The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Whenever [Coco] began yearning for austerity, for the ultimate in cleanliness, for faces scrubbed with yellow soap; or waxed nostalgic for all things white, simple and clear, for linen piled high in cupboards, whitewashed walls … one had to understand that she was speaking in a secret code, and that every word she uttered meant only one word. Aubazine.

  It was at the heart of Coco Chanel’s aesthetics–her obsession with purity and minimalism. It would shape the dresses she designed and the way she lived. It would shape Chanel No. 5, her great olfactory creation, no less profoundly.

  Standing amid the scenes of Coco Chanel’s childhood, the power of Aubazine is obvious. From the exterior, the abbey is an imposing structure of granite and sandy-hued limestone that towers over the village that grew up around it. Inside, it is a contrast of brilliant whiteness and lingering shadows. The keyhole doorways are dark wood against vast expanses of pale stone. There is the cool solidity of arching walls, adorned only with the play of light and the sun streaking in through colorless lead-paned windows. It possesses a striking and silent kind of beauty.

  This building was also filled with meanings that would shape the course of Coco Chanel’s life–and the life of Chanel No. 5. Everywhere in the world at Aubazine, there were scents and symbols–and reminders of the importance of perfume. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who founded the Cistercian movement6, made a point of encouraging his monks to give perfume and anointment a central role in prayer and in rituals of purification. In his famous sermons on the Bible’s “Song of Songs,” some of the most erotic verses anywhere in religious literature, he advised devout clerics to spend some spiritual time contemplating the perfumed breasts of the young bride described in the song’s key passages. Soon, someone got the idea that this contemplation would be even more effective if it were combined with time spent simultaneously sniffing the aromas of the local jasmine, lavender, and roses.

  For centuries, scent had been part of the life of devotion at Aubazine, and the traces lingered. Étienne had made a mission of planting richly scented flowers everywhere in the empty ravines and wastes around his abbeys7. They were the same hills where the girls went for long walks with the nuns on Sundays. Just beyond, in the cloister courtyard, were the carefully tended remains of the original twelfth-century gardens, the source of all those scents. The echoing nave, where Gabrielle Chanel listened to endless sermons, had been the site of these perfumed rituals of meditation and prayer for hundreds of years. Even the worn, stone staircase at Aubazine that led to the children’s bedchambers8 and the attics, where Gabrielle hid her secret romance novels, was the same one those medieval monks climbed every night on the way to their perfumed dreams. Scent had always been a part of her childhood.

  It was a desperately unhappy childhood9. Later, “Aubazine” was a word throughout her life that Coco Chanel would never speak. She surrounded it in silence and mystery, and it remained a guarded and shameful secret10. In all the interviews that she gave in the years that followed, she would claim to have grown up with aunts and invented a fabulous and fictional story about her father making a fortune in America. In fact, she did everything in her power to jettison the past, going so far as to send money to members of her family on the condition that they never reveal those shared secrets.

  What she lived with always, however, were Aubazine’s smells. They were the bracing scents of order and severity. Everywhere at Aubazine was the aroma of sheets boiled in copper pots sweetened with dried root of iris11 and the aromas of ironing. There was the scent from linen cupboards lined with pungent rosewood and verbena. There were clean hands and washed stone floors. Above all, there was the smell of raw tallow soap on children’s skin and ruthlessly scoured little bodies. It was the scent of everything that was clean. Aubazine was a secret code of smell, and in the years to come it would be at the heart of everything she would find beautiful.

  Aubazine was also filled with symbols and the mysterious power of numbers12, and these numbers could be found–along with their meaning–literally in the walls and on the floors around her. It was an architecture rich in silent stories. The Cistercians who raised these abbey walls nearly a thousand years before believed profoundly in a kind of sacred geometry that ordered the universe. Their buildings reflected it everywhere. In the small chapel where the children were sent to pray, the entire scope of Romanesque numerology was carved into stone before them in the most mundane places, on the floors and walls and doorways. Before them was the singular unity of God’s perfection in the simple shape of a circle. Double columns reflected the duality of body and spirit, earth and heaven13, and three windows in a row were the threefold nature of the divinity. Nine represented the foundations of Jerusalem’s walls and the number of the archangels, and six symbolized the days of creation.

