Perhaps this was the consoling story that Coco told herself when it appeared that no one cared (not the police, nor her family, nor anyone else, for that matter): that she was intriguing, even when it seemed that she was never the centre of attention. At least Emilienne d’Alençon took a certain interest in Coco, while apparently unperturbed by her presence, if Chanel’s description of her to Claude Delay is to be believed. ‘Emilienne d’Alençon used to ask me, “Well, are you happy?” I answered, “I’m neither happy nor unhappy – I’m hiding. It’s like home here, only better.”’
But she was sufficiently unhappy to write to her aunt Adrienne – who was still the mistress of the Baron de Nexon, though not yet married to him – to ask her to send the money for a train fare. In telling this story to Delay, Chanel did not specify where the train might take her; but in any event, she claimed that Adrienne wrote back to say that Coco should not leave Royallieu: ‘Whatever you do keep out of the way or they’ll put you in a reformatory.’ Who were ‘they’, that could lock up a woman for bad behaviour? Except, of course, as Chanel reiterated to Delay, she was still a little girl; so young that she used to fall asleep at the table and weep, because she was up past her bedtime, and at her aunts’ house she would have been asleep long before. But in this version Bluebeard was transformed into a perfect gentleman: ‘“I’ll take you home,” said Balsan. “I’ll tell them that I’m bringing you back just as I found you and you’re still only a little girl.”’
The idea of herself as a little girl was to permeate the rest of Chanel’s life, and yet, as is evident in Truman Capote’s description of her in 1959, it was also suggestive of a particular blend of innocence and experience that was so profitably displayed in her own appearance, and upon which she went on to make her fortune in couture. Capote observed: ‘Chanel, a spare spruce sparrow voluble and vital as a woodpecker, once, mid-flight in one of her unstoppable monologues, said, referring to the very costly pauvre orphan appearance she has lo these last decades modelled: “Cut off my head, and I’m thirteen.” But her head has always remained attached, definitely she had it perfectly placed way back yonder when she was thirteen, or scarcely more, and a moneyed “kind gentleman”, the first of several grateful and well-wishing patrons, asked petite “Coco”, daughter of a Basque blacksmith who had taught her to help him shoe horses, which she preferred, black pearls or white?’
Capote’s portrait of Chanel was written just a year after Breakfast at Tiffany’s, his glittering depiction of the balancing act undertaken by a beautiful girl dependent on the patronage of rich men; and he was alert to the imaginative possibilities of modern fairy tales. But it would be unkind not to recognise the real pain that Chanel suffered, even as she distanced herself from the past in storytelling (for telling stories is, amongst other things, a way in which to imagine a happy-ever-after, and for the misunderstood to come to an understanding of their tribulations).
So there she was; poor little Coco (‘Qui qu’a vu Coco?’), imprisoned in another abbey, surrounded by the forest of Compiègne. The nuns’ regime had vanished, and in pride of place was a courtesan – the famous Emilienne, a former mistress of the king of Belgium, among others; a cocotte so highly prized that Leopold II had in turn introduced her to King Edward VII, to whom she allegedly declared that French aristocrats were the only men who knew how to make love to a woman. Emilienne had been heaped with diamonds and endearments; men had lost their hearts and their fortunes to her; although some had come up with a more practical arrangement, such as the eight members of the Jockey Club who had pooled their resources in order to procure her attention on a regular basis.
Coco was still the outsider looking in, the girl with no money and no father, just as she had been at school, with all the unease and uncertainty that such a position entailed. Even so, if her years in Aubazine had taught Gabrielle everything she knew about needlework, then her time in Royallieu gave her an equally thorough education in how to stitch the empty hours together, to make something of herself. She spent six years there – a period of apparent idleness, punctuated by fancy dress parties and horseriding; of lengthy boredom and occasional debauchery; of setting herself apart from the courtesans who came and went from Royallieu. But for all her efforts at distancing herself, she was intrigued by the beauties who entertained the men; along with Emilienne, there was another cocotte-turned-actress, Gabrielle Dorziat, a charming young singer named Marthe Davelli, and Suzanne Orlandi, the mistress of Balsan’s friend Baron Foy. Coco watched and waited; she saw the manner in which Emilienne ceased to be Balsan’s lover but remained his friend. And Coco listened to Emilienne’s stories, as well as telling her own, taking heed of the woman who had come from nothing – the daughter of a Parisian concierge in Montmartre, who had made a teenage debut scantily clad in a circus act – and ended up with something more precious than her ample wealth. ‘The only serious person I met in those days was Emilienne d’Alençon,’ Chanel remarked to Haedrich; for Emilienne not only wrote the poetry to prove it but was turned into prose by Marcel Proust. (She was said to have inspired the writer’s portrait of Rachel in A la recherche du temps perdu, a demi-mondaine who ensnares the heart and jewels of the young aristocrat, Robert de Saint-Loup.)
After a time, Coco realised that she preferred the courtesans to the sneering society women. At least Emilienne was clean, she said; unlike the supposedly respectable wives and mothers, who smelled dirty to Coco. ‘I thought the cocottes were ravishing with their hats that were too big and their heavy make-up,’ she observed to Haedrich. ‘They were so appetising!’ Not that she wanted to dress like them – all her efforts went into creating herself as a gamine, choosing sober androgyny over their crinolines and whalebone corsets, their feathers and lace and chinchilla. She wore softly knotted schoolboy ties, and simple white shirts with Peter Pan collars; and little straw boaters, as plain as a convent uniform.
But her taste for romance did not leave her, and neither did her sense of loss. Perhaps this is why she responded with such heightened emotion to Alexandre Dumas’s novel La Dame aux camélias, and its stage version starring Sarah Bernhardt as Marguerite Gautier, a courtesan who nevertheless remained the embodiment of purity, a tragic lover who dies of consumption, having stayed untainted by the vice all around. ‘La Dame aux camélias was my life, all the trashy novels I’d fed on,’ she said to Delay, who recognised the link between Marguerite and Chanel’s story of her mother’s deathbed – the drops of red blood coughed onto white sheets and a snowy handkerchief. But in this particular narrative, Chanel placed herself centre-stage, as a provincial 13-year-old on a trip to the theatre in Paris with her aunts. She sobbed her way through the entire performance of La Dame aux camélias, she told Delay; and her grief was so noisy that the rest of the audience complained. Nevertheless, she was dressed for the part that she had assigned herself: ‘I was in black. It looked nice, with my white collar. In the provinces, you wear your mourning until it falls off you in pieces! People told my aunts I ought to have another dress. “But she’s an orphan,” they said. “When she’s 16 we’ll see.”’
On other occasions, however, Chanel said that she was already living at Royallieu when she went to see La Dame aux camélias, accompanying her aunt Adrienne and the Baron de Nexon; and her account veered between disdain and distress: either she wept so loudly that the rest of the audience hissed at her, or she declared her disgust for Bernhardt as grotesque, like ‘an old clown’. Something of that abhorrence and fascination remained: when Sarah Bernhardt died in 1923, Chanel joined the lines of other sightseers, then found herself troubled by the difference between the staged beauty of Marguerite’s death in La Dame aux camélias and the grim reality of the cadaver before her. ‘It was terrible,’ she told Delay, ‘they were queuing up. Sarah was dead and all I saw was a poor little lifeless ruin with a scrap of tulle … I was pale as death. The sordidness of it all …’
In Delay’s sympathetic interpretation, the inconsistencies of Chanel’s response to La Dame aux camélias suggested ambivalence, rather than an aversion to the truth; not least because of the earlier experience of her mother’s deathbed, and the unavoidable sight of the pale corpse lying beside