Misia was appalled at Gabrielle’s acceptance of a shabby room, and at her choice to remain in a hotel requisitioned by the enemy. However, to Gabrielle, these considerations simply weren’t relevant. For all her beautiful houses and elegant possessions, her attachment to these went only so far. She was always able to withdraw from attachment to things. Her strongest sense now was survival. And her means of survival — her shop — was just over the road on rue Cambon. Gabrielle didn’t care what people thought, and she asked Misia what point there was in going somewhere else. Sooner or later, all the hotels would be “occupied” anyway. At 31 rue Cambon, meanwhile, the Chanel boutique was busy: German soldiers were buying Chanel № 5 for their womenfolk back home. Albeit limited in its production, the perfume would continue being sold throughout the four years of France’s occupation.
Despite the occupation, ten or so of Gabrielle’s fellow couturiers had remained open to carry on their work. Shortages of all materials, which would continue throughout the war, meant they were struggling to bring out their new collections. Schiaparelli and Mainbocher would go to America; Edward Molyneux fled to London. For those who stayed, the shows were attended by some French women, German embassy staff and some of the German command. They escorted their wives, including Emma Goering and Suzanne Abetz, wife to the man the Reich called the German ambassador. Following lengthy and delicate negotiations, Lucien Lelong, president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, dissuaded the German command from moving the entire Parisian couture business to Vienna and Berlin. He argued that Parisian fashion could be made only in Paris. He also succeeded in keeping 80 percent of couture’s workforce, against constant demands for extra labor from German war industries intent on rapid expansion. Lelong even obtained special dispensations for the couturiers to buy costly fabrics without using their ration tickets. But a change in their clients was quickly noticed by all the fashion houses. Lelong would say:
A new class of rich person, black marketeers and collaborators, thanks to their wives, provoked a sudden change in the dress world. The old wealthy and aristocratic clientele was… replaced by the butter, egg and cheese people [the BOEF], the spoiled darlings of the war. These nouveaux riches caused a deluxe ready-to-wear, unknown to the public before 1939… and the new clientele brought an enormous success to this fashion, which was not high fashion but imitated it very well and was cheaper into the bargain.1
Gabrielle would describe this period as “singularly lacking in dignity” it was “a filthy mess.”2
The races at Longchamp opened again, and German officers, who had free entry to the enclosure, mixed with Parisian society. A good section of this society chose to “believe” in the propaganda regarding Franco-German cultural exchange. Much was made by those Germans and the Germanophile French of the fellowship of all artists and the meaninglessness of national boundaries. And the “gentlemanly” German officers began to be welcomed into the reemerging salons. The socialite Marie-Louise Bousquet, for example, maintained her renowned Wednesday lunches, keeping her traditionally good table well furnished with black-market provisions. To her Wednesdays, she invited a variety of the German command, including the propaganda director, Gerhard Heller, and the equally cultivated novelist officer Ernst Jünger. (After the war, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were happy to be found at Marie-Louise Bousquet’s lunches.)
Ernst Jünger found Hitler and the Jews equally distasteful, and socialized with Vichy-sympathizing Parisians, including the writer Paul Morand, who had wasted no time in offering his services to the Vichy government. He was for a time the film censor and, later, Vichy’s ambassador to Romania. Misia Sert’s ex-husband, José Maria, had returned to her after his young wife’s death, but on his visits to Madrid, was conducting an affair with the wife of the German ambassador. Throughout the war, Sert’s connections were unclear, but he always managed to have good food, entertained well and was untroubled by the inclusion of Germans at his gatherings. Another salon where conquerors and Parisians mixed freely was that of the American heiress Florence Gould.
While several writers, such as André Gide, André Malraux and Colette, chose to remain in the south, beyond the occupied zone, Cocteau had hurried back to Paris, saying that “Miracles are happening everywhere, and I am intensely curious.” He wrote to his fellow opium-addict artist friend Christian Bérard, “I find these days exciting, too bad Martel was so lacking in curiosity.”3 Thierry de Martel was one of France’s finest brain surgeons and had lost his son and been severely wounded himself in the First World War. At the recent armistice, Martel had felt so disillusioned in his country’s values and the international catastrophe that he had taken his own life. France was deeply shocked. Cocteau was fully aware of these circumstances, and the callousness of his remarks was thus appalling. But by now he had become incapable of appreciating the physical and moral enormity of the occupation, or of sensing the depth to which his conquerors might be capable of sinking. Cocteau’s orgy of opium and cocaine consumption over the last few years had stupefied and desensitized him to a considerable degree.
