That came later, however. First, she had come up with a plan to sell hats, although the question remained as to who, precisely, was to back her business, and where she was to live, and whether Balsan had been abandoned altogether. Many years later, confiding in Marcel Haedrich, Chanel said that she went on seeing Etienne Balsan after she left Royallieu, and he continued to declare his love for her. ‘We lunched and dined together – Etienne, Boy and I. Occasionally Etienne talked about killing himself, and I wept. I wept so! “You aren’t going to let Etienne kill himself,” I said to myself. “You’ll set them both free. Go throw yourself into the Seine!”’
Other, less torrid versions give more emphasis to Etienne and Boy’s financial discussions about who should pay what to keep Chanel. To Morand, Chanel claimed that Balsan returned from Argentina with a bag of lemons, which had gone rotten, as a gift for her. It remains unclear whether or not he intended this to be symbolic, in some unspecified way, or if Chanel herself had conjured up the rotting lemons as a mystifying metaphor, or was simply for once telling the truth. All that emerges with any certainty from her account to Morand was that matters between the three of them were confused: ‘there were tears and quarrels. Boy was English, he didn’t understand; everything became muddled. He was very moral.’
But to Haedrich, Chanel presented herself as the muddled one of the threesome, a little girl who didn’t understand the machinations of two older men. ‘I was just a kid,’ she said, insisting that she had celebrated her eighteenth birthday with Capel when she came with him to Paris. ‘I had no money. I lived at the Ritz and everything was paid for me. It was an incredible situation. Parisian society talked about it. I didn’t know Parisian society … It was very complicated. The cocottes were paid. I knew that, I’d been taught that. I said to myself, “Are you going to become like them? A kept woman? But this is appalling!” I didn’t want it.’
What she did want was to earn her own living. Eventually, after protracted negotiations, Balsan and Capel agreed to share the cost of setting her up in business to sell the hats that she was already making for herself, and for her friends (and their girlfriends). Among her first clients were Emilienne d’Alençon, Suzanne Orlandi and Gabrielle Dorziat, the cocottes-turned-actresses who began to wear Chanel’s designs on stage and in magazines. Capel covered the running costs; Balsan provided the Paris premises at his bachelor apartment in Boulevard Malesherbes. ‘They had decided to give me a place where I could make my hats,’ she said to Haedrich, ‘the way they would have given me a toy, thinking, “Let’s let her amuse herself, and later we’ll see.” They didn’t understand how important this was to me. They were very rich men, polo players. They didn’t understand anything about the little girl who came into their lives to play. A little girl who understood nothing of what was happening to her.’
It seems highly likely that Coco did understand something of her circumstances, or at least the practical arrangements that had been put in place; but her constant emphasis on her youth and innocence, when she was already in her late twenties, is perhaps more indicative of real confusion on her part, rather than her simply being disingenuous. After all, her status was ambiguous with these men who said that they loved her but treated her like a plaything. And troubling questions still remained. What were their real feelings for her, and how long would they be sustained? How would she survive without them and which of them would be left heartbroken?
The one certainty was her decisive approach to fashion. Just as at Royallieu, Coco dressed like a young convent girl or a schoolboy, and made hats that were stripped of embellishments, of the frills and furbelows that she dismissed as weighing a woman down, and being too cumbersome to let her think straight. They weren’t entirely original – at first, she bought simple straw boaters from the Galeries Lafayette department store, and then trimmed them with ribbon herself – but they were chic. ‘Nothing makes a woman look older than obvious expensiveness, ornateness, complication,’ she said to Claude Delay in old age, still wearing the little straw hats of her youth. ‘I still dress as I always did, like a schoolgirl.’
And in doing so, Coco began to edge her way to the centre of attention, elbowing past her rivals and competitors, whether the society ladies or the cocottes or couturiers. (Paul Poiret, whose fame at the time was such that he dubbed himself the ‘King of Fashion’, said of Chanel’s early days as a milliner, ‘We ought to have been on guard against that boyish head. It was going to give us every kind of shock, and produce, out of its little conjuror’s hat, gowns and coiffures and jewels and boutiques.’) Thus the day came, she told Morand, when she felt able to insist that Boy should dine with her at the casino in Deauville, rather than attend a gala there without her: ‘All eyes were on us: my timid entrance, my awkwardness, which contrasted with a wonderfully simple white dress, attracted people’s attention. The beauties of the period, with that intuition women have for threats unknown, were alarmed.’
Whether they were prompted by alarm or jealousy or simple curiosity, the beauties flocked to buy hats from Chanel at her milliner’s establishment. Soon, her business had grown too successful for Balsan’s apartment, and backed by Capel – whose own fortunes were prospering further – she opened new premises on 1st January 1910 at 21 Rue Cambon. ‘I still have it,’ she told Paul Morand. ‘On the door, it read: “Chanel, modes”.’ She summoned her sister, Antoinette, and her aunt Adrienne to Paris to help – both of them beautiful, as well as skilled seamstresses; Adrienne still the consort of Baron de Nexon – and Chanel worked alongside them, but also went out and about, as her own best model. ‘In the grandstands, people began talking about my amazing, unusual hats,’ she said to Morand, ‘so neat and austere … Customers came, initially prompted by curiosity. One day I had a visit from one such woman, who admitted quite openly: “I came to have a look at you.” I was the curious creature, the little woman whose straw boater fitted her head, and whose head fitted her shoulders.’
But still, she sensed danger all around. Eventually, she told Haedrich, she ventured out to Maxim’s for the first time, accompanied by three escorts (‘one of them was an Englishman who was determined not to be impressed by anything’). It was in 1913, and respectable women did not eat dinner at the restaurant, but Coco was happy to be there with Capel and his friends. ‘I’d been told that the cocottes went to Maxim’s,’ she remarked. ‘I liked the cocottes: they were clean.’ But as in the convent at Aubazine, even amidst cleanliness, there was blood.
A couple sat down at the next table, and immediately, another woman appeared, and asked the man to come outside. Coco watched as the man shook his head, a gesture met with a volcanic eruption of violent rage. ‘She broke a glass and began to slash at his face with the base of it. There was blood all over. I fled at once, I went up the stairs, the little spiral stairway. I ran into a room and crawled under a table covered by a cloth. I didn’t want to see any more of that quarrel and that blood. How horrible! I was weeping because the three men I was with had done nothing. All that mattered to them was that they shouldn’t be spattered by the blood.’
Thus Boy, her supposed protector, nevertheless left her vulnerable; and all she could do was to hide beneath a cloth. She had lost her heart to Capel, and he proved himself capable of being heartless, at least in the ease with which he conducted his infidelities. ‘He really understood me,’ she told Haedrich, 60 years later. ‘He handled me like a child. He said to me, “Coco, if only you’d stop lying! Can’t you talk like everyone else? Where do you dig up the things you imagine?”’ But she was not imagining his affairs with other women, even though she pretended not to care (and in doing so, was perhaps false to herself). ‘I couldn’t have cared less whether he was unfaithful,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘I found it rather dirty, but it didn’t count between us.’ And to Morand, she claimed to have had so much fun with Capel that nothing else mattered. ‘“Tell me who you’re sleeping with, it would amuse me greatly,” I would say to him.’ Boy Capel laughed, she said, but in other accounts she did not seem to be as amused as he was, nor quite as nonchalant as she had claimed to be.
True, to the