Coco Chanel (22 page)

By the summer of 1918, the Germans had concluded that their only remaining chance of victory was to defeat the Allies before the overwhelming resources of the United States forces could be deployed against them. Meanwhile, Old Tiger, as Clemenceau was now known, traveled from one headquarters at the front to another, haranguing the generals and endearing himself to the troops by hobbling down into trench after trench to rouse and inspire them. He threw out the French commander in chief, Philippe Pétain, and replaced him with Ferdinand Foch. Paris was now bombarded from the air; the distant cannons continued hurling shells into the city, and once more the fighting had almost reached the capital. Again there was an exodus. Those who could went by car, while the rest squeezed onto crowded trains and any other transport they could find.

And while Arthur and Diana vacillated about their feelings for each other, Gabrielle was at the mercy of their uncertainty. Arthur may have gone for periods without seeing Gabrielle, but he found it impossible to give her up.

Between the strenuously hard work and the heartache, Arthur somehow made good progress on his new book. Here, complaining of a neglect of the art of maternity, and the prevalent system of marriages of convenience, he asked, when mothers married off their daughters for wealth, “What becomes of love and virtue in these barters of gold and beauty?” He believed that the natural result of this prison for women was that they turned to adultery, and “discretion replaces virtue.”
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Arthur believed that “this conception of marriage is a crime; a dreadful crime against the woman . . . Intelligence, beauty and virtue are the most precious gifts of a race. They all depend on motherhood.”
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The war was turning Arthur's thoughts toward the regeneration of society, and thus he was being led to a new estimation of motherhood. And he must, at least partly, have had Diana in mind when he went on to say that “the English aristocracy . . . does not give a dowry to its daughters and leaves it to love to unite its children . . . the future role of women consists of making a Utopia a reality by giving birth to a generation that will be capable of thriving in it.”
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At last, in that spring of 1918, Arthur and Diana came to a final decision. Somehow, Arthur broke the news to Gabrielle: he had found someone else and he had asked her to marry him. Perhaps Gabrielle had no longer been able to bear what she sensed already and had initiated this confession. But no matter how much she might have suspected, or indeed prepared herself for it over the last months, Arthur's words left her devastated.

She had never been an ordinary mistress, for whom the hackneyed old explanations would have to suffice. And while her growing success seemed only to increase her allure, one commentator, imagining that this bold “queen of fashion” must have “some corners of vulgarity where one could detect the common extraction,” found that “yet she is a charming and graceful being. Neither pushing nor servile . . . a cultured and subtle mind.”
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Had the very thing attracting Arthur to Gabrielle in the first place—her difference—become too challenging for him to manage?

In making herself financially independent, even wealthy, Gabrielle had apparently made herself free—and also exposed herself to hurt. And we recall again Arthur's prophesy to her—“You're proud, you'll suffer”—and his realization that thinking he'd given her a plaything, he had in fact given her freedom.
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Arthur's intention to marry left Gabrielle feeling weak and abandoned. She had lost, perhaps forsaken, the only man she had ever really loved. In company with the courtesans and the mistresses whose lives she had struggled to transcend, it appeared she still wasn't good enough to marry. More than any other person, it was Arthur who had helped Gabrielle to become the person she wanted to be. But it now seemed as if the independence she had so striven for had been earned at the cost of her heart. With an awful resignation, Morand's Irène tells Lewis that she now believed she had been wrong to work so much. But she also recognized that now she could not turn back:

Gabrielle was unable to alter what she had become. But if her intuition had prepared her for Arthur's news, so that she was able to conceal from him the depth of her feelings, when his rejection finally came, it broke her heart. Unforeseeably, the war had changed Arthur's notion of commitment and he had felt honor bound to make a choice.

Once he had broken the news of his impending marriage to Gabrielle, she could no longer remain at the apartment they lived in together. Then while the Germans approached Paris and those thousands were fleeing the embattled city, Misia Edwards came to her rescue. She knew of a beautiful apartment hastily abandoned by a friend and told Gabrielle she really must take it on. The large ground-floor windows at 46 quai Debilly overlook the Seine on one side and the Trocadéro on the other. While mirrors lined the walls of the entrance hall and more filled an alcove, the ceiling shone with fine black lacquer. A huge Buddha dominated the low-level furniture and a slight scent of cocoa hung upon the air. The recent occupant was a devoted opium smoker and had been fearful that remaining in a fallen city would leave him without sources for his habit. Gabrielle was for the first time in an apartment paid for out of her own purse. She set about arranging it exactly to her liking.

In addition to finding Gabrielle a place of refuge, Misia “sent” a couple to look after her: Joseph Leclerc and his wife, Marie. These two were to prove Gabrielle's devoted servants. In the same way, in 1913, Arthur had sent a woman named Mme. Aubert to Gabrielle at rue Cambon. Her real name was Mademoiselle de Saint-Pons, and it was she whom Gabrielle would give credit for “advising me and guiding me.”
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Despite Mme. Aubert's flaming-red hair, she remained discreetly in the background. Invisible to the public, she helped everything at rue Cambon run smoothly and was indispensable to Gabrielle, even more so in difficult times. Her discretion was such that Gabrielle's great-niece would later say, “Hardly anyone knew her”; she would remain as Gabrielle's amanuensis until the Second World War.