There were many Frenchmen who, as ambassador William Bullitt had put it, would remain “as fine as they have ever been.” Yet while it is difficult to write briefly about something as momentous as the occupation without gross simplification, Cocteau’s repugnant detachment reflected one aspect of the tragedy of France in 1940. Intellectual and artistic life had taken on a darker intensity since the debilitating horrors of the First World War. The French experience had convinced many that violence and irrationality ruled, and that European society was in crisis. The poet Paul Valéry had written, “We realized that a civilization was just as fragile as a life.” Since the First World War, the country had been at political loggerheads with itself — between left and right, between Catholic conservatism, fascism and communism — and many went into this new war already in a worn-out state of pessimism. “Frenchmen had exhausted, in the charnel house of the First World War, their reserves of national pride, of confidence in those who led them, even of horror and indignation over their own fate.”4 Afterward, many would simply want to forget those Dark Years, as those between 1940 and 1944 became known.
The battle for France had lasted no more than six weeks, concluding in a total military defeat. Pétain had signed an armistice with Germany, and half of the country, including Paris, was occupied by thousands of German troops. Unprompted by Germany, Pétain’s Vichy government now threw out democratic institutions and set about persecuting what it saw as the three most unwanted social elements: Freemasons, Jews and communists. From the outset, Vichy also had a policy of collaboration with Germany. By the end of the war, 650,000 civilian French workers had been put to work in German factories; another 60,000 had been deported to German concentration camps; 30,000 French civilians were shot as hostages or members of the Resistance and aside from about 4,000 Jews who died in French camps, almost 80,000 others would be sent from there to die in Auschwitz.5
The late Charles Péguy, taken up as a hero by both the resisters opposed to Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws and also by Vichy itself, had written: “In wartime he who does not surrender is my man, whoever he is, wherever he comes from, and whatever his party… And he who surrenders is my enemy.”6 That opposing sides were able to take this same man as one of their heroes is representative of the complexity of French reactions to the occupation. It reveals the extent to which “antagonists might share as many assumptions with their enemies as with those on their own side.” Since the sixties, it has been shown that de Gaulle’s “heroic reinterpretation of the Dark Years… in which most of the horrors inflicted on France had been the work of the Germans alone… and in which de Gaulle and the Resistance had incarnated the real France” was a gross exaggeration. De Gaulle’s propaganda, that the mass of French people, apart from a handful of traitors, was solidly behind him and the Resistance, was constructed in the belief that this was the way to get his countrymen back on their feet.
However, in the sixties, when the French came to challenge de Gaulle’s heroic version of their past, and when they were increasingly reminded that millions had revered Pétain, they also saw that the laws of Vichy France were representative of much of France. And the country largely faced the fact that it was Vichy that had discriminated against Jews and Freemasons, that it was French policemen, not Germans, who arrested the Jews and communists and sent them to concentration camps. The Resistance was a very small minority, and most people had been attentistes—those who would wait and see. A gradual redressing of the balance in France has meant that this attitude is no longer hidden. It is overwhelmingly recognized that the history of the occupation should not be written in black and white, but in many shades of gray. This has much bearing on our understanding of how Gabrielle was to spend a good part of the war.
