Every autumn, Etienne was invited to the château at Pau, an old town in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where he and his friends rode, hunted and played polo. Years later, Gabrielle recalled the “green pastures, the mountain streams rushing to the plains, the grass-covered jumps and the hunters in their red coats,” in what she described as “the best fox-hunting land in Europe.”1 She remembered the horses, saddled up and impatient to be off; could still hear their clattering hooves on the cobblestones. That season at Pau, in 1908, was an intoxicating interlude for Gabrielle. It was here, she said, that she met Arthur Capel, a wealthy polo-playing Englishman, a playboy to outdo all the others.
Arthur Capel and Etienne were already acquainted, but this was apparently the first time Arthur and Gabrielle had met. The Englishman was a noted horseman. His manner was seductively nonchalant; he spoke fluent French and possessed an engaging wit. This didn’t, though, entirely mask his sense of purpose. In Arthur Capel’s eyes there was a hint of something steely, reflecting the difference Gabrielle would recognize between this man and Etienne’s other friends. Instead of spending his inheritance, Arthur chose to work for his living. His dark good looks were enhanced by an air of inscrutability, and women found him irresistible. Gabrielle, too, was fascinated. Arthur was soon visiting Etienne’s château.
Gabrielle’s conversations with Etienne about setting up a hat shop had so far come to naught. Living with one’s mistress was unconventional enough for an upper-class man in 1908, but for her to work was verging on the scandalous; it would signal that he didn’t have the finances to support her. Gabrielle remonstrated with herself that she must do something, asking herself, “Otherwise what will become of you?” She said later, “The proud know only one supreme good: freedom!”2
Her efforts at persuasion at last bore fruit. Unwilling as Etienne was to finance a shop, why didn’t she try out her idea from the garçonnière (bachelor apartment) he shared with his brother? Ironically, many an ex-demimondaine before her had followed Gabrielle’s chosen occupation, and she now quietly launched herself as a milliner at her lover’s Parisian apartment at 160 boulevard Malesherbes.
Arthur Capel’s apartment, then also on boulevard Malesherbes, was close to Etienne’s garçonnière, and he often dropped by to see the “abandoned little sparrow,” as he and Etienne called Gabrielle. If Etienne’s support for Gabrielle’s venture was rather halfhearted, Arthur’s interest was balm to her ruffled sensibilities. Indeed, he gave her the most enthusiastic encouragement she had so far received, and sent along his women friends to look at Gabrielle’s hats. So did Etienne’s friends. There was no doubt Gabrielle had talent. Arthur’s visits became more frequent. While showing due consideration for his friend Etienne, in the most amicable way Arthur gradually made his intentions clear regarding Gabrielle.
It was probably at this point that Etienne proposed to her for the second time. It seems that Gabrielle may for a while have played a more worldly, more courtesanlike part than she would ever admit to in the future, and shared her favors. Now, leaving Royallieu, she was put up by Arthur at the Ritz. While officially Etienne’s mistress, she had several admirers. Miguel de Yturbe, Léon de Laborde and Arthur Capel were young men at the heart of Parisian society, and all were on hand to court her.
Yet while Gabrielle may have had the looks, the wit, the character and intelligence, as well as the necessary hardheadedness to become a fully fledged courtesan, she refused to foster some of those qualities that led, first, to a courtesan’s success, and then to her survival. Besides, Gabrielle’s insecure beginnings had left her too preoccupied with her future. Without quite knowing it, she had also caught the scent of change upon the air. She wanted influence, but she wanted it via a route that wasn’t dependent upon her willingness to act the courtesan part of a possession. In other words, although she may have been making herself available to more than one lover, ultimately, Gabrielle wanted independence and didn’t see the role of professional lover as her way to secure it.
