Читать книгу Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life - Justine Picardie - Страница 11

In the Shadow of the Cross

Brive-la-Gaillarde is a traditional railway town, a junction on the main line from Paris to Toulouse, occupying a central position in the vast heartland of France; as good a starting point as any for a pilgrim in search of Chanel. Take the road eastwards from the station; it runs through the centre of the town, then follows the curves of the river across a flat plain, towards forested mountains in the distance. After a few miles there is a narrow turning off the main road, climbing in serpentine twists, apparently coiling in on itself up the steep ascent. But at last it leads to Aubazine, a medieval village dominated by the dark bulk of a twelfth-century Cistercian monastery and abbey, founded by St Etienne in 1135.

This is the place to which Gabrielle’s father drove her in a cart from Brive, along with her two sisters, Julia and Antoinette, soon after the death of their mother. The boys were left elsewhere – deposited with a peasant family; foundlings used as unpaid labour – and the three girls were handed over to the nuns who ran an orphanage within the abbey walls, the sisters of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary. The children’s father promptly disappeared. Gabrielle later claimed he had gone to America in search of a fortune in a promised land, the New World, far away from the ascetic cloisters where he had abandoned his daughters.

Not that Gabrielle ever described it as abandonment; nor did she use the word ‘orphanage’. Instead, she told a number of embroidered stories about being left with her ‘aunts’, while her sister (she was vague about which one) was sent to a convent. There were two ‘aunts’ in her various narratives: black-clad, cold-eyed, stern and always nameless. ‘Actually, they weren’t my aunts, but my mother’s first cousins,’ she once remarked to Marcel Haedrich, adding that she lived with them in ‘the remotest corner of Auvergne. My aunts were good people, but absolutely without tenderness. I was not loved in their house. I got no affection. Children suffer from such things.’

Then, in a longer outburst, she gave away something of the misery she had felt, in a denial that also serves as a kind of confession: ‘People say I’m an Auvergnate. There’s nothing of the Auvergnate in me – nothing, nothing. My mother was one. In that part of the world, though, I was thoroughly unhappy. I fed on sorrow and horror. I wanted to kill myself I don’t know how many times. “That poor Jeanne” – I couldn’t stand hearing my mother talked about in that way anymore. Like all children, I listened at closed doors. I learned that my father had ruined my mother – “poor Jeanne”. All the same, she’d married the man she loved. And having to hear people call me an orphan! They felt sorry for me. I had nothing to be pitied for – I had a father. All this was humiliating. I realised no one loved me and I was being kept out of charity. There were visitors – plenty of visitors. I heard the questions put to my aunts: “Does the little one’s father still send money?”’

But there were no visits, and no money; just stern nuns and locked doors. Gabrielle spent seven years in the orphanage, until she was 18. Her father never returned to see her or her siblings, although she created a version for Marcel Haedrich in which he did visit; but even in that fantasy he did not rescue her: ‘When my father came to visit, my aunts did themselves up for him. He had a great deal of charm, and he told many stories. “Don’t listen to my aunts,” I said to him. “I’m so unhappy – take me away …”’

Like her father, Gabrielle told many stories, and she used them to protect his memory, identifying herself with him, rather than her sickly mother. It was as if she felt her father had been right to leave his wife and children, and sought to portray his flight as an act of youthful strength. In this version of her past, Gabrielle reinvented him as a far younger man – ‘not yet thirty’ – and the father of only two daughters, rather than a man approaching 40, who had cast off five children, along with a dead wife. ‘He’d made a new life,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘I understand that. He made a new family. His two daughters were in good hands. They were being brought up. He had more children. He was right. I would have done the same thing. No one under thirty could have coped with the situation. Imagine, a widower with two daughters! He really loved me. I represented the good days, fun, happiness …’

In reality, happiness was scarce in the orphanage, nor was there much love there. Gabrielle Chanel went to live in Aubazine not long after her mother’s death in February 1895; over a lifetime later, at the same time of year – a season when winter has not yet loosened its grip on the mountains – I came to stay in the abbey myself. Little has changed in the last century: only the orphans have disappeared. But you can still see their bedrooms in the original monastery building that adjoins the abbey, the simple iron beds lined up against whitewashed walls hung with crucifixes. Each of the rooms has the name of a saint on the door, and when the wooden shutters are open, a view of the forests that surround Aubazine. Beyond the forests, far away, is the railway track out of Brive, but you cannot see a trace of it from here; only the groves of chestnut trees and the mountains wreathed in a pale, frosty mist.

