Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  ‘You don’t know the damage country attics can do to the imagination,’ Chanel told Delay, recalling the stories that she had absorbed as a girl. Her favourites had been by Pierre Decourcelle, a prolific author of romances who also wrote for Le Matin and Le Journal. Chanel described him to Delay as ‘a sentimental ninny’, yet also acknowledged his influence on her as her ‘one teacher’. But to Marcel Haedrich, she admitted that her ‘aunts’ had educated her to recognise the ‘solid substance’ of orderliness, ‘for having things done right, for chests filled with linens that smell good, and gleaming floors’.

  While the nuns taught her the value of cleanliness, Pierre Decourcelle gave her a taste for the forbidden. As Chanel remarked to Haedrich, she lost herself in his stories, ‘melodramas in which everything happened in a wild-eyed romanticism’, and longed to live in their world, instead of in her aunts’ house:

  ‘I thought all that was awful because in my novels there was nothing but silk pillows and white-lacquered furniture. I’d have liked to do everything in white lacquer. Sleeping in an alcove made me miserable, it humiliated me. I broke off bits of wood wherever I could, thinking, what old trash this is. I did it out of sheer wickedness, for the sake of destruction. When one considers all the things that go on in a child’s head … I wanted to kill myself.’

  It was not the only time that Chanel talked about her desire to kill herself as a child – as if her longing to escape, and her craving for glamorous romance, could be fulfilled only in suicide. ‘At the time, I often used to think about dying,’ she told Paul Morand. ‘The idea of causing a great fuss, of upsetting my aunts, of letting everyone know how wicked they were, fascinated me. I dreamt about setting fire to the barn.’

  If her suggestion was that in being wicked she would reveal the wickedness of others, then perhaps she believed that by dying she might find her rightful place in life. Gabrielle grew up to discover that suicide was not her way out; yet in a sense (however nonsensical it might appear to others), she did need to kill something of herself in order to make her escape. She felt unloved – by the ‘aunts’, by the family who had abandoned her to the care of nuns, by her absent father – although the stories she read had taught her that love conquered all; that desire and passion set men and women alight. An element of her conflict emerges in the tales she told of love (and the lack of it); of the sacred and the profane. Given her aversion to providing any detail about her family – other than the fictional aunts who stand in for the nuns at Aubazine (and possibly those at the convent school in Moulins) – the occasional mentions are significant. To Claude Delay, she referred to her uncle Paul Costier, the stationmaster, sending her a first-class railway ticket (‘because I wouldn’t go second-class – it was a bore’). In other versions, Chanel described her abortive attempt to escape to Paris with Adrienne from her uncle and aunt’s house in Varennes. They had only enough money for second-class tickets, but Gabrielle insisted on sitting in the first-class carriage, for which they were fined by the conductor; without any funds to sustain them in the capital, the runaway girls were forced to return home. Except that Gabrielle did not feel herself to be at home anywhere – not at Aubazine, nor at school in Moulins, nor in the Costiers’ house. When she arrived to stay with Paul and Louise, she told Delay, her uncle was warmly affectionate, but her aunt was detached and cold. At night, Paul came into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight, and said, ‘You’ll stay a nice long time, won’t you?’ But Gabrielle sensed that her aunt didn’t approve of her, and so she left the next day. According to Claude Delay, more than half a century later, Chanel ‘still felt the chill’ of rejection, expressing it as if she had been left entirely alone.

  She was also without God, or at least that was what she told Delay. Gabrielle’s loss of faith had occurred in Aubazine, at her First Communion, after her father had supposedly sent her the dress from America. It is unclear from her account whether she was actually wearing this unsuitable dress in church – instead, she spoke of her fascination at the sight of the barefoot mendicant monk who conducted a three-day retreat with the children before their First Communion, a man in a long home-spun robe with a girdle (a description reminiscent of St Etienne himself). ‘When I got there – the monk and his bare feet and his oration – that was the life I’d been waiting for. Inside the church it was like a mirage. It got dark at five, the candles were lit, I could hear the breathing of the boys and girls around me, in the half-light, almost asleep. I said at confession afterwards it had inspired profane feelings in me.’