Notwithstanding this reluctance, one notices how the trajectory of her life has a number of parallels with the lives of the most stellar demimondaines . First, she had imbibed from them the notion of continual inventiveness, and then, just as their inventiveness was translated into fashion, so Gabrielle would discover in herself their ability to remain just one step ahead of it. Balzac, in his brilliant description of the courtesan Valérie Marneffe, called these steps “the supreme efforts, the Austerlitzes of coquetry or love,” which are then transformed into what is “fashionable in lower spheres, just when their happy creators are looking round for new ideas.”3 We will see how, once Gabrielle had made something new, she was at once impatient to move on. And in this way, she would perfect the courtesan’s sometime role, indeed would make it her vocation. She would show first society women and then the rest how it was they should look for the new century.
We don’t know when one or two amorous encounters with Arthur Capel developed into a full-blown affair. But sometime around 1909, Gabrielle told Etienne that her “entanglement” with Arthur was becoming serious. Etienne was overcome, and set sail for Argentina. Gabrielle would say that he had been “packed off… by his family.”4 She also hinted that on his return from the New World, nothing had been resolved, and her relationship with her two lovers became ever more fraught and confused. While Gabrielle ensured that the details of this triangular relationship would be lost, it appears that as far as Etienne was concerned, a dalliance with another man was acceptable, but the basic commitment was clear: Gabrielle was his. Arthur’s interest in Gabrielle also reminded Etienne how much he wanted her. Whatever the games Gabrielle might have played, and the discord this provoked, there was never really much doubt: whatever previous liaisons she might have hidden from us, once Arthur had made his feelings clear, this particular young woman was his.
While Gabrielle frequently obscured her past with invention, in this case her claim that she and Etienne were never in love with each other may have been a salve for her conscience. What she meant here was that she was never in love with Etienne. The story has it that her passing from him to Arthur was, in the end, amicable. Etienne’s family, meanwhile, remembered him describing Arthur at the time as “an adventurer”—contemporary slang for “lousy foreigner.” But whatever Etienne’s thoughts, his defenses were to no avail; his friend Arthur Capel had carried off his mistress.
This mistress now found herself in a state of mind to which she was quite unaccustomed: she was content. We can only guess at what she may have revealed to Arthur about her origins and her miserable early life, but it did nothing to deter him. He wanted Gabrielle. And sharing his apartment just off the Champs-Elysées, for the first time in her life Gabrielle basked in being loved; she felt cherished and encouraged.5 As we sa wearlier, Arthur was to act as the inspiration for the transformation of her life. But Gabrielle’s path would not be an easy one, and personal misfortune would dog her along the way.
The year 1910 was to be momentous for her; it included the sudden death of her eldest sister. As Gabrielle’s first childhood companion, Julia-Berthe was linked with her inescapably, and on hearing of her death, Gabrielle collapsed. The cause of her sister’s death was said to be tuberculosis, but it now appears this was a fabrication. At the time, Gabrielle apparently demanded to know the truth and was secretly told that Julia-Berthe had in fact committed suicide.6 The macabre family story had it that she rolled herself back and forth, back and forth, in snow and ice until she lost consciousness and was eventually found frozen to death.
This seems impossible; she died in early May. But either the winter ended very late that year or there was something particularly grim about the way Julia-Berthe killed herself. Such a story is otherwise unlikely to have been “remembered.” Years later, Gabrielle herself would tell a friend7 that her sister had fallen in love with an officer who had quickly abandoned her. Gabrielle said she was struck by her sister’s despair and had wanted to meet this man. On discovering him, she had “fallen in love”; no doubt this is code for an affair. When her sister found out, she was driven to commit suicide. If this was true, was Gabrielle not only mourning her sister but feeling implicated too?
Gabrielle may have been sorrowful, but she was also in love and living with a man who represented everything she could want. For the moment, her ambition seemed unimportant, and she was luxuriating in being distracted. When she went to live with Arthur, at first Etienne hadn’t wanted to see them. But he was a forgiving man, and his heart would recover. In time, the new couple were welcomed back to Royallieu and entered once more into the life of the château. We see Gabrielle, previously such a reluctant-looking photographic subject, seated at table with Arthur, Léon de Laborde and Etienne. A smile plays over her face, at once flirtatious and fulfilled.