  The number five at Aubazine though was always considered special. It was the number of an essentially human kind of destiny. Or that, at least, was the idea of the monks who founded Coco Chanel’s childhood abbey, and they built its entire structure on the power of this special number. Cistercian architecture flourished in Europe at the time of the Crusades, and these are the churches most closely associated with the occult mysteries of the Knights Templar14. To those mysteries, the number five–the pentagon–was central. “Cistercian cathedrals, churches, and abbeys,” writes one scholar, “are built on measures … which equal more or less [the] Golden Ratio of Pythagoras.”15 It is the ratio of both the five-pointed star and the human form.

  Coco Chanel understood the power of this number long before the nuns introduced the children to the esoteric symbolism of the abbey’s architecture and its spiritual meaning in their lessons. In the long sunlit corridor that led into the dark solemnity of that cathedral, the path was laid with rough, uneven mosaics, ancient river stones arranged in geometric and symbolic patterns. Here, even the youngest girls waited in line to be summoned to their prayers, and Gabrielle walked this path daily. Laid out there in undulating circles, she found repeated incessantly the pattern of the number five, sometimes in the shape of stars. Sometimes, it was there in the shape of flowers.

  The number five: she believed profoundly in its magic and its beauty. Those Cistercian nuns had raised their orphan charges to revere the power of symbols and spirit, and in this ancient branch of the Catholic faith it was a special number–the number of quintessence: the pure and perfect embodiment of a thing’s essence. It was also, in a material universe of earth, water, wind, and fire, that other thing–ether, spirit–something mysteriously and untouchably beautiful.

  There at Aubazine, the word she would never say, quintessence had been everywhere around her, and it hardly comes as a surprise, then, that the “No. 5 was her fetishistic number from childhood16.” It was part of her childhood games and her adolescent questioning: “she engraved it in the earth … with a branch she had picked up17, [it was the number] she looked for, as a game, among the dates inscribed on the graves in the cemetery.” When Gabrielle Chanel left the convent, she left behind its religion, but she never abandoned her belief in the occult mysticism of numbers.

  She also already knew that the number five was about women in particular. From the beginning, the number five and its perfect proportions were tangled up with the secret sensuality of their allure–and with the symbolism of flowers. That connection was always, at Aubazine, elemental. Indeed, the very name “ ‘Cistercian,’ and that of [its] first monastery, Citeaux, both come from the word cistus, of the Cistaceae rockrose18 family, which we know today as the simple five-petalled ‘wild rose’. … popular in medieval symbolism involving depictions of the … Virgin Mary, [whom] the Cistercians, Templars, Hospitallers, and the Teutonic knights all honored as the patroness of their respective Orders.” Its image was carved into the stone tomb of St. Étienne, which the convent girls passed in the cloister daily, and the plant grew wild in the hills where they walked.

  In the gardens of Aubazine, there was also another flower that looked remarkably similar: the white came
llia blossom. It had a less ancient and less innocent history. Napoléon’s empress Joséphine had made camellias popular throughout France in the nineteenth century, and Alexandre Dumas brought them to the popular vaudeville stage a generation later19 with the 1852 theatrical adaptation of his novel La Dame aux Camélias20 (1848)–"the lady with camellias"–the tragedy of a beautiful courtesan and her impossible love for a young gentleman. It was a novel that Gabrielle Chanel knew well, and as a young girl she once saw the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt bring it to life on the stage in Paris. “La Dame aux Camélias,’ she once said, “was my life, all the trashy novels I’d fed on.” Giuseppe Verdi would take the story as the basis for his opera La Traviata (1853). This long-lasting flower, the leaves of which are a source of tea, was already a symbol of a lover’s devotion.

  In the years after Aubazine, Coco Chanel would take the white camellia as a cherished personal symbol. It was the shape, she always said, of infinite possibility21. It would also be for her a flower mixed up with the story of devotion, the glitter of the footlights, and the kind of love that had no good solution. Unsurprisingly, it was sometimes depicted having five petals. Soon, she would come to know something too about the heartbreak of rich young men and their mistresses.

