his and Diana’s wedding, at her sister and brother-in-law’s Scottish estate, Beaufort Castle, were held up.
It has been traditional to place the date for the Capel marriage in October. In fact, despite their prevarication, Arthur and Diana were actually married considerably earlier than this, on August 3, 1918,6 in the Lovat family chapel, with Diana’s brother-in-law Lord Lovat as chief witness. Arthur must have been required back on duty without delay, because by the following Saturday (August 10), the British ambassador, Lord Derby, recorded in his diary that several people coming to lunch with him in Paris had missed their train after the ferry crossing, “but the Capels (late Diana Wyndham) motored them from Havre.” The following day, the newlyweds were Lord Derby’s guests with several others, and Diana confided in him that their delayed wedding had been her fault because of her indecision. The ambassador thought that “the marriage will be a success, as he is a real good fellow, though a little rough, but that is just what she will correct. She became a Roman Catholic either the morning of her marriage or the day before and I expect really it was making the change that made her undecided.”7
Little did Lord Derby know how mistaken he was as to one of the most significant reasons for Diana’s doubts: Gabrielle. But what of this third side of the triangle, forced to remain in the shadows for these past weeks and months?
As the date of Arthur’s marriage drew nearer, the strain had told upon Gabrielle so badly that shortly before the nuptials, she had suffered an emotional collapse. Unaware of this, a friend, Antoinette Bernstein, wife of the playwright Henri Bernstein, had written to reprimand her for some negligence or other. Gabrielle’s stoic yet poignant reply conveys the suffering she was then trying to contain. She was telling herself, as much as Antoinette, that she would recover; one sees the effort necessary to overcome her emotional exhaustion.
My dear friend
Do not accuse me; pity me for I have just spent three very bad weeks! As things always work themselves out in the end my health is much better. I still have a thousand worries. I fully intend to leave them here [in Paris]. So if you will still have me I can leave at the end of next week. Write soon.
Much love
Coco8
Another letter, sent by Gabrielle’s secretary, and regarding the renting of her house, refers to the fact that “Mademoiselle Chanel has been unwell lately and was not able to reply right away.”9
By August 18, one week after Arthur’s return with his bride to Paris, we find that Gabrielle had fled the city in an attempt to leave behind her “thousand worries.” She had gone to find comfort with her friends Henri and Antoinette Bernstein, as promised, at a spa town, Uriage, in the Alps. And here Gabrielle was to spend the rest of that summer. Ostensibly, she was part of the grand annual exodus from the capital’s August heat. In fact, she was taking a spa cure to help restore and thereby “cure” herself of Arthur. As it turned out, for much of Gabrielle’s stay, Antoinette Bernstein was summering by the sea at Deauville with her mother. But shortly after Gabrielle’s arrival, Antoinette brought her and Henri’s small daughter, Georges, to see her father at the villa that Gabrielle and he were sharing while taking their “methodical and prolonged cure.” Antoinette stayed for about a week before returning to Deauville. In Paris, meanwhile, the British ambassador was noting in his diary that
Capel is an invaluable… link with Clemenceau, but I am very anxious about his health. He is very neurasthenic [the contemporary term for nervous instability, which sounds close to a breakdown], and I am certain he himself thinks he is going off his head… Though he talks freely with me, they tell me that when he is alone at home he sits for hours without saying a word and you cannot get him to buckle down to any work. I am sending him away for a fortnight’s holiday.10
The huge stresses of Arthur’s war work would have reduced many to an emotional crisis of some kind. In addition, he had been living for many months under the strain of conducting his romance with Diana with a divided heart. He had never been able to push the source of that division — Gabrielle — very far from his mind. He had not entered into the sacrament of marriage lightly, and the enormity of his action had overcome Arthur and reduced him to a state of emotional collapse. Unbeknownst to each other, he and Gabrielle were suffering a simultaneous crisis.