In another photograph, guests at a Royallieu house party have been organized by Gabrielle into donning costumes and playacting a “country wedding.” Two things stand out in the “play” itself. While the sophisticated young people take a swipe at bumpkin country folk, they also satirize the idea of marriage, the grown-up institution effectively banished from Royallieu. The pretty little actress Jeanne Léry plays an adoring bride; the socialite Lucien Henraux is a smitten groom; Arthur is the goofy, buxom mother of the bride; Léon de Laborde is a bonneted, dopey-looking baby; while the rising-star actress Gabrielle Dorziat takes the part of a slightly retarded, pigeon-toed village-girl maid of honor, in a short dress and socks.
And then we notice Gabrielle, who has taken the role of adolescent best man. She looks straight into the camera with that disconcerting seriousness. Dressed from the boys’ section of a Parisian department store, she wears trousers that don’t reach her ankles, pale socks, buttoned ankle boots, a Peter Pan — collared shirt and a waistcoat set off by a little dark jacket. Despite the deliberately crumpled white shirt, the clumsy cravat and the pulled-down straw hat, to our contemporary eyes, Gabrielle is the one person who fails in her attempts to appear awkward. A century later, the way she has put together and wears the little “suit” strikes us as having an insouciant, particularly modern kind of style. No matter how sophisticated and relaxed her friends might appear, they remain fixed in their own time, the early years of the twentieth century. It is Gabrielle alone who looks as if she might have been photographed just yesterday.
Describing herself as “unlike anyone else; either physically or mentally,”8 Gabrielle was also ripe with contradiction and rich in paradox. All her life this would make her easy to misread. While craving solitude, she lacked serenity, and possessed an electric, pent-up energy. Without the voluptuous curves then most desirable in a woman, her taut body was more like an adolescent boy’s. She was unusually forthright, yet at the same time, was subtle and seductive. Capable of easygoing lightheartedness, she was also provocative, and had a mordant wit. In her enigmatically beautiful face there was more than a hint of severity. This sprang from a deep seriousness, a profound quality given only to a few.
Gabrielle had developed an aversion to mere prettiness; she wanted beauty. She believed she had an unerring sense of what was “fake, conventional or bad,” the implication being that the conventional is as objectionable as what is “fake” or “bad.” Her unusual ability, growing stronger with age, to intuit the essence of a person and a situation amounted to what a friend described as “a kind of sixth sense.”9 Yet while Gabrielle was both unusually perceptive and knowing, in those early years Paris made her frightened. Painfully aware of her lack of sophistication in that most sophisticated of cities, she later recalled her ignorance of “social nuances, of family histories, the scandals, the allusions, all the things that Paris knew about and which are not written down anywhere. And since I was much too proud to ask questions I remained in ignorance.”10
While Gabrielle would never entirely overcome her sense of social inadequacy, she possessed a quality having nothing to do with inadequacy: humility. Hers was the humility of the artist open to everything, and it complemented her underlying self-confidence and strength of personality. Someone who would know her well in the future would say, “She was very elegant, but elegance is something natural, whereas being sophisticated… is a conscious choice… Elegance is something you’re born with.”11 To this innate elegance Gabrielle added her own singular femininity. For contemporary men attracted to strength as well as delicacy and mystery, Gabrielle Chanel held great appeal. Indeed, she had unsettled the glamorous Arthur Capel, stirring his emotions, and his yearnings, beyond sexual prowess and social prestige.
In 1924, the fashionable diplomat Paul Morand would write his first novel, Lewis et Irène. In the dedication of his book to Gabrielle, he referred to the similarities between Arthur Capel and his fictional hero, Lewis.12 Morand was fascinated by Arthur, a man with whom he shared an addiction to speed, horses, cars and women. In time, Gabrielle would tell Morand much about her relationship with Arthur. Not only did Arthur become the inspiration for Morand’s hero Lewis, but the similarities between Gabrielle and Irène, and many aspects of the Chanel-Capel relationship, were widely recognized by their contemporaries. Lewis et Irène is in large part their story.13
Morand saw Arthur as the dashing exemplification of a new kind of man, and made Lewis out of the same mold. Their similarities began with Lewis’s appearance. He had “beautiful brown eyes, quick and hard, a strong jaw, thick, very black hair, in disarray, and a half-open hunting vest.”14 Lewis was like Arthur in being determinedly modern and up-to-the-minute, with his reading of Freud on sexuality, his scorning of much of the past and his air of always being in a hurry.
