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Coco

When Gabrielle turned 18, she finally left the nuns at Aubazine, who kept on only those girls with a religious vocation to join the order’s novitiate. She was not completely abandoned, however; nor was she without family, despite her father’s continuing absence. He had been one of 19 children, and his parents were still very much alive; indeed, their youngest daughter, Adrienne, was only a year older than Gabrielle. Although her father’s family seem not to have figured in her early life, or when he abandoned the children after their mother’s death, several relatives did appear thereafter. That they included two aunts (neither of them nuns, nor at all like the ‘aunts’ Chanel described in her subsequent stories of childhood) has added further confusion to the task of her biographers. But at some point during Gabrielle’s later years at Aubazine, she began to spend an occasional holiday with her paternal grandparents and Adrienne, to whom she became as close as if they were sisters, and also with another of their daughters, her aunt Louise, who had married a railway employee, Paul Costier. Louise and Paul had no children of their own, and invited Adrienne and Gabrielle to visit them in Varennessur-Allier, a station on the Vichy to Moulins line, where Paul was employed as stationmaster. And it was to Moulins that Gabrielle was sent at 18 to the Notre Dame school, a religious institution run by canonesses where her aunt Adrienne was already being educated.

It is not entirely clear whether Gabrielle’s sisters, Julia and Antoinette, accompanied her to Moulins; according to one of the stories that Chanel told Claude Delay, Julia had left an orphanage at 16 and was married. But she also spoke to Delay of a holiday spent with her sister at a convent in Corrèze. The food there was awful, she said, and the nuns were foolish little country girls who played shuttlecock, not at all like the fierce aunts in whose house Gabrielle had been raised. In this strange and unlikely sounding convent, Gabrielle played the organ and sang, impressing the nuns, who were amazed at her talent; just as they had been astounded by Julia’s piano playing: ‘When my sister had been playing the piano they used to look at her fingers to see what she had on the ends of them. Little peasants!’

But no one was impressed by Gabrielle in the Notre Dame school in Moulins, for she was one of the charity pupils who were provided with a free place, and therefore treated differently to those whose family could afford to pay for their education. Here it was Gabrielle who was dismissed as a little peasant – the kind of girl who might be made to feel inferior to those who had piano lessons; a girl who wore a plain pauper’s uniform with second-hand shoes rather than the more expensive outfits of the fee-paying students. It was here, too, that she was given further instruction in how to sew, which had already formed a substantial part of her education at Aubazine. If she was not to be a nun, then she must earn her living like other orphans, and there was always work available for a seamstress. More sewing took place during Gabrielle’s holidays with her aunt Louise, from whom she learned how to trim and embellish hats, to add to the practical needlework skills she had acquired from the nuns. Adrienne also visited, and as well as darning, the girls fashioned new collars and cuffs out of remnants of white linen to trim their sober black convent uniforms. In the evenings they read the romances that Louise had cut out and saved from magazines and periodicals, hand-sewn together, and carefully stored in the attic.

‘You don’t know the damage country attics can do to the imagination,’ Chanel told Delay, recalling the stories that she had absorbed as a girl. Her favourites had been by Pierre Decourcelle, a prolific author of romances who also wrote for Le Matin and Le Journal. Chanel described him to Delay as ‘a sentimental ninny’, yet also acknowledged his influence on her as her ‘one teacher’. But to Marcel Haedrich, she admitted that her ‘aunts’ had educated her to recognise the ‘solid substance’ of orderliness, ‘for having things done right, for chests filled with linens that smell good, and gleaming floors’.

While the nuns taught her the value of cleanliness, Pierre Decourcelle gave her a taste for the forbidden. As Chanel remarked to Haedrich, she lost herself in his stories, ‘melodramas in which everything happened in a wild-eyed romanticism’, and longed to live in their world, instead of in her aunts’ house:

‘I thought all that was awful because in my novels there was nothing but silk pillows and white-lacquered furniture. I’d have liked to do everything in white lacquer. Sleeping in an alcove made me miserable, it humiliated me. I broke off bits of wood wherever I could, thinking, what old trash this is. I did it out of sheer wickedness, for the sake of destruction. When one considers all the things that go on in a child’s head … I wanted to kill myself.’

It was not the only time that Chanel talked about her desire to kill herself as a child – as if her longing to escape, and her craving for glamorous romance, could be fulfilled in suicide. ‘At the time, I often used to think about dying,’ she told Paul Morand. ‘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.’