  When the priest instructed her to meditate upon the Stations of the Cross in front of the other girls as a penance, Gabrielle refused, saying that she would do so in bed later that night. ‘The Catholic religion crumbled for me,’ she told Delay. ‘I realized I was a person, outside all the secrecy of confession.’ And yet, despite the confessions she made to Delay – a young woman at the time, but who was to come to understand the confessional aspect of her career as a psychoanalyst – Chanel could never quite admit to what followed next.

  To Paul Morand, she spoke of horses. Her aunts bred horses, she said, and sold them to the army. Gabrielle was wild – ‘untameable’ – and ran wherever she pleased. ‘I mounted our horses bare-back (at sixteen, I had never seen a saddle), I caught hold of our best animals (or occasionally other people’s, as I fancied) by their manes or their tails. I stole all the carrots in the house to feed them.’ (This was not the only time Chanel recalled stealing food as a child; she described hiding away from the aunts and cutting herself huge slices of bread that she took to eat in the lavatory. But the cook saw her, and said, ‘You’ll cut yourself in half.’)

  With the horses came the soldiers, arriving at her ‘aunts’ house’ to buy their mounts: ‘Fine hussars or chasseurs, with sky-blue dolmans and black frogging, and their pelisses on their shoulders. They came every year in their beautifully harnessed phaetons; they looked in the horses’ mouths to see how old they were, stroked their fetlocks to check that they weren’t inflamed, and slapped their flanks; it was a great party; a party that for me was fraught with a degree of anxiety; supposing they were going to take my favourite horses away from me?’ One wonders if Chanel knew what she was doing as she told this story to Morand when she was in her sixties; whether it was a story that she was telling herself, or if she was teasing him.

  Whatever her motive – unconscious or not – her tale takes on a darker, almost sadistic tone. The officers could not choose her favourite horses; Gabrielle said she had made sure of that by galloping them unshod on flinty ground so that their hooves were ruined. But one of the soldiers caught on: ‘“These horses have hooves like cattle, their soles have gone and their frogs are rotten!” he said, referring to our best-looking creatures. I no longer dared to look the officer in the eye, but he had seen through me; as soon as my aunts had turned away, he whispered in a low voice: “So you’ve been galloping without shoes, eh, you little rascal?”’

  It seems highly unlikely that Chanel encountered any army officers while she was under the care of nuns in the orphanage at Aubazine; but she undoubtedly came across them in Moulins, after she had left the Notre Dame boarding school. The town was dominated by the military, for several regiments were garrisoned there, including the Tenth Light Horse, the 10ème Chasseurs, who wore scarlet breeches and rakish peaked caps. The Mother Superior at Notre Dame had found employment for Adrienne and Gabrielle as shop assistants and seamstresses in a draper’s store on the Rue de l’Horloge, which sold trousseaux and mourning clothes to the local gentry, as well as layettes for newborn babies. The girls shared an attic bedroom above the shop, and also worked at the weekends for a nearby tailor, altering breeches for cavalry officers. It was there that Gabrielle and Adrienne were spotted by half-a-dozen men, who started taking them out at night to La Rotonde, a pavilion in a small park in Moulins, where concerts were held for audiences from the local barracks. They were rowdy affairs – a combination of music hall and soldiers’ saloon – but Gabrielle was
determined to start singing on stage, and eventually found a regular evening slot, accompanied first by Adrienne, and then as a solo performer. She had only two songs in her repertoire: ‘Ko Ko Ri Ko’ (its refrain was the French version of ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’) and ‘Qui qu’a vu Coco?’, a ditty about a girl who had lost her dog. Soon the audience greeted her with barnyard cockerel calls, and christened her with the name of the lost dog. Thus Gabrielle became Coco, a metamorphosis that might have been humiliating rather than liberating, but nevertheless led to the birth of a legend.