And while Lewis et Irène was in many ways a depiction of Gabrielle and Arthur’s relationship, it was also the first French novel in which the heroine’s unusual self-reliance enabled her to have a relationship in which she was an equal partner. At Irène’s first entrance, in her black swimsuit, with her slim muscled and bronzed limbs, she is clearly a modern woman. Lewis’s admiration soon turns to something more, and in Irène he feels that his “fate was absolutely mapped out.” He realizes that without her, “What coldness when she is gone… what boredom.”15 Lewis tells Irène that he is learning how to be human, and that his first need is to adore her. She replies that her first need is to surrender to him, and that she doesn’t have to “regret my madness any more.”16
Gabrielle would recall that during her first winter with Arthur in 1910, their relationship was a very private one, and they invited few people to their apartment.17 Morand said of Lewis and Irène that “in the morning they stayed in bed. Lewis had kept a few racehorses. He telephoned… from his bed for news of their hooves, their teeth, their tendons.”18 At first, the intimate world of lovers was enough for Gabrielle and Arthur. Gabrielle described how, initially, she “distanced him from his friends”19 but also how Arthur wanted her to “remain the unsophisticated, untainted creature that he had discovered,” believing that she would be “damaged” by having friends.20
It was the beginning of their love affair and, for the moment, Gabrielle apparently accepted Arthur’s judgment. Constantly surprised by his edgy brilliance, she said, “He had a very strong and unusual character, and was a passionate and single-minded sort of man.”21 Paul Morand wrote that Lewis lived his life at top speed, ate while driving his car, sat on the floor and slept very little.22 Gabrielle recalled Arthur’s stable of polo ponies; she talked of his refined yet eccentric manner, his cultivation and his “dazzling social success.” More important, he was also the first person in her life who didn’t “demoralize” her.23
Arthur exemplified the personal superiority and distinction of those for whom the notion of elegance and good taste had changed; it was no longer based upon birth or wealth alone. Membership in this group largely hinged on a particular savoir vivre and a new, nonchalant brand of elegance based more upon individuality than membership in any particular group. Morand’s description of Lewis rings true of Arthur yet again: “To appear carelessly dressed in elegant places, because it pleased him to give an impression of strength and rudeness. That is why he readily dined in a sports jacket [rather than dinner jacket], among women in low-cut evening gowns.”24
Gabrielle was entranced by Arthur’s English dandyism, which fulfilled the anglophile cultural ideal of “le gentleman.” Unaware that some of Arthur’s compatriots from across the Channel mightn’t always find him quite old school enough for their prejudices, Gabrielle was dazzled. She described him as “more than handsome, he was magnificent.”25 But her appreciation of Arthur went much further than his looks.