The prestige of intellectuals in France meant that the war invested their actions with particular significance. Although a good number fled to the unoccupied south, for many, the surest — almost the only — means to avoid compromising oneself was to go abroad into exile. A large number of artists and intellectuals were helped to do this early on, by the French and by a number of foreigners. One of the most significant groups was the hastily organized American Emergency Rescue Committee. Most of the escapees — many of them known to Gabrielle, and a good number of them her friends — went toto America. The artists included Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, André Breton and Jacques Lipchitz, Man Ray and Fernand Léger. Among the film directors were René Clair and Jean Renoir. The many writers who left included André Masson, the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
After legal or forged visas had been found for them, some sailed from Marseille; others were smuggled over the Spanish border. A few, such as the Russian émigré painter Marc Chagall, were slow to realize that they, too, must escape. The benign-tempered Chagall had gullibly believed his French citizenship would protect him from anti-Semitism, and left France only having been reassured that there were cows in America. Marcel Duchamp sailed for New York in 1942. Those who left France behind were often vilified for deserting their country “in her greatest hour of need.” The artists were, of course, a minute fraction of the population, and for a time, many of those who remained saw Marshal Pétain as their best hope. Wanting a return to some kind of stability, they could convince themselves that returning to work was not only necessary so as not to starve, it was also their duty. This fitted perfectly with German strategy for a compliant France.
Otto Abetz, the German ambassador, was a protégé of the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Although both were great Francophiles, their underlying motivation was sinister. Abetz admired French culture and its food and wine. He had a French wife, too. He also believed that the French should know their place.
The plan he had presented to Hitler entailed France becoming a “satellite state,” obliged to accept its “permanent weakness.” To bring this about involved playing on the country’s internal rivalries and hopes of an entente with Germany. Knowing that an attitude of confrontation would unite the French against Germany, Abetz was in concordance with his instructions from Hitler: “Everything must be done to encourage internal divisions and thus the weakness of France.” Nonetheless, Abetz’s was always a careful approach, with a good deal of effort placed on propaganda, while the Propaganda-Abteilung and the embassy permanently vied for control. The Propaganda-Abteilung had a staff of 1,200 and controlled the press, radio, literature, propaganda, cinema and culture, including theater, art and music. The objective was to promote German influence, to undermine and erase the dominance of French culture in Europe, and to promote collaboration. Abetz believed his seductive approach was superior to the Propaganda-Abteilung’s more heavy-handed one, which involved assassination and reprisal. In 1942, Abetz won this battle, and his German Institute became a center of cultural collaboration, with exhibitions, lectures, popular German-language classes, and concerts promoting the most distinguished German musicians.7
From the outset, Abetz was courteous, encouraging a return to “normality” as quickly as was possible following the occupation. The remarkable Jacques Copeau, whose career had been devoted to challenging the stuffiness of bourgeois boulevard theater, became the director of the Comédie Française, the national theater, while Gabrielle’s friend the Ballets Russes dancer Serge Lifar became the Vichy-appointed director of the Paris Opéra Ballet. Ever-sinuous and insinuating, Lifar wasn’t too concerned by having to ingratiate himself with his Nazi masters. He toured in Germany, and notoriously paraded the claim that Hitler had “handled” him on his visit to the Opéra. Hitler admired the place so much he apparently knew its floor plan by heart.
The Free French in London got wind of Lifar’s bragging and, broadcasting via the BBC, had soon condemned him to death. Gabrielle’s sometime friend Comte Etienne de Beaumont, as unperturbed by the Nazi presence as Lifar, had desperately wanted his post, but his attempts at ingratiation had been to no avail. Maurice Sachs, who had swindled Gabrielle over her library, was one of those who turned the war into an escapade in the transgression of every moral code. He also managed successfully to hide his Jewishness. After the occupation, he lived for a while with a German officer, began playing the black market, and also spent a period in a homosexual brothel. In early 1942, he went to Germany, where he became a crane operator, and was delighted when the Gestapo discovered how skillful he was at informing. His death by lynching, when the Allies occupied Germany, is supposed to have taken place at the hands of his fellow prisoners.
Under the watchful eye of Abetz’s propaganda staff, cinemas and theaters in the occupied zone were reopened. The making of new films was encouraged, and newspapers and publishers were permitted to recommence printing. The attitude of their masters was, at the same time, repressive regarding anything “decadent,” anti-German or pro-Jewish. Not long after the armistice, when the Pétain government in the south began to put anti-Semitic prohibitions into practice, most of the intellectual Right across the country, and some of the Left, had already joined in spirit this aspect of repression.