  Coco Chanel, after all, wasn’t destined for the walls of a convent–far from it. When the orphaned girls at Aubazine turned eighteen, only those prepared to renounce the world and become nuns were allowed to stay at the abbey. No one ever imagined that the religious life was the vocation of this spirited and fun-loving young woman, and she certainly harbored no illusions. Instead, she dreamed of the big city. In this distant corner of southwestern France, the big city was a modest little place not far to the north called Moulins sur Allier.

  When she left Aubazine to make her fortune, the girl who was not yet Coco Chanel had no idea that she wanted to create a perfume. She had no idea yet even of becoming a fashion designer. But she left this small village with a foundational catalog of scents and a powerful connection to the number that would later come to define her.

  TWO

  THE PRETTY PERFUMER

  Moulins sur Allier felt a long way from Paris in the summer of 1905. Here in this rural province, life went on much as it had for centuries. The looming Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame de Moulins and a Renaissance palace dominated the village’s medieval city center, and a large clock tower–its famous Jacquemart–tolled off the hours with a numbing persistence.

  In the capital, however, change was coming furiously. At the end of a stately gilded age, Paris was already the refuge of those bohemians, innovators, and artists who would make it famous in the decades to come. In just another few months, the painter Henri Matisse and his compatriots1 would shock the art world with a new exhibit of wild work that would become instantly known as Fauvism. That summer, an infamously sensual young woman named Margaretha Geertruida Zelle would take to the stage under the name of Mata Hari and transform the cabaret striptease–invented in Paris only ten years earlier–into the quintessential French entertainment.

  Moulins sur Allier, some two-hundred-odd miles from Paris, was another world entirely. But even Moulins had its cabaret dancers. At scrappy little dance halls like La Rotonde2, sequined showgirls sang and strutted to entertain the local officers who were housed in the garrison nearby.

  Had things worked out differently–had they worked out, in fact, as she planned–we never would have known Coco Chanel for her fashions or for her famous Chanel No. 5 perfume. We would have known her, along with Mata Hari and, later, Josephine Baker, as Coco Chanel, the sultry chanteuse.

  It was a surprising turn of events, given that she had grown up in the ascetic surroundings of that remote Catholic abbey, surrounded by cloistered walls and, beyond them, farmland. When she had left the convent at the age of eighteen, a few years earlier, the lively Gabrielle Chanel–she wasn’t yet “Coco"–put the sewing skills she had gained at Aubazine to use and found work as a shopgirl selling lingerie and hosiery at a boutique called À Sainte Marie in Moulins.3 On the weekends, to earn a bit of extra money, she worked for a local tailor, repairing men’s breeches. At the end of 1904, the life of a shopgirl and seamstress looked very much like her future.

  The work was dull, and it would never bring her great riches, but Moulins wasn’t without diversions. Gabrielle was young and pretty, and soon thrilling flirtations began with the officers who came to have their breeches mended. They took her for coffees and ice cream and eventually to the local cabaret entertainments, where the girls on the stage belted out risqué tunes with catchy melodies while the audience sang along delightedly.

  Gabrielle Chanel had no thought yet of creating a signature perfume–no thought yet even of creating her innovative fashions, let alone a couture fragrance. It was here in Moulins, though, that the kernel of an idea was first planted in her mind that one day would blossom so wonderfully. The favorite entertainment in Moulins that year was a familiar old comic opera from the last decades of the nineteenth century that continued to charm the audiences of rural France. It was just the kind of thing that a fun-loving officer could take a spirited shopgirl to see on a summer evening. Called simply La Jolie Parfumeuse–"the pretty perfumer4"–it was something for Gabrielle Chanel to remember.

  In fact, the story of La Jolie Parfumeuse might have been prophetic. It was a popular piece in this small town for several seasons, and she is sure to have seen it. Its creator, Jacques Offenbach, was a celebrity in the world of café music–the kind of man who might “discover” a showgirl and launch her career spectacularly. Amid the lively tunes and ribald sexual comedy, La Jolie Parfumeuse was the story of Rose Michon–like Gabrielle Chanel, an orphan girl making her way in the world. The choice before Rose in the comedy was a familiar one: a choice between the pleasures of life on the vaudeville stage and the bustling and clever entrepreneurship of a perfume shop.

