For the first year of her life, Gabrielle’s parents remained in Saumur. With a baby at Jeanne’s breast and a toddler at her feet, she helped Albert in the town’s markets. As few markets were covered over, they would have had no more than an awning to keep off the sun and rain. Albert frequently left his wife and children behind and set up his stall in another town. Jeanne knew he had other women, but her objections had little effect upon his conduct. She was often obliged to supplement the family’s meager income by working as a domestic. Yet although her life was one of unceasing labor, for the moment, youth and determination were on her side.
At some point Jeanne’s uncle Augustin Chardon invited her, Albert and the children to stay for a while, but only on one condition: that Albert marry his niece. After much discussion, and depressing evidence of Albert’s reluctance, the banns were published at Courpière.
When the day arrived, Jeanne went with her family to the town hall: Albert did not appear. To their embarrassment and fury, he refused to attend his own wedding, overcome at the thought of being shackled. Nothing like it could be recalled in Courpière, and Jeanne’s relations’ subsequent threats drove Albert to flee. Following a series of pretty sordid negotiations, a deal was finally struck. Jeanne’s family united, effectively, to pay Albert to marry her. As a precautionary measure, Albert would receive his windfall of five thousand francs, plus Jeanne’s personal possessions and her furniture, only once he had actually signed the marriage contract. Jeanne and her family craved respectability, and Albert finally married her in November 1884.
Incapable of thrift, he quickly squandered his five thousand francs on drink and swagger, thus curtailing his dream of advancement from market stall to his own haberdasher’s shop.1 Proximity to his in-laws became increasingly unpleasant and he set off for the southwest with his wife and little daughters. They settled this time in Issoire, a market town on the Couze River. Here, in 1885, Jeanne gave birth to their first son, Alphonse, who would become Gabrielle’s favorite brother.
The Chanels found lodgings in districts occupied by artisans’ workshops, and the children thus grew up amid the noise and smell of these last vestiges of preindustrial France. They were familiar with the leatherworkers, the can-dlemakers, the joiners, cobblers, tailors and seamstresses: traders whose hand skills — like those of the weavers, button makers, ribbon makers and cutlers from whom Albert bought his wares — were to become redundant as factory machines far outstripped their rate of production.
In 1887, a third daughter was born to Jeanne and Albert at Issoire; they named her Antoinette. By now, the strain of caring for four young children, working outside and living in run-down accommodations was affecting Jeanne’s health. The asthma from which she had long suffered had grown worse, and she persuaded Albert to return to Courpière, where Uncle Augustin again took them in. (Gabrielle would remember the misery of enforced silence because of her mother’s illness.)
Albert’s unpopularity with his wife’s family wasn’t the only reason he soon left Courpière. Nor was it simply that his job required constant travel; the young hustler was constitutionally incapable of remaining still. After a brief recuperation, Jeanne left the children behind and went in search of her no-good man. She returned periodically to Courpière, but the three older children — Julia-Berthe, Gabrielle and Alphonse — remained with their relations for some time. Little Gabrielle’s response to this upheaval seems clear: she was angry. As a way of incorporating and managing her predicament, she resorted to the healthy habit of childhood: make-believe. Years later, she told of acting out her fantasies in an overgrown Courpière churchyard, over which she ruled, where the dead were her subjects. Sometimes, she took along her rag dolls to join in her conversations with the dead. In Gabrielle’s world, the living were miserably failing her.
While the instability of Gabrielle’s life gave her little sense of control, her consequent feelings of impotence were made worse by her relatives’ insensitivity. Discovering that she had stolen kitchen objects and flowers as “offerings” for her lonely games, her elders thwarted her make-believe world by locking things away out of reach. She reacted with disobedience and, in due course, was stigmatized as “the bad one.” Her sister, Julia-Berthe, was never very bright and, although Alphonse was Gabrielle’s favorite, she was angry and frustrated at her powerlessness. She felt lonely, abandoned and unloved by her parents.
In 1889, Jeanne gave birth to her second son, Lucien. Eighteen months later, again pregnant and in poor health, she made her way back to Courpière. Here she gave birth to a third boy, named Augustin, in honor of her uncle. The baby was sickly and soon died. Jeanne’s family now dissuaded her from returning to Albert, and for a year or so, she saw little of her reprobate husband. At the same time, Jeanne was jealous of the liaisons she knew he would be conducting, and pined for him. In due course, with an awful inevitability, the old pattern reasserted itself, and in 1893, against her family’s wishes, she set off in search of him.
He had sent word that he was running a tavern with his brother at Brive-la-Gaillarde, in the Limousin. Jeanne now made the journey of over one hundred miles to reach him. This time, either her family refused to look after Julia-Berthe and Gabrielle, or Jeanne wanted them with her, because she took her eldest girls along.
Typically, Albert’s story was a fabrication and Jeanne’s optimism proved unfounded. Rather than managing the tavern, he was nothing more than its waiter. However dispirited Jeanne must have felt, she didn’t have the strength or the money to go back to her relations in Courpière. With thirteen-year-old Julia and ten-year-old Gabrielle as assistants, Jeanne applied herself to the old routine.
By the winter of 1894, in a very poor state of health, Jeanne was frequently confined to bed with asthma. She developed bronchitis and lay ravaged by a fever and without medical help. Finally unable to take any more she was released from her struggle. Albert’s wanderlust and need for money had sent him out on the road again, and he was absent when his wife died in a Brive-la-Gaillarde garret in February 1895. Jeanne had long since lost her youth to a punishing physical and emotional routine. Now, at thirty-one, she had also lost her life.
Julia-Berthe and Gabrielle would have seen the awful decline in their mother’s health and been powerless to halt it. Quite probably, they shared the room in which she slept. Almost certainly, it was they who discovered her death. Albert’s brother Hippolyte signed the death certificate and made the arrangements for Jeanne’s funeral.2 Those in the family who could have told more never would.