France was by no means unique in its anti-Semitism. Many Europeans, including Great Britain, were mildly anti-Semitic, some were more so than others. The more extreme in France wanted a fascist France allied with Germany, to build a cleansed Europe. Otto Abetz was assigned the project of “safeguarding” all objects of art: public, private and, especially, Jewish owned. Abetz embarked on the job with enthusiasm. Many works of art were taken from their owners and stored in the Parisian Jeu de Paume museum, while much else was hauled off to Germany. The worst perpetrator of this theft was Goering, who “pillaged on a heroic scale.” If there hadn’t been so much internecine warfare between the different German departments, a great deal more art would undoubtedly have left the country. Despite the plundering, some works were regarded as just too decadent, and in 1943, a pyre was secretly lit at the Jeu de Paume on which were burned works by artists such as Picasso, Joan Miró and Max Ernst. Picasso, meanwhile, was selling work to those German officers who, secretly, recognized his gifts.
With occupation, there was an understandable wish for escapism, and although France was really a huge prison, with a captive audience like never before, for those in the arts prepared to “collaborate” enough to have their work put on, this period proved to be strangely fertile. While the occupation has often defied description by those who experienced it, it has also caused utter bafflement in those who did not. One thing, though, is clear: it was virtually impossible not to collaborate with the conquerors if one was to work at one’s profession. Almost all activity required a license, and none were issued without strict German approval. If licenses were not sought, this meant refusal for the publication of books, the production of plays, the showing of films and exhibitions and the performing of any concerts. The extremely courageous artists who gave up working under these conditions were very few in number. Any signs of anti-German sentiment were forbidden, and any Jewish artistic presence whatsoever was eliminated.8
The apparently relaxed cultural policy of the conquerors emerged from the principle that cultural distractions would keep the population unaware and contented. Meanwhile, the real attitude of the Germans toward French culture was a divided one, involving jealousy and contempt. There was jealousy of the preeminence of French culture in Europe combined with contempt for its perceived artistic decadence. German Francophilia was, then, double sided: admiration coexisting with an attitude of superiority. And those very French attributes that made the country so attractive — the refinement and douceur de vivre, the pleasure of civilized living — were also what condemned her to the second rank in the eyes of her invaders. However, a good number of intellectuals and artists were so relieved at the urbanity and admiration shown by some of their masters they failed to observe what actually lay beneath. Serge Lifar and Jean Cocteau, who continued working, like many artists before and after them, were staggeringly politically naive. What we are to make of the record of Gabrielle’s war years, however, remains to be seen.
Late in that summer of 1940, when Gabrielle had been reinstated at the Ritz, having accepted the one small room offered her, she sent all her best furniture back to her apartment above the salon on rue Cambon. And whatever her private thoughts about the occupation, there were two immediate tasks Gabrielle was now obliged to fulfill. One was a task she wished to perform; the other was an onerous one she was forced into.
When she had closed her couture house, her workers had been left without work or compensation. After the armistice, when the German propaganda campaign was intent on having it appear that France was getting back on its feet, educational establishments, businesses, the law courts, et cetera, were reopened. And at this point, Gabrielle’s rejected workforce succeeded in taking her to an industrial tribunal. Under the excuse of “act of war” or “emergency action,” Gabrielle had dismissed them without any notice or compensation. The court rejected this plea, and she was obliged to pay her employees the wages they were due.
Gabrielle’s second duty was to find her nephew. That September of 1940, when the Germans began releasing most of the three hundred thousand pre-armistice prisoners, her imprisoned nephew, André, was not among them. Preoccupied about his delicate health, his aunt was determined to bring about his release. A young aristocrat of her acquaintance, Louis de Vaufreland, told her he knew a German who might be able to help her. This gentleman was named Hans Günther, Baron von Dincklage. He spoke fluent French and English (his mother was English) and was the archetypal Aryan. Tall, blond, blue-eyed von Dincklage was the embodiment of entertaining charm. He suggested that the person Gabrielle needed was an old friend of his, a cavalry captain, Theodor Momm.9
Momm’s family was in textiles, and he had been deputed to mobilize the French textile industries, with a view to siphoning off the profits for the German war effort. Gabrielle’s persuasion was effective, and Momm reopened a small textile mill in the north of France. He then convinced his superiors that the owner was the famous Chanel, and that her nephew was the person needed to run the reinstated mill. Gabrielle was hugely relieved when André was at last released.
