by Lisa Chaney
Diana was a tall, slim, blue-eyed girl whose delicate candor was matched by what someone who knew her well described recently as “a kind of naiveté. She was a very sweet person; most feminine until her dying day.”10 Great loss had revealed early Diana’s self-possession. Her mother had died when Diana was thirteen, then she was widowed in the first month of the war — only seventeen months after her marriage to the Honerable Percy Wyndham — and, by 1915, she had also lost both her brothers.
So unlike Gabrielle, this young woman, with her uncomplicated femininity, brought out the gallant in Arthur Capel, and he had soon visited her near the front. Any discomfort Arthur felt at Gabrielle’s increasing success and independence must have made the delightful young Englishwoman appear all the more seductive.
Arthur’s attraction to Diana Wyndham has characteristically been portrayed as one generated by social ambition alone: his “new” money in union with tradition. The one thing Arthur, or his mistress Gabrielle, could never achieve was Diana Wyndham’s noble heritage. But in Arthur’s long-hidden and recently discovered letters to Diana11 we see that both his sincerity of feeling and his transparency about his doubts are considerably more subtle than pure ambition. In that period of great flux, Arthur longed, like so many others, for some kind of certainty. However obscurely, he saw it in the rootedness Diana and her well-established family appeared to represent.
If, by chance, Diana hadn’t heard of Arthur Capel before they met, she would soon have got wind of his long-standing affair with the ultrafashion-able Coco Chanel. Arthur didn’t hide from Diana that, at thirty-five, he sometimes felt himself world-weary. Yet while he confessed to her that she had reawakened his dormant heart and he no longer wished to stray, a strand of lingering doubt is evident in these letters. He writes:
I re-read your letters in which you say things that are very true — it is a bore to love too many people. It has in fact been the principal bore of my life, in fact poisoned the butterfly’s honey, but now I don’t long any more to explore new countries, unless it be to see the setting sun in your blue eyes.12
And then, almost in spite of himself, Arthur displays that note of ambivalence: “Perhaps this is only a mood & will get stale, perhaps it won’t.”13 Other letters reveal not only Arthur’s but also Diana’s doubts, and were to become typical of their affair. Above all, for months, Arthur was endlessly torn between Diana and Gabrielle.
He knew Gabrielle was one of the most unusual women he would ever meet. But moving in the most urbane of French circles, Arthur was captivated by Diana’s simplicity. And she, while herself moving easily in London society, where her friends were among the most polished in England, felt more comfortable on an English country estate than mixing with the archsophisticates of Paris. She was wary of the great differences between her own life and Arthur’s, 14 and her uncertainty was confirmed by friends’ telling her that Arthur was sometimes seen with Gabrielle when she, Diana, was not in Paris. If our knowledge of Gabrielle’s feelings during this period is limited, we do know that Arthur and Diana’s mutual doubts led them several times to call off their liaison. In one particularly poignant letter, he tells her:
I stepped into hell the morning we parted… & only just kept my head. Yesterday morning the reaction came. I saw my life as it used to be before I met you & resolved to take up its threads again and carry out its obligations… Fate as usual stepped in and I put my resolution into execution yesterday. Then for 24 hours I found peace at last from all these perishing doubts & hesitations. This morning comes your letter one day too late. It would be long & useless to explain but the position is that now I cannot marry.
… feel quite sure that we could not be happy with so little confidence in ourselves… Put the whole thing out of your mind for the time being, let me work out my salvation (or the other thing) & I shall go on loving you just the same, although I know now that it is no use trying to build our house upon sand.