If her suggestion was that in being wicked she would reveal the wickedness of others, then perhaps she believed that by dying she might find her rightful place in life. Gabrielle grew up to discover that suicide was not her way out; yet in a sense (however nonsensical it might appear to others), she did need to kill something of herself in order to make her escape. She felt unloved – by the ‘aunts’, by the family who had abandoned her to the care of nuns, by her absent father – although the stories she read had taught her that love conquered all; that desire and passion set men and women alight. An element of her conflict emerges in the tales she told of love (and the lack of it); of the sacred and the profane. Given her aversion to providing any detail about her family – other than the fictional aunts who stand in for the nuns at Aubazine (and possibly those at the convent school in Moulins) – the occasional mentions are significant. To Claude Delay, she referred to her uncle Paul Costier, the stationmaster, sending her a first-class railway ticket (‘because I wouldn’t go second-class – it was a bore’). In other versions, Chanel described her abortive attempt to escape to Paris with Adrienne from her uncle and aunt’s house in Varennes. They had only enough money for second-class tickets, but Gabrielle insisted on sitting in the first-class carriage, for which they were fined by the conductor; without any funds to sustain them in the capital, the runaway girls were forced to return home. Except that Gabrielle did not feel herself to be at home anywhere – not at Aubazine, nor at school in Moulins, nor in the Costiers’ house. When she arrived to stay with Paul and Louise, she told Delay, her uncle was warmly affectionate, but her aunt was detached and cold. At night, Paul came into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight, and said, ‘You’ll stay a nice long time, won’t you?’ But Gabrielle sensed that her aunt didn’t approve of her, and so she left the next day. According to Claude Delay, more than half a century later, Chanel ‘still felt the chill’ of rejection, expressing it as if she had been left entirely alone.

She was also without God, or at least that was what she told Delay. Gabrielle’s loss of faith had occurred in Aubazine, at her First Communion, after her father had supposedly sent her the dress from America. It is unclear from her account whether she was actually wearing this unsuitable dress in church – instead, she spoke of her fascination at the sight of the barefoot mendicant monk who conducted a three-day retreat with the children before their First Communion, a man in a long home-spun robe with a girdle (a description reminiscent of St Etienne himself). ‘When I got there – the monk and his bare feet and his oration – that was the life I’d been waiting for. Inside the church it was like a mirage. It got dark at five, the candles were lit, I could hear the breathing of the boys and girls around me, in the half-light, almost asleep. I said at confession afterwards it had inspired profane feelings in me.’

When the priest instructed her to meditate upon the Stations of the Cross in front of the other girls as a penance, Gabrielle refused, saying that she would do so in bed later that night. ‘The Catholic religion crumbled for me,’ she told Delay. ‘I realised I was a person, outside all the secrecy of confession.’ And yet, despite the confessions she made to Delay – a young woman at the time, but who was to come to understand the confessional aspect of her career as a psychoanalyst – Chanel could never quite admit to what followed next.

To Paul Morand, she spoke of horses. Her aunts bred horses, she said, and sold them to the army. Gabrielle was wild – ‘untameable’ – and ran wherever she pleased. ‘I mounted our horses bare-back (at sixteen, I had never seen a saddle), I caught hold of our best animals (or occasionally other people’s, as I fancied) by their manes or their tails. I stole all the carrots in the house to feed them.’ (This was not the only time Chanel recalled stealing food as a child; she described hiding away from the aunts and cutting herself huge slices of bread that she took to eat in the lavatory. But the cook saw her, and said, ‘You’ll cut yourself in half.’)

With the horses came the soldiers, arriving at her ‘aunts’ house’ to buy their mounts: ‘Fine hussars or chasseurs, with sky-blue dolmans and black frogging, and their pelisses on their shoulders. They came every year in their beautifully harnessed phaetons; they looked in the horses’ mouths to see how old they were, stroked their fetlocks to check that they weren’t inflamed, and slapped their flanks; it was a great party; a party that for me was fraught with a degree of anxiety; supposing they were going to take my favourite horses away from me?’ One wonders if Chanel knew what she was doing as she told this story to Morand when she was in her sixties; whether it was a story that she was telling herself, or if she was teasing him.

Whatever her motive – unconscious or not – her tale takes on a darker, almost sadistic tone. The officers could not choose her favourite horses; Gabrielle said she had made sure of that by galloping them unshod on flinty ground so that their hooves were ruined. But one of the soldiers caught on: ‘“These horses have hooves like cattle, their soles have gone and their frogs are rotten!” he said, referring to our best-looking creatures. I no longer dared to look the officer in the eye, but he had seen through me; as soon as my aunts had turned away, he whispered in a low voice: “So you’ve been galloping without shoes, eh, you little rascal?”’