By this time, Gabrielle and von Dincklage had had cause to meet on a number of occasions. Gabrielle found the German’s charm and well-bred attentiveness throughout these proceedings most seductive. If she may have experienced any initial doubts about associating herself with the enemy, they were put aside, and she and von Dincklage became lovers. This affair was to endure for several years.
Gabrielle was careful to appear discreet, confining herself a good deal to her apartment on rue Cambon, her room at the Ritz and visits to an inner circle of friends, including the Serts, Serge Lifar, Jean Cocteau, Antoinette d’Harcourt and Marie-Louise Bousquet. Aside from that, there was her handsome lover. In an occupied city, where it was soon impossible not to take sides, Gabrielle appears to have convinced herself that she could have an affair with a German and live immured. For someone of her intelligence, she cannot possibly have believed that such catastrophic events in her own country and beyond didn’t concern her.
But Gabrielle’s attitude didn’t have much to do with intelligence; it was something more elemental than that. She had learned young to put self-preservation before most other things, and one of her clearest intentions throughout the war was just that: survival. As someone recently observed who was acquainted with her then, when he was a boy: “I don’t think it was a question of politics. [She] wanted to serve her own interests and maintain her lifestyle.”10 While this may have been ignoble, there were many who felt the same. Gabrielle and most of her friends were reluctant to ask too many questions about the oppression by their conquerors.
It has often been said that while Gabrielle was very wealthy, if ever the health of her business was in doubt, like many another who had started out poor, she reacted with an irrational fear of returning to that state. And perhaps to salve the guilt she must have had for pleading poverty and cutting off her brothers, she took up various public charitable activities, such as the patronage of Jean Marais’s regiment in the first months of war. Gabrielle had time on her hands and threw herself into the project, looking after every last detail. Other examples of Gabrielle’s charity were kept strictly private. For example, large sums were donated to a mental home in which the ex-courtesan Liane de Pougy was involved.11 In her later years, she contacted the solicitor at Aubazine and made a secret donation to the convent. (It is also said that over the years, she made occasional very discreet trips to the convent to visit the nuns.)12
Returning to Gabrielle’s liaison with her German, one explanation for her actions was that her repeated losses in love had hardened her. Indeed, Cocteau would say that Gabrielle was “a pederast,” that her sexual appetites were virile and that she set out to conquer like a man. This attitude, while serving Gabrielle’s sexual needs, did little to ground her emotions. But while she was not without blame in failed loves, Gabrielle had lost love so many times already that she had little faith in the possibility of its enduring.
There was no question that had Arthur Capel asked her, all those years ago, Gabrielle would have married him. Quite possibly, in the end, this marriage would have foundered. While always believing in preserving the differences between men and women, Gabrielle also wanted desperately to be taken as an equal. However, her times, her upbringing and her social position, in combination with her powerful personality, had seen to it that this rarely happened. In her youth, women were seldom allowed that kind of scope. And for all Capel’s forward thinking, in marriage he had chosen the more traditional woman. Ironically, Diana Wyndham’s own position regarding scope was that she hadn’t easily accepted her husband’s keeping a mistress.
Gabrielle was more than equal to most men, but without the example of an even half-decent parental relationship, where the balance of power — despite its ups and downs — ultimately swings back and forth so that each partner feels loved, needed and found worthy, she had no positive example. Despite her belief that a long-term, stable relationship was what she wanted, in many ways Gabrielle had not developed the emotional maturity to make it happen. When young, she had luxuriated in being feminine and seduced, but this way of being wasn’t sufficient, hadn’t given enough scope for her intelligence and abilities.
Sadly, she appears to have found it impossible, really, to conduct a relationship without either dominating or being dominated, and each time this led, eventually, to her frustration. She was remarkably able at managing the practicalities of her own and others’ lives; friends were many, many times deeply grateful for her vital support. But like her great contemporary and semifriend Colette, who so publicly wrestled with squaring the problem of love and independence, Gabrielle found real mutual love nearly impossible. They were two highly intelligent women, whose lives and loves epitomized versions of the same problem: “Is there love without complete submission and loss of identity? Is freedom worth the loneliness that pays for it?”13
In her own way, Colette had arrived at a better accommodation than Gabrielle ever would. Gabrielle remained vulnerable to emotional insecurity and loneliness. With time, suffering and disillusionment, she had become as much the seducer as the seduced. And she had long since learned to enjoy a sexual relationship that didn’t necessarily involve love. But while harboring few illusions, at the same time, she was also vulnerable in that she was alone and wanted to feel loved.
