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.
Since I am not yet of an age to invent, I must make do with telling a tale. I therefore invite the reader to believe that this story is true.
Alexandre Dumas, La Dame aux camélias
There are many mysteries