Visitors seldom come in winter, and the dwindling community of nuns spends much of its life in silence: silent prayer, silent meal times, silent contemplation of God. If ever there was a place to feel close to God, it should be here, high on the hill, nearing the sky; yet somehow, sometimes, the walls that enclose the monastery seem to get in the way. Inside the abbey is darkness, the stone floor as cold as the unadorned walls, a chill rising from the ground that feels as if it has been frozen since St Etienne walked here. A few shafts of light pierce the shadows through the opaque grey and pearl-white windows; there is no figurative stained glass in this Cistercian abbey, but the panes form geometric patterns, knots and loops that look eerily like the double C of Chanel’s logo.

Did Gabrielle gaze through these windows? Did she stare up at them, when she should have kept her eyes down to the ground, her head bowed in prayer? Towards the end of her life, Chanel told a story of sitting with other children in a wooden pew in church. A nun poked her with a stick when Gabrielle sang ‘Ave Maria’ too loudly; meanwhile, alone on another bench, was a hunchback. ‘I’d have liked to sit down beside him and touch his hump,’ she said to Claude Delay, ‘and tell him that it didn’t matter, he could still be loved.’

The abbey is empty when I walk through its pews, my steps the only sound in the silence. To the right of the altar is the stone tomb of St Etienne, a shrine where his sacred relics are preserved; to the left, a Madonna and headless Child. Along the walls are wooden misericords, ledges for the monks to rest against during the long night vigils, with strange leonine creatures carved into the ends (and in their faces you can see something of the lion that watches over Chanel’s apartment from above the fireplace in her salon). On the far side of the church, so shadowy that it takes a little while for one’s eyes to make out the detail, is a stone staircase that leads up to an ancient wooden door, heavy and blackened by the centuries. This is the staircase that Chanel walked up and down every day on her way to and from her prayers; 36 steps from the orphanage to the abbey, from Vespers to Matins, from dim morning to dark night, over and over again.

Climb the stairs, and push the black door open. It leads into a long corridor on the first floor of the monastery; on one side are more doors, into the sober bedrooms and offices of the nuns; on the other side are high windows, their frames painted beige, overlooking the central walled courtyard and the fountain in the middle, carved out of a huge boulder by the followers of St Etienne. The corridor is paved with an intricate mosaic, thousands of tiny pebbles formed into patterns of stars and a moon; a bishop’s mitre and a Maltese cross; flowers with eight petals each; and another, more cryptic pattern (of loops and a square formed of circles and triangles) which the current inhabitants of the monastery cannot decipher. But the nun who acts as my guide accepts it as a holy symbol of God’s plan, a creation that leads to the Creator. ‘All we know is that it was made by the monks, like everything else here,’ she says, ‘and it has a special meaning.’

‘Of what?’ I ask her.

‘Of the language of numbers, the mystery of the Holy Trinity,’ she says. ‘The meaning of God, which we cannot always understand, and yet we know to be the truth.’ There is no more that she can tell me about the magic or the logic of the mosaic, and by now it is time for prayers again, so I follow her down another stone staircase, the steps worn into hollows by legions of faithful feet, to the chapel on the ground floor where the nuns gather for the six o’clock service. They seem to lose themselves in prayer – their eyes remain closed, as darkness falls; they kneel in silence, motionless, even though it is icy cold – and I try to concentrate on the mystery of the Holy Trinity. But my mind and my eyes wander, counting the windows, searching for the geometry in the stones, 12 stones in an arch around each window. (Do they represent the 12 disciples, or the 12 tribes of Israel; or am I searching for significance, seeking a pattern that does not exist amidst these random stones?)

