Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Life at Aubazine was busy but deeply uneventful. By contrast, Gabrielle’s first eleven years had been spent in a round of ceaseless activity, either traveling or in the noisy, gaudy bustle and repartee of the markets. She was accustomed to people whose rough and precarious lives were lived on a public stage. Those who succeeded best had the keenest sense of showmanship, the quickest sense of humor and the greatest flair for holding their audience with a tale or a joke. Capturing the imagination, these people knew that the business of selling was, in large part, performance. Transplanted to the seclusion of a convent, Gabrielle chafed at her incarceration. One rare form of escape, however, did provide a feast for her imagination.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as village communities were much reduced and the urban mentality became dominant in France, the hugely expanded popular newspapers developed a vast circulation. These organs of mass communication celebrated speed, spontaneity and all that was unpredictable. They glorified the city, and Paris in particular. The popular press enabled people to make some sense of their newly urbanized world. It also introduced a new concept, the serial novel, the feuilleton , and these soon became something of a national obsession. While many families collected their installments until they had grown into a book, critics lamented the feuilletons’ formidable influence.

Albert’s younger sister, Gabrielle’s aunt Louise, decamped from her daily rounds by immersing herself in the latest feuilleton . Gabrielle later remembered: “We never bought books… we cut out the serial from the newspaper and sewed them all together. 13She also smuggled these back to the attics at Aubazine, where she hid from reality in their glamour and romance. Her adolescent dreams were fueled by these torrid fictions, crammed with scenes of passion and love that always triumphed. When Gabrielle’s shameful worldliness was discovered, she was severely chastised by the nuns, but years later, while saying that the writers were “ninnies,” she also claimed to have learned more from these popular fictions than from anything in her impoverished education. She added meaningfully that the romances “taught me about life; they nourished my sensibility and my pride.” 14

For the most part, however, Gabrielle’s time at Aubazine was to remain a poorly healed wound. To contemporaries, an illegitimate birth, impoverished childhood and abandonment to an orphanage were slurs upon one’s reputation, and once out in the world, Gabrielle set about concealment. If, once or twice, the burden of this anxious secret left her feeling so alone she was driven to confide it in full, her confidantes were decent enough to tell no one.

While we catch only glimpses of these crucial formative years, over time Gabrielle found ways to tell her story. She described repeatedly, for example, a profound antipathy for a group of women she called her “aunts.” Unpicking the web of misinformation she wove around herself, one sees that these “aunts” were not one but two sets of women. They were a conflation of her real aunts and the sisters of Aubazine. Together they took the brunt of Gabrielle’s youthful resentment, the memory of which still rankled more than half a century later. Above all, she believed that for her “aunts”—her family and the nuns—“Love was a luxury and childhood a sin.” 15Surrounded as she was by unloving authority figures, Gabrielle’s early experience was one of disharmony, repression and neglect.

In their eighteenth year, when the girls left the confines of Aubazine, the nuns saw themselves as responsible for their continuing welfare. First Julia-Berthe, then Gabrielle and, finally, Antoinette left behind this remote place that had held them for so long. What we don’t know is why, on leaving Aubazine, they didn’t set off, along with the thousands of other girls from humble backgrounds, in search of work. Instead, the nuns arranged for the Chanel girls’ transfer to another convent. This was in Moulins, a small town more than a hundred miles to the north.

The convent of Notre Dame was a local finishing school of sorts, with a contingent of charity pupils whom Gabrielle joined in 1901. Seated in a lower position at table and in church, and wearing clothes of poorer quality, the charity pupil was seldom permitted to forget her inferior status. At Moulins, young Gabrielle’s position was even more irksome to her than at Aubazine, where at least the girls had all sprung from similarly modest backgrounds. As a final humiliation, the Moulins charity girls were obliged to fulfill domestic duties to supplement their keep. Despite the fact that Gabrielle’s sisters were at Aubazine, she always gave the impression that her childhood and youth were spent without siblings or friends. At Moulins, however, she found a friend.

Adrienne Chanel was the youngest of Henri-Adrien and Angélina Chanel’s nineteen children. Their eldest, Albert, Gabrielle’s father, was twenty-eight years older than his youngest sister. Adrienne had been boarding at Notre Dame since the age of ten, and she made Gabrielle feel most welcome. The girls were separated by only two years and looked much like sisters. Adrienne’s self-possessed and tranquil nature was a strong contrast to her defensive and pent-up niece. A photograph of the girls together, taken shortly after Gabrielle’s move to Moulins, is a striking illustration of their different personalities. Adrienne places one hand fetchingly on her hip; the other is behind Gabrielle’s head, as if showing her to the camera. She looks a little concerned, and pleased, smiling lovingly at her friend, who keeps her own hands firmly behind her back. With the barest hints of a smile, Gabrielle gazes fiercely into the camera.

What had made these young women so unalike, when they had so much in common? Both were the children of impoverished, nomadic market traders. Adrienne was first sent to Moulins at ten; Gabrielle joined Aubazine at eleven and neither girl’s parents could scrape together the money to spare their daughter the stigma of charity status. There was, though, one significant difference between them: Adrienne had always felt cared for. Her parents made regular visits to Moulins to see their favorite daughter and Adrienne often visited her older sister Louise, who lived not far away with her husband, the stationmaster at Varennes. Adrienne made the best of her lot, and a lovable and vibrant personality had endeared her to the nuns at Notre Dame. She benefited from her time there and became a charming and competent young woman.

Louise, having long since rejected the nomadic life that was her birthright, didn’t mind that Varennes was a one-street, nowhere place consisting of her husband’s railway station, an inn, a church and a short straggle of houses. She happily occupied herself with her children, the housekeeping and maintaining the niceties of her improved social position. And it was she who drew the Chanels together, at Varennes, where they had the semblance of a home. Even Gabrielle’s recalcitrant father called in on occasion, albeit secretly, so as to avoid seeing his children. (Gabrielle’s disillusionment intensified when, one day, Louise let slip this information.)

While Gabrielle was at Aubazine, she and Adrienne may have met on the odd occasion, but after Gabrielle’s arrival at Moulins, the two girls became firm friends. Adrienne’s parents (Gabrielle’s grandparents), Henri-Adrien and Angélina, had finally come to a halt in Moulins, not far from the convent. In 1901, a young woman’s reputation still required her being chaperoned in public and, accordingly, Louise would have accompanied the girls on their visits to her home.