Au revoir mon petit Buggins… I want no more of it…
Boy 15
While Arthur had returned to Gabrielle and clearly felt unable to renege on whatever promises he had made her, this sad episode was not to be the conclusion of his affair with Diana, and they would return yet again to their seesawing indecision. In the letter perhaps most revealing of Arthur’s philosophy, he wrote:
I’ve slid down every cursed slope and the hills. I hate the main road & the crowd. The world I know is of my own making, the other makes me sick. Their morals, their convictions, their ambitions mean nothing to me. Fancy, sympathy & illusion have ever been my bed mates & I would never change them for Consideration, Position or Power, except perhaps the Position where two make one — blush my sunbeam…
All this, my “ blonde,” is very complicated and I don’t give a damn about knowing why I love your lips and your big blue eyes and your brave smile when your soul gives me the illusion that it’s talking to my soul…
Be happy and I will be too.
Boy the Wanderer 16
And while Arthur wished that what he suspected was the “illusion” of his and Diana’s love would be real, Gabrielle was to say to Paul Morand that she’d been having so much fun she had “forgotten about love.” Yet by the time she came to her senses and halted her incessant round of activity for a moment, her intuition told her that something was very wrong. Arthur, meanwhile, rushing from meetings with the military and politicians in France then on to their counterparts in London, made no mention (any more than he normally would have) of his assignations and letters to Gabrielle’s English competitor.
The French president, Raymond Poincaré, had asked Georges Clemenceau, who was then seventy-six, to take over as prime minister in November 1917. Irritable and recklessly brave, Clemenceau had already been prime minister between 1906 and 1909. While disliked by the Right and the Left, he insisted upon unity above all. Temporarily surmounting political differences, he succeeded, as no one else had, in reenthusing his compatriots with the will to fight and win the war. 17 Upon Clemenceau’s appointment, Arthur immediately sought an audience with him, offering to place his fleet at the service of the French government and to supply the country with coal. Clemenceau accepted Arthur’s offer, their friendship blossomed and Arthur was increasingly called upon to liaise at a high level between the British and the French. Having already gained considerable respect as liaison officer to General Allenby’s Cavalry Corps, alongside Edward Spears he now became (formally) one of the two most important officers liaising between the French and the British governments.
In Paris, in the spring of 1918, we find Arthur’s favorite sister, the exuberant and capricious Bertha, watching the showing of Gabrielle’s new season’s clothes, upstairs in the gold-trimmed salon at rue Cambon. (Gabrielle was one of the first couturiers to have live models walking back and forth, wearing her collections in a floor show.) On April 1, Vogue would describe the collection as ingenious, admiring the knitted-jersey dresses’ “silken suppleness, clinging so closely to the body.” Citing the society women wearing Chanel, such as Princess Radziwill, Vogue said that “many well-dressed women” were wearing versions of Gabrielle’s gray silk jersey “costume” embroidered in gray cotton, and that Mlle. Saint-Sauveur had sported one, this time embroidered in gold, “just a few days ago at a lunch at the Ritz.” At the same lunch, Princess Violette Murat showed off one of Gabrielle’s embroidered dresses “of blue silk jersey,” while Mrs. Hyde and Mlle. d’Hinnisdal also wore dresses by Gabrielle.
As the floor show got under way, without warning, Bertha Capel and her fellow guests were shocked out of their state of self-absorption by the sudden thump of an explosion that blew in windows and rocked the buildings nearby.
Paris was under fire from one of the huge long-range German cannons (nicknamed Big Bertha), the like of which had never been seen before. Shells followed one another every twenty minutes. A friend of Bertha’s at Gabrielle’s show remembered that at the first cannon shot, “the little emaciated models continued their
walk, impassive.” “It is a rather extraordinary thing,” she [Bertha] says, “to watch the show of a mellow spring collection, during which the rhythm of the bombings sets the pace for the models presentation.”18 The cannons launched their shells on the city from as far away as seventy-five miles. Arriving without warning, the German bombardment could continue for several days at a time. On a particularly successful day, as many as twenty shells might reach Paris. From March to August 1918, they were responsible for the deaths of more than two hundred people and injuries to hundreds more. Their prime objective, however, was psychological. The aim was to weaken Parisian morale.