Here is the place that Gabrielle prayed, and sewed, and slept; here is a world contained by high walls, where the hours are divided into devotions. How did she feel, within these immovable confines, knowing that outside her father was always travelling, always beyond her reach? On Sundays, the orphan girls walked to the Calvaire, a cross on the hill beyond Aubazine. They came out through the gate that separated them from the village – a gate kept locked and bolted at all other times – and walked up the path behind the abbey, following the mountain stream that provided water for the followers of St Etienne. The path is steep, through chestnut woods and pine forests; and it is still quiet here, footsteps muffled by fallen leaves and damp earth, the silence broken only by the occasional cry of a bird. In a clearing, you can look down the gorge to the monastery, and it seems smaller when seen from this perspective, yet monolithic nevertheless, as much a part of the landscape as the forested hillsides.

This was where Gabrielle walked; though the contours of the landscape were still taking shape in Chanel’s imagination decades afterwards, when she looked back to Aubazine from the sumptuous salon of Rue Cambon. She told her friend Claude Delay about the woods into which she escaped from the house of her aunts; fleeing there early in the morning, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, hoping that the gypsies would steal her away. The horses were wild in her legend, unshod and reared for the cavalry officers who came to see her aunts once a year. The aunts never dreamt that she could ride; nor did they know that she was accompanied by a red-headed farmer’s boy. She spun a story of romance, telling Delay of the time she was given a present of rose-scented soap by one of her boy cousins. The fragrance was intoxicating for both of them: ‘My cousin kissed me passionately, I let him. The frenzy of the provinces … I didn’t see him again for three months. That’s the sort of thing that makes a woman of one.’

Did Gabrielle truly become a woman at Aubazine? She lived in the convent until she was 18, as did her sisters. One of them, Julia, fell pregnant here in mysterious circumstances; a nominal father was found to give the baby boy a name – on his birth certificate he was registered as André Palasse – but when Julia died in 1910, the boy was left an orphan. Chanel seldom referred to her elder sister; on the occasions she did, her remarks were contradictory. ‘She only loved the convent,’ she told Delay, yet also claimed that Julia had loved her husband, that she killed herself by slitting her wrists when she discovered that he had a mistress.

Whatever the true circumstances of André’s birth and his mother’s death, Chanel took on her six-year-old nephew and brought him up as her own – indeed her lover, Boy Capel, became his godfather – yet she chose not to keep him in Paris with her, but sent him to be educated at an English boarding school. People used to speculate about André’s origins, as they still do. Even now, if you talk to the elderly lady who lives in a house across the road from the abbey, where she was born, just as her mother and grandmother were before her, you might hear another story, that the baby was Gabrielle’s, not Julia’s. ‘That’s what I heard,’ says the old lady, ‘but who knows if it is true?’ What she does know for certain is that Mademoiselle Chanel returned to Aubazine from time to time, long after she had become rich and famous. ‘She arrived here in a big black car, we used to see her, but she was always very discreet, very private. Mademoiselle Chanel would visit one nun in particular, who still lived in the convent, and I wondered if she came to visit her whenever she was broken-hearted? She used to give money to the nuns, and she would stay and talk to them for a while, but she never stayed the night here. No, she never again slept within the walls of the abbey …’

Mademoiselle Chanel did not mention Aubazine to her friends; nor even utter its name to her great-niece Gabrielle Labrunie, the daughter of André Palasse, to whom she was very close. ‘I wouldn’t have dreamt of asking her about the past,’ says Madame Labrunie, when I question her about Aubazine. ‘And if I had asked, she would have told me it was none of my business. She always said she was interested in what was ahead of her, not what had already finished.’