While Gabrielle was a sophisticated and worldly woman, von Dincklage was a suave and practiced Lothario, and a great many women had already fallen victim to his charms. In addition, Gabrielle was no longer young — she was fifty-eight to von Dincklage’s forty-five — and this man left her feeling she was still attractive. Meanwhile, what von Dincklage’s position was in regard to the occupying forces, and what Gabrielle believed it was, obviously has considerable bearing upon the way we judge her collaboration.
If, during the occupation, Gabrielle was seen in public less than before the war, and was careful not to show herself in public places with her German lover, she did not, however, spend the occupation holed up in her room at the Ritz. Yet her powers of denial were as tremendous as those of Colette, who wrote of this period, “A credulity, a forgetful exhaustion endowed me with delusion.”14
Colette needed money to help support herself and her Jewish husband, Goudeket, and was neither among those who refused to write nor those who worked for the Resistance. Indeed, she wrote for “some of the most repellent of the pro-Vichy and pro-German publications and maintained cordial relations with their editors.”15 And when Colette was asked to sign a petition against the arrest of the Jewish director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, she refused on the grounds that it might call attention to her husband. At the same time, the couple socialized at the collaborationist salons of José Maria Sert and Florence Gould.
In August 1941, a mutual friend of Gabrielle and Colette’s, the celebrity singer and actress Arletty, had a small party to celebrate her new apartment. Here she was to live with her lover, a German officer. Among Arletty’s guests were her friends Lili de Rothschild (to die in the Ravensbrück concentration camp), Colette, Maurice Goudeket, Marie Laurencin, Misia and Gabrielle. When Arletty was later challenged, she dismissed the idea that her sexual choices made her unpatriotic with the famous comment: “My heart it is French but my ass is international.” At the liberation, Arletty would be tried and imprisoned as a collaborationist.
Antoinette d’Harcourt’s son, Jean, recently offered the opinion in an interview that Gabrielle’s relationship was “mostly in order to get material advantages. It was different from Arletty’s behavior during the war. Arletty, it was a coup de coeur [literally ‘a blow of the heart’], whereas Chanel, they were coups de portefeuille [‘blows of the wallet’].” While describing Gabrielle’s attitude to von Dincklage as “all about money” is too simple, Jean d’Harcourt’s comment is, nonetheless, interesting. “You know, she kept a car, and a driver, and petrol throughout the war: that was most unusual, unless you were a Minister from the Vichy government but, otherwise, no one had that!”16
Gabrielle fairly regularly attended events in support of friends working under, if not directly for, the enemy, such as Serge Lifar, who ran the Opéra and also socialized with others who were in the habit of consorting with the Germans. André de Segonzac made a tour of Germany and Austria in the company of a party of French artists. Sacha Guitry entertained for the Germans on the stage, at their receptions and their dinners. On other occasions, Gabrielle dined with the Morands, where guests might include Cocteau; the right-wing poet Jouhandeau and his wife, Caryathis; the writer Louise de Vilmorin; Misia and José Maria Sert and a smattering of the German command. One of the favorites at French gatherings was Gerhard Heller, important in the literature section of the Propaganda-Abteilung. Almost ubiquitous at Parisian salons, Heller cast his spell of utter charm. Seducing many French writers into believing he wasn’t intent on destroying French cultural hegemony, Heller would again hoodwink large sections of the French public with his memoirs, in 1981.
In 1941, Misia was almost seventy and began dictating her memoirs to Boulos Ristelhueber, Sert’s young secretary. In addition to Boulos’s extreme thinness, his pallor was deathly and to conceal it, he wore dense makeup. Sadly, this only added to the bizarreness of his appearance. He and Misia had a number of friends in common, shared an equal passion for music, and Misia found this painfully delicate creature a gentle and sympathetic companion. Their friendship was an unexpected boon for the aging muse, whose loss of sight was rapidly narrowing her world. Boulos Ristelhueber greatly admired Misia and, during the war, saw her almost daily.