Meanwhile, Arthur wrote to Diana one of those letters in which he both strived for her and tried to be realistic about their difficulties: “Don't bother about your qualms, they are fully justified . . . but what does it matter if we love one another—my Buggins?”
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Having finally made her decision to marry, Diana wrote to tell her friend, the diplomat Duff Cooper. All the same, she was defensive and gave the impression that there were those who disapproved. The fact that Arthur was “half French and not fond of country life” was, for example, in her aunt's eyes a black mark against him indeed. Diana did, however, find support from her father and sisters. Family opinion has it that her sister, Lady Laura Lovat, was an extremely competent, even controlling, young woman, who would never have “permitted” her younger sister to wed someone of whom she did not approve. Meanwhile, Diana said to Duff Cooper: “I've been ill, we've nearly lost the war, and I think I'm going to marry Capel after all . . . I look for nothing but abuse from the world, but I prefer this sort of marriage to the . . . mariage de convenance and feel quite certain that this one is fraught with great possibilities & charm.”
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She implored him to write to her “and say you're pleased about it. And that you like my ‘darkie', I adore him.”
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In preparation for this married life, Arthur had found a grand apartment on the avenue du Bois. He then asked his sister Bertha to live with him as a kind of chaperone, by way of announcing to the world that he no longer lived with Gabrielle.

 

The bloody battle to repulse the German army from Paris had begun, and Arthur was kept very busy in his role as assistant political secretary. Owing to the extraordinary circumstances, all leave was canceled, and preparations for his and Diana's wedding, at her sister and brother-in-law's Scottish estate, Beaufort Castle, were held up.

It has been traditional to place the date for the Capel marriage in October. In fact, despite their prevarication, Arthur and Diana were actually married considerably earlier than this, on August 3, 1918,
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in the Lovat family chapel, with Diana's brother-in-law Lord Lovat as chief witness. Arthur must have been required back on duty without delay, because by the following Saturday (August 10), the British ambassador, Lord Derby, recorded in his diary that several people coming to lunch with him in Paris had missed their train after the ferry crossing, “but the Capels (late Diana Wyndham) motored them from Havre.” The following day, the newlyweds were Lord Derby's guests with several others, and Diana confided in him that their delayed wedding had been her fault because of her indecision. The ambassador thought that “the marriage will be a success, as he is a real good fellow, though a little rough, but that is just what she will correct. She became a Roman Catholic either the morning of her marriage or the day before and I expect really it was making the change that made her undecided.”
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Little did Lord Derby know how mistaken he was as to one of the most significant reasons for Diana's doubts: Gabrielle. But what of this third side of the triangle, forced to remain in the shadows for these past weeks and months?

As the date of Arthur's marriage drew nearer, the strain had told upon Gabrielle so badly that shortly before the nuptials, she had suffered an emotional collapse. Unaware of this, a friend, Antoinette Bernstein, wife of the playwright Henri Bernstein, had written to reprimand her for some negligence or other. Gabrielle's stoic yet poignant reply conveys the suffering she was then trying to contain. She was telling herself, as much as Antoinette, that she would recover; one sees the effort necessary to overcome her emotional exhaustion.

Another letter, sent by Gabrielle's secretary, and regarding the renting of her house, refers to the fact that “Mademoiselle Chanel has been unwell lately and was not able to reply right away.”
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By August 18, one week after Arthur's return with his bride to Paris, we find that Gabrielle had fled the city in an attempt to leave behind her “thousand worries.” She had gone to find comfort with her friends Henri and Antoinette Bernstein, as promised, at a spa town, Uriage, in the Alps. And here Gabrielle was to spend the rest of that summer. Ostensibly, she was part of the grand annual exodus from the capital's August heat. In fact, she was taking a spa cure to help restore and thereby “cure” herself of Arthur. As it turned out, for much of Gabrielle's stay, Antoinette Bernstein was summering by the sea at Deauville with her mother. But shortly after Gabrielle's arrival, Antoinette brought her and Henri's small daughter, Georges, to see her father at the villa that Gabrielle and he were sharing while taking their “methodical and prolonged cure.” Antoinette stayed for about a week before returning to Deauville. In Paris, meanwhile, the British ambassador was noting in his diary that

The huge stresses of Arthur's war work would have reduced many to an emotional crisis of some kind. In addition, he had been living for many months under the strain of conducting his romance with Diana with a divided heart. He had never been able to push the source of that division—Gabrielle—very far from his mind. He had not entered into the sacrament of marriage lightly, and the enormity of his action had overcome Arthur and reduced him to a state of emotional collapse. Unbeknownst to each other, he and Gabrielle were suffering a simultaneous crisis.

As Gabrielle made her own attempt at recuperation, also far from Paris, a young observer, Simone de Caillavet, recorded that she was mystified by the relationship between Gabrielle and Henri Bernstein and his wife. She found Antoinette and Gabrielle “equally emaciated” and commented on their “vehement friendship for one another.” Simone was unable to fathom “what bonds link the three units of this enigmatic trio.”
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Henri Bernstein was an incorrigible philanderer and a man possessed of a rather intense and melodramatic personality, rather like the heightened endings of his plays about love, which were so successful at the time. Gabrielle had arrived in the mountains overcome by a sense of rejection and loss, and temporary forgetfulness in seduction by this older man may have given her a welcome respite from her secretly desperate state of mind.