As Gabrielle made her own attempt at recuperation, also far from Paris, a young observer, Simone de Caillavet, recorded that she was mystified by the relationship between Gabrielle and Henri Bernstein and his wife. She found Antoinette and Gabrielle “equally emaciated” and commented on their “vehement friendship for one another.” Simone was unable to fathom “what bonds link the three units of this enigmatic trio.”11 Henri Bernstein was an incorrigible philanderer and a man possessed of a rather intense and melodramatic personality, rather like the heightened endings of his plays about love, which were so successful at the time. Gabrielle had arrived in the mountains overcome by a sense of rejection and loss, and temporary forgetfulness in seduction by this older man may have given her a welcome respite from her secretly desperate state of mind.
Gabrielle and Henri Bernstein did not, however, spend all their time alone. There were visitors to the villa. Adrienne came to stay, bringing a friend, a former dancer. Photographs show the women, and Henri, walking and picnicking in the summer mountain pastures. The women are all dressed in variations of a Chanel jersey skirt and loose belted jacket. In another photograph, they wear Gabrielle’s linen outfits. Her followers had become women of fashion who, for the first time, were prepared to look very similar. Previously, a couturier had to make endless tiny modifications to a style because one of a woman’s greatest fears was to find herself in the same outfit as someone else.
In other photographs, Gabrielle appears as a dazzling representation of “modernity,” with her bobbed hair and in her outfit of coarse silk pajamas — that same style she had recently made the height of chic in the bomb-shelter basement of the Ritz. Even Henri Bernstein was wearing these “outrageous” pajamas. In one photograph with a number of visitors, Antoinette is the only person not smiling. Young Nadine Rothschild was convinced that Antoinette “ignored the affair between her husband and Gabrielle because she had a ‘costly passion’ for fashionable clothes and found ‘sufficient compensation’ in being dressed for free by Gabrielle in many of her ‘sensational designs.’”12
Then finally, this appalling war, waged at the cost of so many lives, was at an end. On September 29, 1918, the German Supreme Command informed Kaiser Wilhelm II that the military situation was hopeless. With no choice but to take his command’s recommendation, the Kaiser then asked the Allies for an immediate cease-fire. The negotiations that followed dragged on, and on, and the social deterioration of Europe grew worse than it might otherwise have been. This included a revolution in Germany, the abdication of the Kaiser and the proclamation of a German Republic on November 9. Finally, on November 11, the armistice was signed, famously, in Marshall Foch’s private train carriage, in that same forest of Compiègne where Gabrielle had ridden so many times with Etienne Balsan and their friends. During the course of the war, 11 percent of France’s population, approximately 6 percent of Great Britain’s, and 9 percent of Germany’s had been killed or wounded. The number was almost unimaginable; in all, approximately nine and a half million men had lost their lives.
While the armistice ended the fighting, it took another six months of negotiation at the Paris Peace Conference for the Allied victors to set peace terms for Germany and the other defeated nations. During those six months, Paris effectively became the seat of world government, as the negotiators brought to a close the reign of bankrupt empires and redrew the world map. As new countries were created, the infamously punitive peace treaty with Germany declared it must bear full guilt, and the Allies required that reparations be paid to them. Many thought this excessive. As assistant political secretary to the British delegation, Arthur was kept very busy for many months to come. Notoriously, if the aim had been to pacify, conciliate or permanently weaken Germany, it had failed; the Paris Peace Treaty would prove fertile ground for the roots of the Second World War.
If Arthur’s marriage had driven Gabrielle to leave the city, she now continued outside it in a villa she rented in the leafy outlying suburb of Garches. Here, with a view over Paris, she returned after long days of work for peace and the company of her dogs, to whom she had become very attached in recent years. If Gabrielle entertained any doubts about whether, at thirty-five, she could still be found attractive, she need not have worried. Henri Bernstein took her to meet his ex-lover, the beautiful ex-courtesan Liane de Pougy — now Princess Ghika. Writing of Gabrielle and Bernstein’s visit, de Pougy said, “Bernstein… brought… the dressmaker, Gabrielle Chanel — the taste of a fairy, the eyes and voice of a woman, the haircut and figure of an urchin.”13 Gabrielle had no shortage of admirers. When the armistice had at last been signed, Paris went mad and Gabrielle was to be seen at the festivities with a new lover, another handsome playboy, Paul Eduardo Martínez de Hoz, who was a member of the Jockey Club and scion of one of Argentina’s wealthiest families.