While Misia had never stopped loving Sert, after the young Roussadana’s death, he had been desolate. Misia once again took on the role of hostess at her ex-husband’s table, and while he supported her financially, they did not return to living in the same apartment. Sert, meanwhile, violently anti-German and hating the occupation, found little difficulty in accommodating himself, becoming Franco’s ambassador to the Vatican, no less. Misia hated the occupation, too. Yet though fiercely pro-Jewish, she also closed her eyes to some of Sert’s and her friends’ questionable activities.
Boulos Ristelhueber’s diary gives us a glimpse of Gabrielle and her friends’ occupied Paris:
Dec 17. Paris sadder than ever. An atmosphere of catastrophe. False rumors running wild. One knows nothing, nothing!
Dec 19. Serge Lifar speaks about the concert tonight… [The great conductor Herbert von Karajan, penalized at the end of the war for his notorious membership in the Nazi party, was conducting.]
Dec 20. Dined with Misia on her bed. Picasso sinks onto it and speaks of his unhappy divorce from Olga…
Dec 21. Rather sad lunch with Jean Cocteau… I deposited him at Colette’s… and went to see Jean Marais. At four o’clock called on Coco Chanel, so nice to me that she did me good…
Dec 27. the anti-Jewish laws… turn Paris into a prison…
Dec 28. At last night’s dinner at the Barnes’s, Misia… confronted an important German official…
Dec 29. Spent the evening at Misia’s with Coco Chanel and François d’Harcourt. Coco goes into a tirade against the Jews. The conversation is dangerous, given Antoinette’s origins [Antoinette d’Harcourt was a Rothschild] and the presence of the Duke. [Duke François d’Harcourt was Antoinette’s husband]… Sert’s chauffeur drove me home in such blackness that half the time we were on the pavement.
New Year’s Day 1942. Thick snow. Paris covered in white: grey-green uniforms everywhere. With its deserted streets — just a few horses and men pushing hand carts — Paris looks like a city in East Prussia.
Jan 22. Jean Cocteau… shows me some great photographs from the old days… Gide at fifteen… Georges Auric and Raymond Radiguet, stark naked in a small clump of reeds… Misia and Coco in ju-jitsu outfits.17
On January 11, Boulos commented on Misia’s distress at Sert’s departure for Spain and a sojourn with his mistress, and then described going with Cocteau and Marais to an all-night pharmacy “to fill in a prescription.” Marais had almost succeeded in weaning Cocteau off his opium, so this must have been a prescription “for the morphine to which Misia and Boulos were both hopelessly addicted.”
Over the years, Misia and Gabrielle had made numerous trips to Switzerland together, apparently to visit this or that clinic. Almost certainly, one of the major reasons for these trips was in fact to collect not only Misia’s new supply of morphine but also Gabrielle’s.
In the postwar period, Gabrielle had someone else pick up her “prescription.” Her assistant Lilou Marquand said she knew that “someone would go to Switzerland to get her morphine” with the protection of Chanel Inc.”18
Parisians were now pretty desperate for distraction from their privations, and entertainment of all kinds — theaters, cinemas, the opera and ballet as well as music halls, cabarets and brothels — were doing a roaring trade. Cafés and restaurants were filled with celebrities, the old rich, the black-market new rich and many Germans keen to sample the famed pleasures of “Gay Paree.” Those revelers unwilling to call a halt to their evening and brave the rigors of the Metro at the eleven o’clock curfew hour — virtually everyone had to use it; private cars were almost unknown — stayed on at the clubs and cafés, frequently open all night. Colette wrote to a friend that the composer Georges Auric, out with Marie-Laure de Noailles and a German officer, had his leg badly injured: “Nightclub, two in the morning, champagne, accident.”19
Intelligent and sensitive though Boulos Ristelhueber was, he could only partly comprehend the history and complexity of the friendships recorded in his diary. Perhaps most complex of all was that between Misia and Gabrielle. Since their meeting in 1917, they had fought, hurt, envied, loved and sometimes hated each other. Gabrielle was drawn to the mad Slav in Misia, who was, like her, as Morand said, extraordinarily rich in “that singular commodity called taste.” And while they each had a gargantuan appetite for gossip and intrigue, these were just as readily used against each other. Each of them was also probably the only woman the other knew to whom she could unfailingly turn. From its initiation, their friendship had been an intensely close one, often provoking gossip. Their many mutual friends were completely divided as to whether Gabrielle and Misia were lovers. At various times, it is almost certain that they were.