One of the sources of their intense mutual attraction lay in their recognition that the other was untypical. And while they were both ambitious, Arthur was one of the only people in Gabrielle’s life until then whose authority she was happy to accept. Well behind her were her days as a poseuse at Moulins, when her slenderness had been called “thinness” and was attributed to too much partying. (It had been rumored that she would come to no good, and one of her nicknames at the time, La Famine aux Indes, was borrowed from the disturbing contemporary famine photographs from India.)26
But her life had changed beyond recognition since Moulins. Even though Gabrielle sometimes refused a trip to the dressmaker or a new pearl necklace, courtesy of Arthur, the bondage she had assumed was luxurious, and she was happy. She wore beautiful clothes, discovered that her slender grace was found increasingly alluring, and reveled in an unaccustomed happiness. Gabrielle’s natural charm blossomed as never before, and an admirer was to remember, “She had a roguish smile and delighted in mocking people with a tantalizing look of innocence.”27
Gabrielle’s fascination for Arthur lay not only in her unusual beauty but in her intelligence, her striking directness and her capacity for silence. But while Morand’s fictional Lewis was impressed by Irène’s “uncluttered and imperious mind,” he was also intent on educating her out of what he saw as her abominable ignorance. In the habit of “improving” his conquests, he set out to “cultivate their minds.”28 In like manner, Gabrielle recalled that for all the luxury of Arthur’s apartment, his outlook was in some ways a strict one. She said that “in educating me, he did not spare me; he commented on my conduct: “You behaved badly… you lied… you were wrong.”29 Gabrielle could accept this admonishment and his attempts to school her (including instruction in small details, such as the best years for champagne) because she didn’t feel undermined by that “gently authoritative manner of men who know women well, and who love them implicitly.”30
Her background and her desultory education had inspired in Gabrielle a reasonable idea of what she wanted. First was escape from the meanness of her upbringing. On moving out of the haberdasher’s shop into her own lodgings, she was determined to make her own way. Like many shop assistants before her, she had possibly augmented her earnings in Moulins with modest prostitution, and was eventually partnered with Etienne Balsan. Later, in his château at Royallieu, she found something to which she could seriously apply herself: horse riding. Not only did she become a talented rider, Gabrielle was also well informed about the most significant racing fixtures, the best jockeys, the finest horses. Yet her social life was spent largely with sportsmen and their mistresses, aristocrats, courtesans and turf society. During her years at Royallieu, she may have had the privilege of grandeur and being waited upon, but clearly, Arthur didn’t believe it had imbued her with much sophistication.
He was an established figure in the highest Parisian circles. Yet although he had fallen in love with this unusual creature, his social standing impelled him to a certain caution regarding transgression of the status quo. As a result of this, Gabrielle was effectively forbidden access to the haut monde. That subtle and precise brutality practiced by most elites, whose sense of exclusiveness functions with a hair-trigger sensitivity, meant that her lover didn’t escort his live-in mistress around the capital’s select salons, where he normally found his friends. And no matter what the private indiscretions of the haut monde, that same society wasn’t unconventional enough to visit a bachelor and his mistress at home. While at Royallieu, we remember, Etienne had no wish to receive society. This was just as well, because society would have been most unlikely to accept his invitations; his establishment was disreputable.
So Gabrielle and Arthur went out, and he introduced her to his more rakish friends at fashionable public places such as the theater or Maxim’s, the Café de Paris, or the Pré Catalan restaurant on the Bois de Boulogne. At times, Gabrielle hankered after an obvious kind of respectability: she was in love with Arthur Capel and would have married him if he’d asked. But unlike Etienne Balsan, for the moment, he did not.
Arthur’s numerous female admirers — several of them ex-lovers — were unhappy at his cohabitation with his mistress. She, meanwhile, recalled an episode intended to demonstrate her hold over him to the haut monde. Arthur was due at an important gala at the ruthlessly fashionable Deauville casino. On a whim, Gabrielle insisted that he should dine there with her alone. All eyes were upon them. While Gabrielle may have felt diffident before the Parisian elite, the urge to stake her claim over her man publicly was a far from timid action. She remembered that her “awkwardness, which contrasted with a wonderfully simple white dress, attracted people’s attention. The beauties of the period, with that intuition women have for threats unknown, were alarmed; they forgot their lords and their maharajas; Boy’s place at their table remained empty.”31 (“Boy” was the nickname by which Arthur was commonly known.) Gabrielle’s first moment of public triumph was not, however, based upon a conspicuous white dress and her connection to the glorious Arthur Capel alone. People remembered that evening and her memorable mix of engaging honesty, hauteur and charm. Le tout Paris had already whispered a good deal about the eligible Arthur Capel’s new liaison, but this episode announced it with a megaphone.
Many of the details of Gabrielle’s affair with Arthur remain obscure. And while, as we shall see, Arthur had reasons for keeping aspects of his own background mysterious, in the future Gabrielle would maintain far greater secrecy about her own. As a result, the chronology of these years is very difficult to disentangle.