King George V came to Paris to celebrate the armistice, and a large and distinguished party met at the Capels’ apartment to watch the procession from their balcony. The English socialite and diplomat’s wife, Lady Helen d’Abernon, later one of Gabrielle’s clients, recorded:
It was a wet day and the entry was far from imposing, although guns fired and the streets were lined with troops and with spectators the whole way to the Elysée…
I passed most of the morning in the company of monsieur Bondy, a quiet but charming writer, and at intervals “Boy” Capel came and sat down beside us. The jeune ménage—his and Diana’s — appears oddly assorted. Capel is a curious, rather strange-looking man, more French than English. He has had an eclectic and not unromantic past, yet he is interested — and successfully interested — in big financial affairs. Diana is very pretty and has the charm of all the Listers, but she seems a half-assimilated, exotic little figure amongst these brilliant, vociferous, scintillating French people. They appear metallic, yet I do not think that they are fundamentally hard — sensitive rather, in an unsentimental, slightly animal way. I like them and admire them, while realizing that they are as different from the Anglo Saxons as it is possible to be. 14
In hinting at the chasm of difference between the French and the Anglo-Saxons, in noticing how French Arthur was, and how only “half-assimilated” Diana seemed among this gathering of “brilliant” people, Helen d’Abernon’s comments were unwittingly astute. Yet in addition to their great cultural differences coexisted Arthur’s “not unromantic past,” in the form of Gabrielle. Try as he might, he could not banish her from his mind.
Nevertheless, the Capel family was to grow, and in April 1919, while Diana was staying in Scotland with her sister Lady Lovat, she was delivered of a baby girl. Christened Ann Diana France Ayesha Capel, she was a most welcome addition to Arthur’s life.
Yet though he and his blue-eyed English wife socialized a good deal, she was not proving as docile and compliant as Arthur might have imagined when he chose her over the extraordinary and characterful Gabrielle Chanel. As the months wore on, time was not tempering the wedded couple’s differences.
For example, previously Arthur had seen nothing unusual in buying clothes for Diana from Gabrielle’s salon in Biarritz, but once married, Diana began to object. Arthur overruled her. Why should she not be dressed by the most exciting designer in Paris? The long-standing tradition in Diana’s family has it that she disliked Gabrielle.15
Meanwhile, Arthur had come to the decision that he was no longer able to live without Gabrielle, and he made his way back to her, in her villa out of town. If Arthur didn’t actually tell Diana, she soon guessed it anyway, and found the negotiation of the age-old triangle in the ensuing period most painful to accept. She spent Easter 1919 alone and weeping. While Arthur’s guilt weighed upon him, any objections Diana might have raised were ignored, and his visits to Gabrielle grew more frequent.
There were few in Paris in whom Diana could confide, but she learned to lean a little on an elderly English friend, Lady Portarlington, who would come and keep her company when Diana knew that Arthur must be with Gabrielle. Keeping a mistress was so commonplace that Paris would have been more surprised at its causing disagreement than at its actually happening. And anyway, Arthur was almost universally liked. Diana’s unhappiness at accepting what Bertha told her — that her brother “just cannot give Gabrielle up”—made the young foreigner loath to remain in Paris.16 Thus she took to spending more time in England, where her presence was easily explained: Arthur was very busy, and Diana was visiting friends and family. She also took up her flirtation with her old friend Duff Cooper once more. Even so, while Cooper’s recent marriage to the beautiful socialite Lady Diana Manners was never to inhibit his activities, his and Diana Capel’s enjoyable flirtation did not develop into a full-blown affair.17
At the anniversary Victory Ball of November 1919, Cooper talked with Diana, who was “looking very well in gold trousers.” 18 (It was still most unusual for a woman to wear trousers, and these were almost certainly from Chanel.) One wonders if Diana and Cooper spoke of Gabrielle. When, earlier that same day, Arthur had once again absented himself from home, he probably didn’t tell Diana that he was to act as a witness at the marriage of Gabrielle’s sister Antoinette.