Gabrielle and Misia were connoisseurs of women’s beauty, and bedding each other — or another woman, for that matter — was not something that would have concerned them in the least. They were libertarians who had lived through an era that was increasingly open to sexual experiment. Gabrielle also spent her working days molding her artistry on women’s bodies. As she would say, it was a woman’s body itself that was one of the things that inspired her designs. She was also enough of an artist that Coleridge’s assertion in many ways applied to her: “A great mind must be androgynous.” In like manner, Virginia Woolf ’s conviction was pertinent: “It is fatal for anyone who writes [or makes any art]… to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.”20 With time, despite loving and wanting to be loved by men, it seems that Gabrielle turned more often to her own sex for both exhilaration and consolation.
In the period immediately before and during the early part of the war, one of her lovers was the woman mentioned above, the duchesse Antoinette d’Harcourt. This beautiful and rather tormented woman apparently needed her beloved opium in order to better express her passion and intelligence. Her son, Jean, remembers Gabrielle visiting them often before the war at the d’Harcourt château in Normandy.21 Gabrielle was apparently having an affair with Antoinette. The younger woman appears to have enjoyed the extra frisson of running another female love affair at the same time. Her second lover was Arletty. One day, it seems that Antoinette misjudged her timing, or perhaps her “mistake” was intentional. As Gabrielle was leaving her tryst with the young beauty, she met Arletty arriving.22
In 1943, Salvador Dalí wrote a roman-à-clef, Hidden Faces, cataloguing the viciousness and vacuity of much of le tout Paris. Cécile Goudreau, the sharp-tongued, knowing and witty sophisticate, is, apparently, Gabrielle,23 and Dalí depicts her as both a devotee of opium and an enticingly predatory lesbian: “As she spoke Cécile Goudreau stretched herself out and drew up the lacquered table with the smoking accessories set out on a level with her chest. Betka came and lay down beside her, pressing her own body lightly against hers. Then Cécile, with a quick casual movement, passed her arm around her neck.”24 But before Betka’s seduction, Cécile, “with the consummate skill of an old mandarin” introduces her young companion to the rituals of smoking opium.
With time, Gabrielle would become more circumspect about displaying any of these attitudes for public consumption. Indeed, as her legend would become transformed into a myth, she would staunchly deny any sexual or narcotic transgressions. During the war, meanwhile, she continued her affair with her German. Afterward, she would defiantly proclaim, “People believe that I exude rancour and malice. They believe… well, they believe anything, apart from the fact that one works, one thinks of oneself and one takes no notice of them.”25
Gabrielle and Arletty were, of course, only two of the most high profile of many French women who had affairs with German men. These liaisons with the enemy were to become the aspect of collaboration that most exercised the popular imagination, and in the purges that followed the liberation, thousands of women would be accused of “horizontal collaboration.” Notoriously, many would have their heads shaved and swastikas daubed on their skulls. Some were paraded naked through the streets; others were murdered before they reached any formal kind of trial. Prostitutes were treated with particular harshness.
In this period, any woman even found in the company of a German risked being accused of horizontal collaboration. To a large extent, while they were sometimes “turned in” by other women, the feeling against them derived as much from the sense of personal and national emasculation felt by French men, living under an occupying army. While postwar prosecution of these women was seen as a kind of cleansing process, they were also used as scapegoats for the sense of impotence their menfolk had experienced during the war.
Whatever the resulting censure, these liaisons nonetheless took place. Frequently, these women were vulnerable in one way or another: they might be young, single or divorced, and their first contact with a German was often in the workplace. By the middle of 1943, approximately eighty thousand women from the occupied zone were claiming support from the Germans for the children resulting from these liaisons. In Gabrielle’s case, with a ruthlessness attendant upon her fear of growing old, combined with her underlying loneliness, she, too, had her own particular vulnerability.
Who then, was Gabrielle’s German lover, the man who, like her, professed to hate war?