It seems highly unlikely that Chanel encountered any army officers while she was under the care of nuns in the orphanage at Aubazine; but she undoubtedly came across them in Moulins, after she had left the Notre Dame boarding school. The town was dominated by the military, for several regiments were garrisoned there, including the Tenth Light Horse, the 10ème Chasseurs, who wore scarlet breeches and rakish peaked caps. The Mother Superior at Notre Dame had found employment for Adrienne and Gabrielle as shop assistants and seamstresses in a draper’s store on the Rue de l’Horloge, which sold trousseaux and mourning clothes to the local gentry, as well as layettes for newborn babies. The girls shared an attic bedroom above the shop, and also worked at the weekends for a nearby tailor, altering breeches for cavalry officers. It was there that Gabrielle and Adrienne were spotted by half-a-dozen men, who started taking them out at night to La Rotonde, a pavilion in a small park in Moulins, where concerts were held for audiences from the local barracks. They were rowdy affairs – a combination of music hall and soldiers’ saloon – but Gabrielle was determined to start singing on stage, and eventually found a regular evening slot, accompanied first by Adrienne, and then as a solo performer. She had only two songs in her repertoire: ‘Ko Ko Ri Ko’ (its refrain was the French version of ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’) and ‘Qui qu’a vu Coco?’, a ditty about a girl who had lost her dog. Soon the audience greeted her with barnyard cockerel calls, and christened her with the name of the lost dog. Thus Gabrielle became Coco, a metamorphosis that might have been humiliating rather than liberating, but nevertheless led to the birth of a legend.

Chanel never talked to her friends about this episode of her life, even in the most guarded of terms; other than to deny it to Paul Morand, dismissing it as foolish legend, along with the other stories in circulation: ‘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.’ She did, however, mention the name of the cavalry officer who was to become her lover, Etienne Balsan, and referred to his horses as providing the means of her escape. To Morand, she declared, ‘horses have influenced the course of my life’, and told a story of being sent by the aunts to the Auvergne spa town of Vichy, to spend the summer with her grandfather, who was taking the waters there. ‘I was so glad to have escaped … from the gloomy house, from needlework, from my trousseau; embroidering initials on the towels for my future household, and sewing crosses in Russian stitching on my nightdresses, for a hypothetical wedding night, made me feel ill; in a fury, I spat on my trousseau.’ In this version, she knocked five years off her age, and had herself sewing (and loathing) her own trousseau, rather than those of wealthier women in the shop where she laboured in Moulins. But her desire to be freed from the aunts and their legacy was manifest. ‘I was sixteen. I was becoming pretty. I had a face that was as plump as a fist, hidden in a vast swathe of black hair that reached the ground.’ And Vichy, with its casino and cafés and Belle Epoque opera house, its boulevards and gardens landscaped for Napoleon III, was to be the backdrop that she chose for her adventure: ‘Vichy was a fairyland. A ghastly fairyland in reality, but wonderful to fresh eyes … Vichy was my first journey. Vichy would teach me about life.’

It was in Vichy, she said, that she went to a tea party and ‘made the acquaintance of a young man, MB [Monsieur Balsan]; he owned a racing stable’. They arranged to meet the following day, in fields where horses grazed beside the river. There, she heard the roar of a fantastical torrent of water, whereupon Balsan asked her to go with him to his house in Compiègne. She said yes, and ran away with him: ‘My grandfather believed I had returned home; my aunts thought I was at my grandfather’s house.’

Chanel told a similar story to Bettina Ballard, a young Vogue editor in Paris whom she befriended in the Thirties; although in this version she was even younger. ‘She escaped the aunts before she was sixteen,’ recounted Ballard. ‘She went to visit her grandfather at Vichy and was so afraid that she would be sent back to the aunts that she stopped a handsome young officer in the park and asked him to take her away with him. He did just that, but he took her home to his father’s chateau. It was Etienne Balsan.’

Claude Delay heard a more embellished tale of Chanel encountering Etienne Balsan at a Vichy tea party: she had been taken there by her aunt Adrienne, who was by then involved with the Baron de Nexon (a relationship that was in fact a real one, and although the Baron’s parents were fiercely opposed to the affair between their son and a seamstress, the two eventually married, many years afterwards, in a romance worthy of those that Adrienne and Gabrielle had read as teenagers). In this gothic account, Chanel told Balsan that she had been beset by bad luck ever since the death of her mother and her father’s departure to America, and announced to him that she was going to kill herself: ‘All through my childhood I wanted to be loved. Every day I thought about how to kill myself. The viaduct, perhaps …’ Despite this somewhat unorthodox introduction, Balsan was sufficiently intrigued to provide a different way out by inviting her to see his stables and house, a former abbey named Royallieu.

And so Coco went with him there, to an abbey that had become a house of pleasure, leaving Gabrielle behind her, locked away in a shadowy place where no one might find her, nor the torn remnants of her past.