Later, many years later, when Chanel had slipped away from her life as a kept girl, replacing its shadowy uncertainties with what looked like the security of a self-made woman, the white camellia would appear in her work: in fabric prints, or shaped into diamonds and pearls; embossed on buttons, preserved in corsages. And in her salon, they glittered as crystals from her chandelier, and were carved into her Coromandel screens. These replications were in some sense true to life, in that they had no scent – for the camellia is without fragrance, and therefore does not decompose from sweet-smelling purity to the odour of decay. It is, perhaps, the perfect symbol of death as portrayed on stage in its least brutal way; the death of a courtesan or an abandoned woman, tragic yet compelling for an audience; stripped of the horror of visceral pain and fear and animal smell.
After her mother died, Chanel told Delay, she had been instructed to kiss her dead body, to kiss the corpse on the lips. For ever afterwards, she was possessed of a highly developed sense of smell, and was revolted by anything redolent of dirt. The courtesans smelled good, she said, but the society women were filthy. And Coco always kept herself clean.
His name was Arthur Capel, but his friends called him Boy, in an Edwardian era when English gentlemen were still able to celebrate their continuing freedoms long after they had turned from boys to men. Boy’s origins were swathed in romance, and he came to Paris amidst murmured speculation that he was connected in some mysterious way to the British aristocracy through the Capell family, who were descended from the Earls of Essex; or that he was the illegitimate son of a rich French father, possibly a Jewish financier. But the more prosaic truth is that he was exactly who he said he was: the son of Arthur and Berthe Capel, raised with three sisters in comfortable circumstances in an industrious Catholic family. His ambitious father had risen from being a clerk to a business entrepreneur; his French mother had moved to London as a schoolgirl. Born in Brighton in September 1881, educated at Beaumont (under the instruction of Jesuit priests) and Stonyhurst (a distinguished Catholic college), Capel subsequently went into his father’s business, expanding his family’s investments with energetic determination.
But for all his Catholic education and hard-headed work ethic, Capel was an accomplished playboy and polo player, sharing an enthusiasm for fast horses and pretty women with his friend Etienne Balsan. It was at Royallieu that Coco came across Capel, and there that a curious triangular relationship developed between Boy and Balsan and the girl who was mistress to no one. What was in reality a lengthy and convoluted process became, in Chanel’s retelling of it, an instant and dramatic incident that began on a trip away from Royallieu. ‘MB took me to Pau,’ she told Paul Morand, and conjured up for him a vivid scene set against the blue sky and snow-capped Pyrenees: ‘the babbling mountain streams that flow down to the plains; the fields that are green in every season … the red coats in the rain, and the best fox-hunting land in Europe …’
In this verdant landscape – the fertile territory of Chanel’s half-imaginary past – there was a fairy-tale castle with six towers, and galloping horses, and the sound of their hooves on cobblestones. And there, too, centre-stage in this glorious place, was Boy Capel. ‘In Pau I met an Englishman,’ she said to Morand. ‘We made each other’s acquaintance when we were out horse-trekking one day; we all lived on horseback.’ They drank wine together; it was ‘young, intoxicating and quite unusual’, and so was the Englishman. ‘The young man was handsome, very tanned and attractive. More than handsome, he was magnificent. I admired his nonchalance, and his green eyes. He rode bold and very powerful horses. I fell in love with him. I had never loved MB.’ Yet at first, she and Capel did not speak. ‘Not a word was exchanged between this Englishman and me. One day I heard he was leaving Pau.’ She asked him to tell her the time he was travelling to Paris; no other conversation was necessary. ‘The following day, I was at the station. I climbed onto the train.’
It was 1909, and Chanel was 26 by then, just under two years younger than Capel; though she told Claude Delay that Boy called her ‘my dear child’ when she declared that she was leaving Balsan for him. She held out the letter she had written to Balsan to explain her decision – ‘My dear Etienne, I shall never be able to repay the kindness and comfort you’ve given me while I’ve been with you.’ Boy wouldn’t listen to her, wouldn’t allow her to leave, in this retelling of a story that Chanel often told (always a variation on a theme); but she followed him, and dashed onto the train with her suitcase. Three days later, Balsan arrived in Paris, having pursued her there from Pau; jealousy had made him realise that he loved her after all.
This version of the love affair with Capel – Coco’s most romantic love story and a defining episode of her life – cast her as a girl who was not yet a woman. Indeed, she suggested that she was a virgin, and needed to consult a doctor in Paris before the love between a girl and Boy could be consummated. By then, she told Delay, Balsan had taken himself off to Argentina to mend his broken heart, and Capel had asked a doctor in Paris to take care of her. At this point, her narrative becomes unusually physical in its details, as if flesh and blood had overtaken whimsical romance. Boy was a man with a string of women, as well as polo ponies, and his mistresses would ask him when he was going to leave little Coco, but his reply was certain: ‘I’d rather cut my leg off.’
Instead, Coco was dispatched to the doctor, who performed a mysterious gynaecological procedure with a snip of his scissors. ‘The seat of pleasure is a question of structure,’ she told Delay, with a peculiar blend of the graphic and the cryptic. ‘As far as I’m concerned, if it hadn’t been for that little snip of the scissors … After that, it didn’t hurt any more.’
It was at about this time, she continued, that she ordered a tightly fitted dress from Chéruit, a fashionable Parisian couturier, in blue and white grosgrain: ‘I looked like the Virgin Mary.’ But it was so constrictive around the waist that when she wore the dress out to dine at the Café de Paris with Boy, she had to ask him to undo it for her. Afterwards, she couldn’t close its fastenings – Coco was undone in public – and didn’t have an evening coat to cover herself up. At that moment, she vowed never to wear corsets again.
There are echoes of a similarly uneasy shifting between freedom and subjugation, liberty and compulsion, in Chanel’s description to Morand of her relationship with Boy. They lived together in Paris, and he meant everything to her – ‘he was my father, my brother, my entire family’ – and there he instructed her as if she were his child. ‘Our house was full of flowers, but beneath the luxurious surroundings Boy Capel maintained a strict outlook, in keeping with his moral character, which was that of the well-brought-up Englishman. In educating me, he did not spare me; he commented on my conduct: “You behaved badly … you lied … you were wrong.” He had that gently authoritative manner of men who know women well, and who love them implicitly.’
But his implicit love manifested itself in explicit abandonment and infidelities; although Chanel seemed to accept that this ‘lion of London society’ had every right to be unfaithful to her. She maintained to Morand that Capel adored her as much as she adored him; that he was a perfect gentleman. ‘His manners were refined, his social success was dazzling,’ and yet he was ‘only happy in the company of the little brute from the provinces, the unruly child who had followed him. We never went out together (at that time Paris still had principles). We would delay the delights of advertising our love until later, when we were married.’ At the same time, Boy continued to enjoy the diversions of other women. Coco said she didn’t care – or at least, that is what she claimed to Morand – and yet her description of Capel’s behaviour hints at an anxious imbalance between anger and acceptance; and then there is that odd phrase of his again (or was it hers?) about chopping off his leg. ‘Boy Capel’s beautiful girlfriends would say to him angrily: “Drop that woman.” Not being in the least jealous, I pushed him into their arms; this baffled them and they kept on repeating: “Drop that woman.” He replied in that utterly natural way he had … “No. You might as well ask me to chop off a leg.” He needed me.
But she also needed him – financially, as well as in every other way – and she was aware that he had the capacity to run away from her whenever he chose to; just as her father