  Chanel never talked to her friends about this episode of her life, even in the most guarded of terms; other than to deny it to Paul Morand, dismissing it as foolish legend, along with the other stories in circulation: ‘that I have come up from goodness knows where; from the music hall, the opera or the brothel; I’m sorry, for that would have been more amusing.’ She did, however, mention the name of the cavalry officer who was to become her lover, Etienne Balsan, and referred to his horses as providing the means of her escape. To Morand, she declared, ‘horses have influenced the course of my life,’ and told a story of being sent by the aunts to the Auvergne spa town of Vichy, to spend the summer with her grandfather, who was taking the waters there. ‘I was so glad to have escaped … from the gloomy house, from needlework, from my trousseau; embroidering initials on the towels for my future household, and sewing crosses in Russian stitching on my nightdresses, for a hypothetical wedding night, made me feel ill; in a fury, I spat on my trousseau.’ In this version, she knocked five years off her age, and had herself sewing (and loathing) her own trousseau, rather than those of wealthier women in the shop where she laboured in Moulins. But her desire to be freed from the aunts and their legacy was manifest. ‘I was sixteen. I was becoming pretty. I had a face that was as plump as a fist, hidden in a vast swathe of black hair that reached the ground.’ And Vichy, with its casino and cafés and Belle Epoque opera house, its boulevards and gardens landscaped for Napoleon III, was to be the backdrop that she chose for her adventure: ‘Vichy was a fairyland. A ghastly fairyland in reality, but wonderful to fresh eyes … Vichy was my first journey Vichy would teach me about life.’

  It was in Vichy, she said, that she went to a tea party and ‘made the acquaintance of a young man, MB [Monsieur Balsan]; he owned a racing stable.’ They arranged to meet the following day, in fields where horses grazed beside the river. There, she heard the roar of a fantastical torrent of water, whereupon Balsan asked her to go with him to his house in Compiègne. She said yes, and ran away with him: ‘My grandfather believed I had returned home; my aunts thought I was at my grandfather’s house.’

  Chanel told a similar story to Bettina Ballard, a young Vogue editor in Paris whom she befriended in the Thirties; although in this version she was even younger. ‘She escaped the aunts before she was sixteen,’ recounted Ballard. ‘She went to visit her grandfather at Vichy and was so afraid that she would be sent back to the aunts that she stopped a handsome young officer in the park and asked him to take her away with him. He did just that, but he took her home to his father’s chateau. It was Etienne Balsan.’

  Claude Delay heard a more embellished tale of Chanel encountering Etienne Balsan at a Vichy tea party: she had been taken there by her aunt Adrienne, who was by then involved with the Baron de Nexon (a relationship that was in fact a real one, and although the Baron’s parents were fiercely opposed to the affair between their son and a seamstress, the two eventually married, many years afterwards, in a romance worthy of those that Adrienne and Gabrielle had read as teenagers). In this gothic account, Chanel told Balsan that she had been beset by bad luck ever since the death of her mother and her father’s departure to America, and announced to him that she was going to kill herself: ‘All through my childhood I wanted to be loved. Every day I thought about how to kill myself. The viaduct, perhaps …’ Despite this somewhat unorthodox introduction, Balsan was sufficiently intrigued to provide a different way out by inviting her to see his stables and house, a former abbey named Royallieu.

  And so Coco went with him there, to an abbey that had become a house of pleasure, leaving Gabrielle behind her, locked away in a shadowy place where no one might find her, nor the torn remnants of her past.

  COURTESANS AND CAMELLIAS

  ‘Since I am not yet of an age to invent, I must make do with telling a tale. I therefore invite the reader to believe that this story is true.’

  Alexandre Dumas, La Dame aux camélias

  There are many mysteries in the myth of Coco Chanel, but few more perplexing than her years with Etienne Balsan at Royallieu; perhaps because Balsan never gave away her secrets, however often he was questioned in later life, when Chanel was far more famous than him. In the drama of Chanel’s life – a drama in part of her own making, as well as of others – Balsan has been cast as a rich playboy, the roué who introduced the little orphaned seamstress into the decadent world of the Belle Epoque, deflowering her in an unsentimental education. While there may be some truth in this portrait, Chanel also used Balsan as a stepping stone from Moulins to Paris, gaining poise in place of an innocence already lost. The two of them continued to be friends until his death in 1953, and if their initial sexual relationship had been characterised by his infidelities, Balsan nevertheless displayed a lifelong loyalty to Chanel. He remained unmarried, apparently unrepentant and unfailingly discreet.

