by Lisa Chaney
Despite her belief that if she didn’t dress like a kept woman, she wouldn’t be seen as one, Gabrielle was, nonetheless, a mistress. As for her looks, opinion was divided. While some didn’t find her particularly attractive, others were in thrall to her unconventional beauty. She was told she “looked noble” and that she possessed an “authentic exoticism.”17 Gabrielle was never very adept at the simpering demeanor of many contemporary women; with hindsight, her manner was an intimation of the future.
She had chosen to leave behind her previous servitude by becoming a kept woman, but her intelligence was too keen and her energies too restless for her to find the passiveness of this existence rewarding for very long. And after a time, the entertainments at Royallieu would come to bore her too. If, by any chance, Gabrielle articulated her dilemma to herself, for the moment she could find no answer. Living with the trappings of luxury and the apparent freedom that many women from her background would have fought for, she recognized that, really, she had simply swapped one kind of bondage for another. Yet while her ambivalence about her position is sometimes revealed in photographs of her at this time, in others her expression displays by turns her confidence, her wit and an unusual ability to appraise herself and her audience. What the photographs show, too, is the odd glimpse of her diffidence and vulnerability, and also of her most elusive and feminine allure.
In one such photograph Gabrielle walks along the promenade at Nice. Dressed almost head to toe in black, she sports a muff, a huge-brimmed hat, white shirt and tie. A beautiful young woman, she is attended by three highly eligible young men — Comte Léon de Laborde, Miguel de Yturbe and Etienne Balsan. All wealthy horsemen, they are charming cynics who speak the language of a sophisticated, knowing elite. Gabrielle was learning and, at Nice, she was also luxuriating in the only power then available to her, a sexual one emanating from the possession of great character and unusual beauty. And her eyes tell us that she knows it.
At the races, we see Léon de Laborde holding Gabrielle’s chin in a gesture both intimate and proprietary. Another photograph shows Gabrielle, Léon and Etienne at the Royallieu stables. Léon has his arm around Gabrielle’s waist and stands between her and her lover. Here and in other photos, one could be forgiven for assuming that Léon, not Etienne, was her lover. (Almost certainly, at some point, he was.)
If a rich man played the game, when he grew tired of his mistress from a lower class, on separating from her he would make her a parting settlement so as to tide her over until she could find another “protector.” With no lover, a mistress was out of “work.” A small number of men gave an indefinite settlement. When the time came for Gabrielle to be rejected by Etienne, if she was lucky, she would pass on to one of his friends or acquaintances. But as her looks faded, unless she had cleverly squirreled away a tidy sum, her future would be one of increasing poverty.
Preoccupied with her sense of powerlessness, by 1908, Gabrielle’s ambition to get to Paris was forming into a plan. She wondered aloud to Etienne what would happen to her. He teased her about being bourgeois and asked her whether she wasn’t all right there at Royallieu. Etienne worked hard, but his mistress had little with which to occupy herself and soon mentioned her future once again. Etienne gave the same response; and so it went on for several months.
Etienne’s wealth meant that he could enter or reject society as he chose. While on the one hand benefiting from the privilege his wealth afforded him, on the other he was irritated by the social codes of his class, its obsession with security, family, property and honor handed down from father to son. Instead, Etienne focused on a particular kind of earthy impermanence. He loved risk: the transience of a horse race, the playing of juvenile games and pranks, a brief, intense affair or a sophisticated gamble begun one day and finished on the next. Gabrielle appears to have stirred in him something different.
No doubt spurred on by her talk about her future, Etienne was apparently moved to ask his shop-assistant mistress to marry him. In years to come, Gabrielle would say that Etienne’s elder brother, Jacques, came twice to Royallieu and asked her to do so. (Etienne may have sought his brother’s assistance here.) When Gabrielle protested, telling Jacques that she didn’t love his brother, he replied that it wasn’t important; she should marry Etienne anyway. With Etienne and Jacques’ parents dead, perhaps Gabrielle’s status as a kept woman with no background mattered less to the Balsan brothers. Gabrielle recalled Jacques’ anger at her refusal, and that he told her she would end up with nothing. When she replied that she wanted to work, he retorted angrily that as she didn’t know anything about anything, what on earth did she think she was going to do?
Work indeed became Gabrielle’s new conviction; it was her only possibility of escape from her position as a demimondaine. She would later recall how, as a mere twelve-year-old, she had realized that “without money you are nothing, that with money you can do anything… I would say to myself over and over, money is the key to freedom.”18 She told Etienne that although she was good on a horse, she wouldn’t be permitted to earn her living as a female jockey, so she would like to open a hat shop. One can imagine Etienne’s surprise. He knew she was unusual, but employment was not expected of a mistress.
He was probably only vaguely aware that for some time, female visitors to Royallieu had asked Gabrielle where she found her hats. Almost beyond our comprehension today, it is worth remembering that at that time, virtually everyone, however old or young, rich or poor, wore a hat. (In many early photographs, where we see men, women and children too poor to wear shoes, they are, nonetheless, almost without exception, wearing a hat.) And women’s headgear was a highly significant aspect of dress. The fashionable woman’s hat was a dramatic edifice intended to cause a stir, to be noticed for its beauty and its grandeur.
One of the few places Gabrielle had visited on her rare trips to Paris was the palatial department store Galeries Lafayette. Here, instead of leaving with a haul of the seductive luxuries on offer in this temple to the new consumer, Gabrielle bought a number of basic hat forms made of straw or felt. Back at Royallieu, she decorated them, minimally, often with little more than a ribbon around the crown, to which she might simply add a large hat pin.
As in all previous periods, the definition of elegance and fashion was still the beautiful and the refined. Beauty was associated in large part with adornment. And adornment, whether in the form of costly jewels, silks, satins, laces, furs or hugely complicated hats, was associated with luxury and wealth. (The poor quite simply couldn’t afford these things or, therefore, fashion.) The frisson provoked by Gabrielle’s hats thus lay in their great simplicity and lack of adornment. Being shocking wasn’t then something associated with high fashion, but Gabrielle wasn’t entirely alone. Some high fashion was beginning to practice the same thought, put forward by a few radical contemporary artists. To shock was the idea, and this those unconventional female visitors to Royallieu were now keen to emulate.
6. Captive Mistress
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.