Having failed to find a Frenchman who would marry her, Antoinette had fallen in love with a Canadian airman ten years her junior. To Oscar Fleming, the son of a wealthy but strict Protestant Ontarian, Antoinette appeared exciting and sophisticated. Whatever Gabrielle’s opinion of this whirlwind romance, the beautiful lace wedding dress she had in her collection for that season was very likely designed for Antoinette.
Not long after the newlyweds’ arrival in Canada, with Antoinette’s maid and many trunks of clothes, Antoinette began sending plaintive letters to Gabrielle and Adrienne, begging for a passage home. Little is known about Antoinette’s time in Canada but, apparently, Oscar’s father insisted his son finish his training as a lawyer in Toronto, and said he would work better if he studied there alone. Antoinette’s maid soon left her, but Antoinette was obliged to remain alone in Ontario with her in-laws. She spoke almost no English and was desperately unhappy. The replies to her letters that came from Paris exhorted her to persevere. Could she not try out her Chanel clothes from her trousseau on the stores in Detroit? All that is known of how Antoinette went about this is that she was unsuccessful.19
Two days before Christmas 1919, Diana telephoned Duff Cooper to say she had just arrived in London. Arthur had, meanwhile, started for the south of France, and she was to join him in a fortnight.20
Diana lunched with Duff Cooper and her friend Lady Rosslyn, then flirted with Cooper as their taxi crawled through the London traffic. Cooper had dropped Diana back at Asprey’s for tea with Lady Rosslyn, but noticed that Diana had forgotten her book. Turning back and finding her still standing outside Asprey’s with her friend, Cooper returned the book and drove off. Reading the paper the following morning, he realized why, standing there on the pavement, Lady Rosslyn had looked so awful. She was about to give Diana a terrible piece of news that Lord Rosslyn had cabled her, and for which there was no good way to prepare Diana.
The details were sketchy, but a few hours earlier, as Arthur was driving to the south of France, it appeared that one of his tires had burst. The car was flung upside down, it exploded into flames, and he had died in the blaze. While the car was burned, almost to a shell, Arthur’s mechanic, Mansfield, was badly injured but had managed to escape. Duff Cooper wrote: “December 24, 1919. The first thing I saw in the Daily Express this morning was the death of Boy Capel, Diana’s husband, who was killed in a motor accident in the south of France on Monday [22 December]. I was very shocked.” Arthur had almost certainly spent the night before that fateful day with Gabrielle.21 Then he had set out with Mansfield to make the 620-mile journey south.
Some weeks later, when Lady Rosslyn told Duff Cooper how dreadful it had been breaking the news of Arthur’s death to Diana, she added a bleak insight into the workings of their marriage. She said “how impossible Diana’s relations with Capel were becoming, how he had entirely ceased to live with her and hardly ever spoke to her. That he confessed she had got on his nerves and he could barely stand her presence.”22
It seems odd, under these circumstances, that Arthur and Diana had been planning to meet up in a fortnight. Was he going to attempt another beginning with his wife, in which case he may well have formally broken off his affair with Gabrielle before driving south? Or had Arthur simply said goodbye to Gabrielle at Garches with the intention of ending his marriage when he met up with his wife in the south of France after Christmas? Whichever of these conclusions Arthur had made, one is left with the mournful understanding that while the resolution of this state of affairs had to end sadly for at least one of these three, instead it became a tragedy.
Whatever confused thoughts had filled Arthur’s head as he sped south to Cannes for Christmas with his sister Bertha — rather than spending it with his wife and baby girl — we will never know. But in the very early hours of the following morning, Arthur and Gabrielle’s companion from Royallieu days, Comte Léon de Laborde, at one time most likely Gabrielle’s lover, was ringing at the door. He knocked, he broke the silence of the quiet enclave and shouted. No one came. Laborde refused to give up and, finally, Gabrielle’s butler, Joseph, was there at the door. He was very reluctant to tell Mademoiselle and wanted to wait until morning. But Léon insisted that Gabrielle must know. At last she came down the stairs. In white pajamas, her short hair tousled, she looked to him “the silhouette of a youth in white satin.”23
Léon told Gabrielle all that he knew. It had been late last evening, on the road between Saint-Raphaël and Cannes, when Arthur and Mansfield had almost reached their destination. Léon said that Arthur must have been very tired.