  It was a sexy little drama, set in a cabaret, and the audience cheered on the adventures of the quick-witted and innocently sultry Rose, whose hopes of marrying the boy of her dreams are endangered by the rakish scheming of her would-be seducer and by her uncanny resemblance to a famously provocative showgirl from Toulouse. Rose naturally triumphs, and, in a comic final scene, her seducer’s comeuppance arrives when he finds himself locked into a perfume storage room and gassed with the overpowering and lusty feminine scents of too much patchouli and tuberose.

  Throughout it all, of course, the officers who came to be amused had plenty of scantily clad showgirls to ogle. Unsurprisingly, La Jolie Parfumeuse was an international hit for years, playing on stages in France, Germany, and the United States. In the world of early French boulevard music, it was well loved and emblematic.

  It also might have been the young Gabrielle Chanel’s story had she not made an entirely different choice. One day she, too, would open a shop and give the world its most famous fragrance. In her early twenties, however, that idea hadn’t yet occurred to her. What had occurred to her was–as she put it herself years later–that she had “a hot little body5,” and, when she quit working as a shopgirl, it was to join the cabaret.

  As a singer, Coco Chanel was not particularly talented. What she lacked in voice, however, she made up for in verve and youthful sensuality, and she was determined to make a career as a vaudeville actress and dancer. She dreamed of someday having a life in Paris, where women like Mata Hari were finding fame and fortune. She learned to wiggle her hips and danced in glittering, sequined gowns. She even earned her famous nickname, Coco, that year by making the tunes of “Qui qu’a vu Coco” and “Ko Ko Ri Ko6"–a famous Offenbach tune–her signature numbers, to the delight of the officers who came to watch her.

  It was fun, singing up there onstage and having so many gallant admirers. Before long, some of those gentlemen became more than just admirers, and it was from among these officers that Gabrielle Chanel–now simply Coco to everyone–soon chose her first lovers. Before long, she was pregnant, and the trouble was that C
oco’s officer knew well that marrying her was out of the question. She had strayed too far from the convent.

  She was a showgirl actress, and it was a risqué line of work for a young woman, one that would make her, in the eyes of respectable men and their families, essentially unmarriageable. To put it bluntly, “For a large section of society, the similarities between the actress’s life and the prostitute’s or demi-mondaine’s were unforgettable and overruled all other evidence of respectability.”7 Even talented singers and showgirls were forever condemned to the margins of polite society–that borderland known in French simply as the demi-monde, a shadowy “half-world” of those who would never be acceptable.

  The demi-monde was a kind of social limbo, and Coco Chanel had entered it. No matter what came afterward–no matter what stunning celebrity she would achieve or vast riches she would accumulate, no matter how she would set the style for her entire generation or create the world’s most famous perfume–she would never manage to escape this hard reality. She had consented to “be ‘hired’ for amusement8,” and this simple fact–and the consequences of what her biographers believe was a botched abortion9 that would leave her unable to bear children–would shape the course of her life in ways that were both profound and painful.

  Coco Chanel’s brief career as a showgirl would also lead, circuitously but inexorably, to the creation of Chanel No. 5 perfume. And not just to its creation but also to the very particular scent that it would capture. The aromas of the demi-mondaines–the women of the half-world–were something she would always remember.

  With Coco pregnant and in trouble, one of her admirers–perhaps the responsible lover–helped her arrange the abortion. Étienne Balsan was a rich officer with the army’s ninth infantry regiment who bred expensive horses and was heir to the vast industrial fortune his family had built by supplying textiles to the French army. He was handsome and enthusiastic in his admiration of women. He was also kind and generous. Remembering the patron saint of her stark convent childhood, Coco Chanel told him, “I’ve already had one protector named Étienne, and he performed miracles too10.” Soon, he offered the young Coco another kind of protection–the protection of becoming his mistress.