But Chanel did allow some stories to slip out. To Claude Delay, she spoke of being taught to sew by the aunts, hemming and seaming her trousseau; and of how she wore a white shift in which to bathe herself, because it was a sin to look at one’s body. She said that she sewed cross-stitches on her nightgowns, to make them look Russian. Sometimes she used to rub her nose to make it bleed at night; the blood dripped on her white nightdress, and when she cried out for someone to come to her bedside, a nun would emerge. Slashes of red appeared elsewhere in her narratives: two cherries that she stole to eat before her First Communion, before she panicked and sought absolution from the priest for her wickedness; the bloodstains on her nightdress when she reached puberty, not understanding what had happened to her but believing she had hurt herself; and her reddened skin, when the aunts beat her. ‘I remember that they used to take my knickers down to spank me. First there was the humiliation. Then it was very unpleasant, your bottom was as red as blood.’

She talked in vivid detail about the dresses and linen she remembered from childhood, elaborate stories that may have contained a kernel of truth, though perhaps they came from the serialised romances that she read as an adolescent (‘I found them in the attic of my aunts’). Her aunts had huge cupboards filled with shelves of freshly laundered white linen that smelled of verbena and rosewood. When they went to mass, the aunts wore jade crosses and veils over their faces, their throats edged in white material, in contrast to their black dresses. When Gabrielle saw a school of black-clad orphans go past, she said, she hid away to weep for them; she felt sorry for them in their black aprons.

But Gabrielle insisted that she was not an orphan; nor was she to be pitied like them. Her father sent her a white dress from America for her First Communion. It was all ruffles and lace, she told Delay, with layers of billowing organdie petticoats and a long veil, two rosaries, a string of pearls, and a pair of silk stockings to wear underneath. Gabrielle loved the dress as a child, but in later life she declared that it must have been chosen by her father’s girlfriend, a ‘tart’ with dubious taste. She gave a slightly different version of the story to Paul Morand: ‘Shortly before he left for America, my father bought 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!’

Yet another version of the story (to Marcel Haedrich) did not involve a white dress from America, nor her father. Instead, in this telling of the tale of the First Communion, her aunts wanted her to wear a cap like a peasant girl’s, but Gabrielle insisted on something different, and in the end she got her way, and wore a white paper crown of thorns with artificial roses.

Such victories were rare, however. Gabrielle was more often thwarted by the aunts, as she explained to Haedrich, with all the minutiae that you might expect from a woman whose early career was as seamstress and milliner. Unlike the orphan girls at the convent, who wore black uniforms, she claimed to have had a little tailored black alpaca suit; her aunts gave her a new one every year in the springtime. ‘I should have liked a pink dress or a sky-blue one,’ she said wistfully. ‘I was in mourning all the time, while the peasant girls wore blue and pink. I envied them.’ In the summer, the aunts gave her ‘a horrible leghorn hat’, the details of which still haunted her, with its ‘little piece of velvet and a rose above the brim’. In the winter, she was made to wear a cloche, ‘very hard, with a kind of feather on it. I was told it was an eagle’s feather, but I knew it was a turkey’s, stiffened with paste. There was a little rubber band in the back that went under one’s hair, to hold the hat in place when it was windy. I thought the whole business was very ugly.’

At last, at the age of 15, Gabrielle was allowed to order a dress of her own, without intervention from the aunts, and she chose ‘a clinging mauve material’, but her body was still that of a child, ‘with nothing for it to cling to. The dressmaker had put a bit of taffeta at the bottom, with a flounce. Parma violet underneath!’ She’d come up with the idea for the flounced dress from a novel – and perhaps this is the closest to the truth that Gabrielle could admit, in her account of a loveless teenage girl who lost herself in fiction. ‘I thought that Parma violet was ravishing. My heroine wore it on her hat. The dressmaker didn’t have any more, so she put a twig of wisteria on mine.’ But when the long-awaited morning came for Gabrielle to wear the dress for the first time, to Sunday mass, her aunts told her to take it off, and they sent it back to the dressmaker, along with the twig-trimmed hat.

Had Gabrielle ever even seen herself in the violet dress, summoned up from the paper pages of a romance? In the house of her aunts, there were no mirrors. She could not glimpse her reflection anywhere; she was nowhere to be seen. If she made up stories from then on, you can understand why; for out of these loose threads, Gabrielle created an image of herself.