  Balsan’s father had died when he was 18, his mother a few years later, leaving Etienne and his two older brothers heirs to a solid fortune made in textiles. The family business, based in Châteauroux, a traditional wool town in central France, had been well established for a century, supplying the French army with uniforms and the British military during the Boer War. As a boy, Balsan was sent to boarding school in England, where he showed more interest in horses than anything else: he arrived with his dog, bought himself two hunters, and rode to hounds more often than he attended classes.

  After his parents’ death, he made it clear to his more industrious brothers, Jacques and Robert, that he had no intention of following them into the family business. (Both of them continued to run it with the same success as their forebears; Jacques also went on to distinguish himself as a fighter pilot during the First World War, and in 1921 married Consuelo Vanderbilt, after her divorce from the Duke of Marlborough.) Instead, Etienne enlisted in the army and was posted to Algiers with a light cavalry regiment, the Chasseurs d’Afrique. As his nephew François Balsan later reported in a privately printed family history, Etienne fell asleep on sentry duty one afternoon, and having been discovered in this compromising position by the governor of Algiers himself, was thereafter confined to the guardhouse. During his period of punishment, the regiment’s horses were afflicted with a mysterious skin ailment. Balsan sent a message to his commanding officer proposing a deal: if he were to come up with a cure for the disease, he would be released. The young officer duly applied a successful remedy (the recipe for which he had learned in England), and, much to his relief, was subsequently transferred from Algeria to Moulins.

  By the end of 1904, when he was 24 (and Chanel was 21), Balsan had completed his military service as a cavalry officer and elected to pursue more sporting equestrian activities. He found a suitable estate to purchase in Compiègne, in Picardy, about 45 miles north-east of Paris. The region was formerly a vast forest where the kings of France hunted in the Middle Ages, and while large expanses of woodland remained, the area had become established as a leading centre for racehorse trainers and thoroughbred stables. As such, it was a perfect location for Balsan’s new property. Royallieu had originally been built in 1303 as a monastery, was later remodelled as a royal hunting lodge, and then converted into a convent for Benedictine nuns in the seventeenth century. The nuns were driven out by the Revolution, but the portrait of its first abbess, Gabrielle de Laubespine, was still hanging on the staircase when Balsan moved in. And there she remained, a silent witness to his reign, during which Royallieu was devoted to the worship of
horses and the pursuit of amusement and pretty women.

  At some point in 1905 Chanel followed him there, in circumstances that remain quite unclear. They had met at Moulins, and that they became lovers is certain. But Balsan already had a mistress in residence at Royallieu, Emilienne d’Alençon, a famous courtesan-turned-actress. She was 14 years older than Coco, and although past the first bloom of youth, still widely regarded as one of the leading beauties of the day. Decades later, however, when Chanel described Emilienne to Marcel Haedrich, it was as if the two women had been separated by great age, as well as by experience. ‘Etienne Balsan liked old women,’ she said, with some terseness. ‘He adored Emilienne d’Alençon. Beauty and youth didn’t concern him. He adored cocottes and lived with that one to the scandal of his family.’

  But it wasn’t as simple as that. Emilienne came and went from Royallieu as she pleased, and at one point took a new lover, Alec Carter, a famous English jockey. Balsan was similarly diverted by other girls, some of whom would come to stay at Royallieu. No one knows how this curious arrangement was reached and maintained, or where Chanel fitted into the hierarchy. Several French writers, including Marcel Haedrich, have related gossip that Coco had to eat her meals with the servants in her early days at Royallieu, particularly when Balsan had his upper-class friends or family to stay. But Chanel herself gave little away, even to Claude Delay, beyond portraying Emilienne as having worn ‘heavy gowns and spotted veils’, like an ancient Miss Havisham. She described herself, in contrast, as free and unencumbered, dressing ‘neither as a great lady nor as a scullery maid’: a young tomboy, spending her days galloping on horseback through the forests. ‘I didn’t know any people; I knew the horses,’ she said, as if to protect herself from the memory of the isolation she suffered at the time, not understanding her position in the household (neither servant nor châtelaine). And yet, as always, she sought to define herself by her idiosyncratic choice of clothes. Unlike Emilienne, Coco wore simple riding breeches and equestrian jackets from a local tailor, thus distinguishing herself as somehow unique; if not yet the one and only Coco Chanel, then at least not just another cocotte in Balsan’s stable of women.