• Пожаловаться

Paul Morand: The Allure of Chanel

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Paul Morand: The Allure of Chanel» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию). В некоторых случаях присутствует краткое содержание. год выпуска: 2013, категория: Современная проза / на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале. Библиотека «Либ Кат» — LibCat.ru создана для любителей полистать хорошую книжку и предлагает широкий выбор жанров:

любовные романы фантастика и фэнтези приключения детективы и триллеры эротика документальные научные юмористические анекдоты о бизнесе проза детские сказки о религиии новинки православные старинные про компьютеры программирование на английском домоводство поэзия

Выбрав категорию по душе Вы сможете найти действительно стоящие книги и насладиться погружением в мир воображения, прочувствовать переживания героев или узнать для себя что-то новое, совершить внутреннее открытие. Подробная информация для ознакомления по текущему запросу представлена ниже:

Paul Morand The Allure of Chanel

The Allure of Chanel: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «The Allure of Chanel»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

Coco Chanel invited Paul Morand to visit her in St Moritz at the end of the Second World War when he was given the opportunity to write her memoirs; his notes of their conversations were put away in a drawer and only came to light one year after Chanel's death. Through Morand's transcription of their conversations, Chanel tells us about her friendship with Misia Sert, the men in her life - Boy Capel, the Duke of Westminster, artists such as Diaghilev, her philosophy of fashion and the story behind the legendary Number 5 perfume...The memories of Chanel told in her own words provide vivid sketches and portray the strength of Coco's character, leaving us with an extraordinary insight into Chanel the woman and the woman who created Chanel. Pushkin Collection editions feature a spare, elegant series style and superior, durable components. The Collection is typeset in Monotype Baskerville, litho-printed on Munken Premium White Paper and notch-bound by the independently owned printer TJ International in Padstow. The covers, with French flaps, are printed on Colorplan Pristine White Paper. Both paper and cover board are acid-free and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified.

Paul Morand: другие книги автора


Кто написал The Allure of Chanel? Узнайте фамилию, как зовут автора книги и список всех его произведений по сериям.

The Allure of Chanel — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «The Allure of Chanel», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Шрифт:

Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

The attic … what resources there are in this attic! It’s my library. I read everything. I find the fictional material there upon which my inner life will feed. We never bought books at home; we cut out the serial from the newspaper and we sewed together those long sheets of yellow paper. That’s what little Coco lapped up in secret, in the so-called attic. I copied down whole passages from novels I had read, which I would slip into my homework: “Where on earth did you get hold of all that?” the teacher asked me. Those novels taught me about life; they nourished my sensibility and my pride. I have always been proud.

I hate to demean myself, to submit to anyone, to humiliate myself, not to speak plainly, to give in, not to have my own way. Now as then, pride is present in whatever I do, in my gestures, in the hardness of my voice, in my steely gaze, in my anxious and well-developed facial features, in my entire being. I am the only volcanic crater in the Auvergne that is not extinct.

My hair is still black, rather like a horse’s mane, my eyebrows are as black as our chimney sweep’s, my skin is dark like the lava from our mountains, and my character is as black as the core of a land that has never capitulated. I was a rebellious child, a rebellious lover, a rebellious fashion designer, a true Lucifer. My aunts were not wicked people, but I thought they were, which amounts to the same thing. The Mont-Dore was not really a terrible place, but it was for me, and it was what I endured at the time that has strengthened me; I owe my powerful build to my very tough upbringing. Yes, pride is the key to my bad temper, to my gypsy-like independence, to my antisocial nature; it is also the secret of my strength and my success; it’s the Ariadne’s thread that has always enabled me to find my way back.

For I sometimes lose myself. In the maze of my legendary fame, for example. Each of us has his or her legend, foolish and wonderful. Mine, to which Paris and the provinces, idiots and artists, poets and society people have contributed, is so varied, so complex, so straightforward and so complicated at the same time, that I lose myself within it. Not only does it disfigure me, but it reconstructs another aspect of me; when I want to recognise myself, all I have to do is think of that pride that is both my flaw and my virtue.

My legend is based upon two indestructible pillars: the first is 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; the second is that I am Queen Midas.

It was thought that I had a mind for business that I don’t have. I am not Madame Curie, but nor am I Madame Hanau. Business matters and balance sheets bore me to death. If I want to add up, I count on my fingers.

It irritates me when I hear people say that I’ve been lucky. No one has worked harder than me. Those who dream up legends are lazy folk; if they weren’t, they would go and investigate more deeply, instead of inventing things. The notion that anyone could construct what I have built up, without working, as if by magic, by rubbing Aladdin’s lamp and simply making a wish, is nothing but pure imagination. (Pure … or impure.) What I say here will not change anything, in any case: nothing.

