If the mirrored staircase is the backbone of the House of Chanel, then Mademoiselle’s salon – the largest of the three main rooms in her apartment – is its hidden heart. The outside world is not entirely excluded, for there are windows reaching from floor to ceiling, overlooking Rue Cambon to the school on the other side of the street, where children still study in the first-floor classroom, just as they did when Mademoiselle Chanel lived here. But did she look out of the window at them, or keep her eyes fixed on the treasures within these walls? There are yet more Chinese screens hiding the doors (Chanel hated the sight of doors, she said, for they reminded her of those who had already left, and those who would leave her again). Look closer, and you could lose yourself within their intricacies, drawn into a landscape of boats and bridges, of graceful women kneeling beside the water; a place where serpents and dragons fly through the air, above unicorns and elephants; where the trees grow leaves like fine white lace, and camellias are perpetually in blossom.
You could spend days in this room and never want to leave, such is the wealth of its riches. Two walls are lined with leather-bound books: antique editions of Plutarch, Euripides and Homer; the memoirs of Casanova and the essays of Montaigne; The Confessions of St Augustine and The Dialogues of Plato; the complete works of Maupassant and Molière in French, Shelley and Shakespeare in English; and two volumes of a weighty Holy Bible, published in London by the aptly named Virtue and Co. (If you happen to take down Volume Three of Shelley from the shelf, it falls open at a well-thumbed page from the poet’s preface to Julian and Maddalo: ‘Of the Maniac I can give no information. He seems, by his own account, to have been disappointed in love. He was evidently a very cultivated and amiable person when in his right senses. His story, told at length, might be like many other stories of the same kind: the unconnected exclamations of his agony will perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text of every heart.’)
In front of one of these walls of rare books stands Mademoiselle’s roll-top desk, where her cream-coloured writing paper and envelopes are still in the compartment where she kept them. Above is a gilt-framed painting of a lion, signifying Chanel’s astrological sign of Leo, in commemoration of her birthday on 19th August, although she was less willing to remember the year of her birth, 1883, adjusting it when it suited her purposes; even tearing it out of her passport. ‘My age varies according to the days and the people I happen to be with,’ she told a young American journalist in 1959, when she was 76. ‘When I’m bored I feel very old, and since I’m extremely bored with you, I’m going to be a thousand years old in five minutes …’ Beside the lion is a vase of crystal camellias; on the leather desktop is her tortoiseshell fan, engraved with the stars that she constantly reworked into her jewellery designs, and a pair of her spectacles. Try them on, and the room dissolves into a blur of gold and red and shadows; quickly take them off again, to stop the walls from closing in.
The drawers of the desk are unlocked; two are empty – and much was emptied from here, mysteriously vanishing on the night of Mademoiselle’s death; shadowy figures stealing down the mirrored staircase, disappearing with bags of her belongings, including most of her precious jewels (the priceless ropes of pearls and necklaces of rubies and emeralds, her dazzling diamond rings and bracelets). But the right-hand drawer still contains a few of her personal possessions: a pair of sunglasses in a soft leather pouch, another fan, this one even more delicate, fashioned in paper and fragile wooden frets, and a sheaf of photographs of Mademoiselle Chanel. The first is of her in 1937, elegant in a white jacket and pearls, standing beside the Coromandel screen in the hall. Her eyes do not look into the camera lens, but gaze sideways, towards something or someone unseen, somewhere beyond the screen, beyond the white birds and camellias.
There are several more photographs in the drawer: Chanel as a young woman astride a white horse, head held high to the camera, but her eyes hidden in the shade of a wide-brimmed hat. A man stands beside her, her lover, Boy Capel, his hands lightly touching her foot in the stirrup; they are dressed in near-identical riding outfits, a boyish tie her only addition to the crisp white shirt and trim jodhpurs. Twenty years on, and Boy Capel is gone, while Chanel is balanced on the shoulder of her friend Serge Lifar, a handsome ballet dancer, his hair as glossily dark as hers. She is wearing her strands of pearls over a black sweater and white trousers, and smiling in the light of a Riviera morning. Sunshine dapples her face again in a picture of a younger Chanel on a countryside road, where she is standing beside her car, nonchalant in a striped matelot top and navy sailor trousers; a reminder of her life beyond Rue Cambon, of her villa beside the sea in the South of France. And then there is the photograph of Chanel in 1920 with her lover, the Grand Duke Dmitri, cousin of the Russian tsar, and one of the assassins of Rasputin. He is as handsome as a movie star; she is more beautiful than any of her models, hair cropped short, tanned skin glowing against iridescent pearls and white satin dress, gazing into his eyes.
But mostly the pictures show Chanel alone: poised by the fireplace, or reclining on the long beige-suede sofa in the salon, studying a book, her hand hovering over a page of cryptic Indian illustrations. You cannot read her expression in these photographs of a solitary woman, the elegant lines of her face impassive, her eyebrows arched, a cigarette in her hand, its smoke rising like a decoy.
And so you go back to searching the room, trying to decode the cipher, looking for clues that might explain its owner’s enigmatic face. There are bunches of dried wheat on either side of the marble fireplace, and two more made of gilded wood on the mantelpiece, emblematic of good fortune and prosperity. A golden lion raises its paw to a Grecian mask, a woman’s face with eyes as dark as Chanel’s; and in the centre of the mantelpiece is a first-century headless torso of Aphrodite, its marble curves reflected in the looking glass, so that it seems to be one of twins. The Baroque mirror above the fireplace is vast, reaching the high ceiling, framed by pillars of cherubs and grapes. Its reflections are refracted by yet another mirror, of darker, smokier glass, which hangs above the suede sofa; leaning against the faded gilt frame is a gold crucifix (a double-barred cross, typical of those seen in the Spanish holy town of Caravaca, a former stronghold of the Knights Templar). Beside the cross is a painting of a single wheatsheaf by Salvador Dalí, one of Chanel’s many artist friends and lovers.
You could go on searching for meaning here, noting the quilted cushions on the sofa (diagonal quilting, the same pattern as her famous handbags); hunting for the lions in the room; counting the pairs of animals. There are the two bronze deer by the fireplace, almost life-size, a buck and doe, their cloven feet sinking into the carpet, and another tiny pair beside the sofa, in painted metal, with vases of pink flowers on their backs. Two camels on a side-table, two frogs (one glass, one bronze); two lovebirds made of pearl in a tiny jewelled cage; two porcelain horses, on either side of the smoky mirror; two golden fire-dogs in the empty hearth. Once you start looking, the doublings are everywhere: a second Grecian mask, staring at its twin from across the room; two Egyptian sphinx; two ceramic bowls on top of a bookshelf, one containing a broken shard of crystal; two clocks, one on the desk, which has stopped at 3.23, on the eleventh day of an unnumbered month, the other suspended, miraculously, on a mirrored wall between the two windows, its hands motionless at 1.18, a winged and vengeful angel of death wielding a scythe above the clockface.
A collection of symbolic objects is scattered throughout the room: a Catholic icon, a Buddha holding a spray of roses in his hand, another Buddha beside a strange mythical creature (part lion, part dog, part man, with an expression on his face of a sorrowful Caliban); a crystal glass cross, a mariner’s navigational tool, a single bronze hand made by Diego Giacometti; a pack of Tarot cards (the number five is on top, Chanel’s lucky number, illustrated by a picture of a green tree, its roots visible above the ground). There