Meanwhile, the British ambassador, Lord Derby, irritably confided to his diary:
… of all the stupid things today the War Office telephoned here to know exactly where the shells from Big Bertha had fallen… as it is the one thing you are not allowed to talk about and… can be of no possible use to the Cabinet — unless it means they are frightened to come here — I told Capel… that he had better not send any reply.19
Several of the women then staying at the Ritz came over to Chanel on the rue Cambon — situated just across the way from the hotel’s rear entrance — in search of something appropriate to wear should the shelling take place at night. Taking sudden shelter down in the Ritz’s cellars, what could Gabrielle substitute for their delicate nightgowns? The enterprising Gabrielle brought up and offered the rich refugees a consignment of men’s scarlet pajamas. The dashing young couturier decreed that these were not only acceptable, they were also stylish. She was soon reproducing them in coarse pale silk, and her more bold clients were delighted. “It was very chic, very daring and very new, as pajamas would only really become popular three or four years later, on the Lido at Venice.”20
By the summer of 1918, the Germans had concluded that their only remaining chance of victory was to defeat the Allies before the overwhelming resources of the United States forces could be deployed against them. Meanwhile, Old Tiger, as Clemenceau was now known, traveled from one headquarters at the front to another, haranguing the generals and endearing himself to the troops by hobbling down into trench after trench to rouse and inspire them. He threw out the French commander in chief, Philippe Pétain, and replaced him with Ferdinand Foch. Paris was now bombarded from the air; the distant cannons continued hurling shells into the city, and once more the fighting had almost reached the capital. Again there was an exodus. Those who could went by car, while the rest squeezed onto crowded trains and any other transport they could find.
And while Arthur and Diana vacillated about their feelings for each other, Gabrielle was at the mercy of their uncertainty. Arthur may have gone for periods without seeing Gabrielle, but he found it impossible to give her up.
Between the strenuously hard work and the heartache, Arthur somehow made good progress on his new book. Here, complaining of a neglect of the art of maternity, and the prevalent system of marriages of convenience, he asked, when mothers married off their daughters for wealth, “What becomes of love and virtue in these barters of gold and beauty?” He believed that the natural result of this prison for women was that they turned to adultery, and “discretion replaces virtue.”21 Arthur believed that “this conception of marriage is a crime; a dreadful crime against the woman… Intelligence, beauty and virtue are the most precious gifts of a race. They all depend on motherhood.” 22 The war was turning Arthur’s thoughts toward the regeneration of society, and thus he was being led to a new estimation of motherhood. And he must, at least partly, have had Diana in mind when he went on to say that “the English aristocracy… does not give a dowry to its daughters and leaves it to love to unite its children… the future role of women consists of making a Utopia a reality by giving birth to a generation that will be capable of thriving in it.”23
At last, in that spring of 1918, Arthur and Diana came to a final decision. Somehow, Arthur broke the news to Gabrielle: he had found someone else and he had asked her to marry him. Perhaps Gabrielle had no longer been able to bear what she sensed already and had initiated this confession. But no matter how much she might have suspected, or indeed prepared herself for it over the last months, Arthur’s words left her devastated.
She had never been an ordinary mistress, for whom the hackneyed old explanations would have to suffice. And while her growing success seemed only to increase her allure, one commentator, imagining that this bold “queen of fashion” must have “some corners of vulgarity where one could detect the common extraction,” found that “yet she is a charming and graceful being. Neither pushing nor servile… a cultured and subtle mind.”24 Had the very thing attracting Arthur to Gabrielle in the first place — her difference — become too challenging for him to manage?
In making herself financially independent, even wealthy, Gabrielle had apparently made herself free — and also exposed herself to hurt. And we recall again Arthur’s prophesy to her—“You’re proud, you’ll suffer”—and his realization that thinking he’d given her a plaything, he had in fact given her freedom.25
14. Alone
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.