The legend has a harder life than the subject; reality is sad, and that handsome parasite that is the imagination will always be preferred to it. May my legend gain ground, I wish it a long and happy life! And many are the times that I shall continue to meet people who will talk to me about “Mlle C whom they know very well”, without realising that it is her they are addressing.

“My earliest childhood”. Those words, which are usually linked together, make me shudder. No childhood was less gentle. All too soon, I realised that life was a serious matter. My mother, who was already very ill, would take us, my two sisters and me, to the home of an elderly uncle (I was five years old) who was known as the “uncle from Issoire”. We were shut away in a room covered in red wallpaper. To begin with, we were very well behaved; then we noticed that the red wallpaper was very damp and could be peeled off the wall, and we tore off a little strip to begin with; it was great fun. By pulling a little harder, a large section of wallpaper came away; it was extremely amusing; we climbed up on a chair; without any effort, all the paper came off … We piled up the chairs one on top of the other: the wall appeared with its pink plaster; how marvellous! We placed the stack of chairs on a table and managed to strip away the paper as far as the ceiling: the pleasure was sublime! At last, my mother came in; she stood stock still, contemplating the disaster. She didn’t say a word to us; in the depths of her despair all she did was weep silently; no reprimand could have had such an effect on me; I ran away, howling with sorrow: we never saw the uncle from Issoire again.

Yes, life was a solemn affair, since it caused mothers to cry. On another occasion, my sisters and I were put to bed in a room, not normally occupied, in which bunches of grapes were hanging on a string from the ceiling. The grapes, in their paper bags, would keep in this way throughout the winter: I took a pillow, threw it in the air, and knocked down one bunch; another followed; then another; the grapes lay scattered on the ground; I hit them with the bolster, this way and that; soon the entire harvest was strewn over the wooden floor. For the first time in my life, I was whipped. The humiliation was something I would never forget.

“These people live like travelling circus folk,” an aunt remarked.

“Coco will turn out badly,” another replied.

“We’ll have to sell her to the gypsies …”

“Stinging nettles …” (domestic chastisements only made me more uncivilised, more fractious).

When I observe how early happiness handicaps people, I do not regret having been deeply unhappy to begin with. You have to be a truly decent person to put up with a good education. I would not have had a different destiny to mine for anything in the world.

I was naughty, bad-tempered, thieving, hypocritical and eavesdropping. I only liked to eat what I had stolen. Unbeknown to my aunts, I would hide away and cut myself huge slices of bread; the cook used to say to me: “You’ll cut yourself in half”; in order to be free, I took my bread to the lavatory. The proud know only one supreme good: freedom!

But to be free, one needs money. I thought of nothing but the money that opens the prison gate. The catalogues I read gave me wild dreams of spending. I imagined myself wearing a white woollen dress; I wanted a bedroom painted in white gloss, with white curtains. What a contrast this white made with the dark house in which my aunts confined me. Shortly before he left for America, my father brought me a first communion dress, in white chiffon, with a crown of roses. So as to punish me for being proud, my aunts said to me: “You’re not going to wear your crown of roses, you’ll wear a hat.” What agony it was, on top of so many other things, such as the shame of having to confess to the priest that I had stolen two cherries! To be deprived of the crown! For me, the eldest, not to be able to wear it!

I threw my arms around my father’s neck. “Take me away from here!” “Now, now, my dear Coco, everything will be all right, I’ll be back, I’ll take you with me, we’ll have a home again …” Those were his last words. He didn’t come back. I never lived under my father’s roof again. He occasionally wrote and told me to trust him and said that his business was doing well. And then that was all: we never heard another word from him.

At the time, I often used to think about dying; 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. They kept on telling me that on my father’s side I came from a family of nobodies. “You wouldn’t hold your head so high if you knew that your grandmother was a shepherdess,” they used to say. In which they were mistaken, for I found it delightful to have a granny with a crook, putting sheep adorned with ribbons out to graze. (Up until the day not long ago when, during the Occupation, I was with my aunt, Adrienne de Nexon, my grandparents’ daughter, who was obliged to provide proof of her ancestry; we discovered that this shameful side of my family, in spite of the shepherdess, was better than the other side.)

Читать дальше

Шрифт:

Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «The Allure of Chanel»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «The Allure of Chanel» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё не прочитанные произведения.


Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud: A Life on Paper: Stories
A Life on Paper: Stories
Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud
Penelope Delta: A Tale Without a Name
A Tale Without a Name
Penelope Delta
Paul Morand: The Man in a Hurry
The Man in a Hurry
Paul Morand
Paul Morand: Venices
Venices
Paul Morand
Paul Morand: Tender Shoots
Tender Shoots
Paul Morand
Отзывы о книге «The Allure of Chanel»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «The Allure of Chanel» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.