As he spoke, Gabrielle’s face was tortured, but she did not cry; only sat there, utterly still.
After a few minutes, still without a word, she walked back up the stairs. Returning, she had dressed and now carried an overnight bag. No, she would not wait; she wanted Léon to take her south, immediately. As they set off in his car, the dawn light was spreading over Paris.
Gabrielle refused Léon’s pleas with her to rest on the arduous journey south, and they reached Cannes the following evening.
Although it was late, Léon went from hotel to hotel asking if Lady Michelham, Arthur’s sister, was staying there with them. He made some calls. At last, he found her. Bertha was distraught. Gabrielle’s bid to see Arthur before he was buried made her refuse rest on the journey, but her wish was not to be granted. Apparently, Arthur had been so badly burned that the coffin had already been sealed.
Bertha insisted that the travelers must stay in her suite of rooms. They did, but Gabrielle refused a bedroom, sitting up on a chaise for the remainder of that night. The next day, she would not accompany Bertha and Léon to the first office in Arthur’s honor, at which he was given military honors, nearby at Fréjus cathedral. Instead, Gabrielle requested that Bertha’s chauffeur take her to the place where Arthur had died.
This man later told Bertha that at the spot where the captain’s car still lay, burned out like a blackened skeleton on the edge of the road, he stood back. He watched as Gabrielle walked around the car, touching it as if she were blind. Then she sat down on a milestone beside it. And at last, the heartbroken woman bent her head and sobbed. When Arthur had married, Gabrielle had “lost” him. Yet while he was alive there had always been hope, and he had returned. Each time he left her, there was the possibility he would come back. This time, there was none. To the chauffeur, standing discreetly at a distance, it seemed as if Gabrielle wept for hours.
On December 28, 1919, Le Gaulois reported that “the body of Captain Arthur Capel, Knight of the Légion d’Honneur, Mons Star, killed in a car accident, arrived yesterday morning [in Paris] and was laid in S.-Honoré d’Eylau, in the church’s vaults.” On January 2, the newspaper announced that “the funeral of Captain Arthur Capel, Companion British Empire… will take place tomorrow, Saturday 3 January at midday.”
A good portion of Parisian society congregated in the church filled to capacity that day.24 So, too, did a large English contingent, led by the British ambassador, Lord Derby, as well as a deputation of Arthur’s fellow British officers. Diana’s sisters and husbands were present, but Diana herself, and Arthur’s mistress, Gabrielle Chanel, were both absent. Afterward, Arthur was laid to rest in the cemetery of Montmartre, where a large tomb was later raised. In keeping with the ultimate elusiveness of this extraordinary man, it was marked with neither name, date, nor epitaph. It reads simply:
FAMILLE CAPEL
In letters of condolence to Diana, friends described Arthur’s importance to them, and how much he was loved.25 One of Diana’s sisters talked of his “pilgrim’s soul,” saying that “he never seemed to be very securely anchored” to this world. “His country was unexplored, don’t you agree?” One friend wrote: “He was such a strange, exceptional, attractive human being. And for you this must seem like the end of the world… Everyone here [in Paris] is shocked beyond words and I hear on all sides appreciation and regret.”26 Clemenceau said, “He was much too good to remain among us,” while a friend wrote that “Boy was the best, the most loyal, and the most devoted friend one could have, and we loved him like a brother… Every day will make us realize more the huge loss.”27
Many years later, Gabrielle would add her own mournful and definitive elegy: “His death was a terrible blow to me… I lost everything when I lost Capel. He left a void in me that the years have not filled.”28 For Gabrielle, Arthur’s death did indeed “seem like the end of the world,” and for the moment she struggled to survive.
If she took any time away from her work, it can have been only a few days, for she had discovered what distracted her better than anything else: this was work. It was fortunate that Gabrielle’s reputation was in the ascendant and that her salon in rue Cambon was rarely still.