Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

No less strong-minded or characterful than Gabrielle, Adrienne combined her quiet ambition with an uncomplicated femininity. Yet without a name or a dowry behind her, unless Maud Mazuel could find her a well-to-do suitor, Adrienne knew her prospects were few. She loved her family, but like Gabrielle, she wished to move beyond her roots. Unlike many socially ambitious women, Adrienne was also in search of love.

She was soon courted by no fewer than three aristocratic admirers and became one of the daring, finely dressed beauties seen with their lovers at the Vichy races. Adrienne’s three most ardent admirers invited her to Egypt, where, away from prying eyes, she would be free to choose her man. Gabrielle was also invited on this adventure, but she said it would gain her nothing. 5By the time the Egyptian party returned, Adrienne had made her choice. She had become mistress to the Baron Maurice de Nexon, and would faithfully devote herself to him for the remainder of her life.

A courtesan might bankrupt a family’s son and also break his heart, but she rarely lived with her lover for any length of time. An irrégulière (a permanent mistress), on the other hand, was a threat involving a family’s honor in a different way: a son might be mad enough to ask for his lover’s hand, leaving his family’s name stained for a generation and more. Adrienne’s lover, the Baron de Nexon, would do just this. Despite his parents’ outrage and the lovers’ subsequent humiliation when the Nexon family refused to “receive” Adrienne, the young baron stood firm by his choice. He wanted Adrienne. But he also wanted his inheritance, which he would forfeit should they wed. Thus the couple lived discreetly in Paris and Vichy for many years, until the baron’s parents’ deaths meant he was finally able to marry.

When Gabrielle returned to Moulins, she was alone and without prospects. She had set her heart on the stage and her failure left her unsure of what to do next. Adrienne’s success almost certainly spurred Gabrielle on to make her next move. Etienne Balsan, in the background for several months, had set up house and now invited her to live with him as his mistress. One suspects she accepted without too much hesitation, grateful for a means of escape from the servitude to which she would otherwise have been forced to return.

Some time before, first Etienne’s father, then his mother had died, each leaving him a large inheritance, making him a very wealthy young man. Immediately after completing his military service, he had launched himself into his life’s work — breeding and training horses. To this end, he had bought and restored a small château, Royallieu, in the department of Oise, and it was here that Gabrielle now traveled with Etienne to begin a new life.

While Adrienne’s cohabitation with her lover must have shocked her sister Louise and the rest of their family, Louise would have appreciated Adrienne’s discretion and, one hopes, been unprudish enough to rejoice at her sister’s good fortune. Gabrielle’s situation, however, was rather different. We don’t know whether she hid her new life from her family for a time and was subsequently found out, or whether she told them immediately that she was going to live openly with a man out of wedlock. (As so often, it wasn’t quite so much what one did but the way one did it that mattered; discretion counted above all.) Years later, when Gabrielle came to tell of her installation at the château of Royallieu, despite garbling the truth to throw her audience off the scent, one catches a hint of her misrepresentation, which clearly provoked considerable family disapproval.

Gabrielle told how she had run away. She said that her grandfather in Moulins believed she had returned to Courpière; that her aunts thought she was at her grandfather’s house; and that, finally, someone “would realize that I was neither with one nor the other.” 6Although nomadic, and at the lower end of the social scale, the Chanel family would have been quite aware that (unlike Adrienne), Gabrielle was jettisoning any chance of a good name by going to live at Royallieu. 7Here she was not alone: her new lover’s family regarded him as its black sheep.

From an early age, Etienne Balsan, a most sympathetic character, was both easygoing and provocative, habitually unsettling his family. They put his intermittent irritability down to the fact that he often starved himself so as to keep his weight down as a jockey. (Etienne frequently rode as the only gentleman rider with the professional jockeys.) When he wasn’t working hard, one of Etienne’s favorite pastimes was courting women. Then he was relaxed and amusing, with a famously caustic wit. Women responded to his cheerful demeanor, and were seduced by his lack of romance and unflinching confidence. One of his stable lads, describing him as a champion jockey, said his only criticism of Etienne was with regard to women: “He focused on them too much. And it tired him out, sometimes.” When he mistakenly gave Etienne the benefit of this opinion, he was called an “idiot,” and Etienne informed him: “It’s no more tiring than riding horses!”

As a man of respectable pedigree and great means, Etienne could afford not to care about status. He had the freedom to do pretty much as he pleased, something very few women were permitted to any degree. Indeed Gabrielle’s arrival at Royallieu to live with Etienne Balsan had made her entirely disreputable in the eyes of contemporary society.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, under Louis Napoléon’s Second Empire, Paris became associated with an ostentatious theatricality and a luxuriant, new kind of spectacle. Louis-Napoléon’s mission was to promote his country’s magnificence and superiority to the world, and in this he was assisted by his urban planner, Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This promotion of magnificence in turn contributed to a period of feverishly self-absorbed luxury. Gratification was the imperative, and entertainments of all kinds proliferated. Many of the now famous great restaurants and grand cafés appeared, as did sumptuous new theaters and concert halls, playing nightly to packed houses.

Another form of entertainment — prostitution — also grew dramatically. At the end of the century, about a hundred thousand women plied their trade to a Parisian population of just under three million. 8At that time, Paris had one of the most highly organized and regulated systems of prostitution in the world. The penal code discriminated against women, and female adultery was considered far worse than adultery committed by a man. The state’s double standard assumed that male extramarital sex was inevitable — in fact, necessary. At the same time, the demimonde, the half-world beyond the bounds of respectability, inhabited by women selling their sexual favors, was rigorously controlled. In doing so, the state believed it was contributing toward the stability of the institution of marriage and simultaneously reducing the incidence of grim syphilis.

The myriad names for these women subtly delineated their variety, hierarchy and place in male fantasy. Many, such as the “kept” women, the irrégulières or femmes galantes , did their utmost to avoid being registered as prostitutes. Each category of the trade had its own epithet, including the street prostitute, the brothel prostitute, the fille libre, fille en carte, fille de maison or fille de numéro . Then there was the grisette , the young milliner, glover or seamstress, who often took lovers to boost her pitiful earnings.

Higher up the scale was the lorette , found in the fashionable cafés and restaurants of Paris’s grands boulevards , who often dreamed of becoming an actress, or might even dare to aim for the status of courtesan. The courtesan, the most highly prized prostitute, had many names: cocotte, biche, chameau, camélia (as in La Dame aux Camélias ), et cetera. In an era of conspicuous and ostentatious consumption, these women flourished as never before. At the pinnacle of the courtesan class itself were the grandes horizontales, lionesses, mangeuses d’homme, Amazones and the grandes cocottes . In lives of previously unimagined refinement and extravagance, they were a living myth, the image of desire. The loving recorder of the demimonde, Comte de Mournay (pseudonym Zed), aptly described the courtesan as “a luxury that surpasses all one’s wildest dreams.”