Walk back to the desk, and dare to sit down on the beige suede-upholstered chair where Mademoiselle used to work; run your fingers over the marks of her pen still visible in the multiple scores and angry scratches on the ink-stained leather desktop. The hands of the clocks are fixed for ever, the room is silent, the cream linen curtains are still; nothing moves across the mirrors, the gleaming light from the chandelier remains caught in time, as if preserved in amber. You cannot see the reflections in the mirrors when you are writing at the desk, only the eyes of the painted lion in the gold frame, the hands of the blackamoors, disappearing through the half-open door; but the hairs on the back of your neck are prickling; and perhaps, if you could turn around quickly enough, who on earth might be reflected in the looking-glass walls?
‘Sometimes, when the boutique is closed, we feel her presence,’ said my guide to the apartment, on my first visit here, glancing over her shoulder at the sound of a creaking door, the murmur of voices on the staircase, nervous as if she were being watched. ‘After dark, even when the lights are on, you might glimpse her in the mirror, or hear her footsteps in the drawing room, very soft and quiet, too quick for anyone to catch up with her …’
‘Those on whom legends are built are their legends,’ declared Coco Chanel to her friend Paul Morand, one of several writers to whom she tried, and failed, to tell the story of her life. ‘People’s lives are an enigma,’ she said to another friend, Claude Delay, not long before her death, when her face had already become a fixed mask to the world, and her myth apparently impenetrable. Delay was a young woman at the time, the daughter of a well-known French psychiatrist, but is herself now an eminent psychoanalyst, and an expert guide to the labyrinth of secrets and lies that Chanel constructed to conceal the truth of her past. Not that there is ever a single truth in a life, especially for a woman who built a career on refashioning women’s ideas of themselves; which may be why Chanel recounted so many different stories about herself, as if in each version something new might emerge from her history.
‘I don’t like the family,’ she told Delay, in one of a series of revelatory, rambling conversations in her final decade. ‘You’re born in it, not of it. I don’t know anything more terrifying than the family.’ And so she circled around and about it, telling and retelling the narrative of her youth, remaking history just as she remade the sleeves of a jacket, unfastening its seams and cutting its threads, and then sewing it back together again. ‘Childhood – you speak of it when you’re very tired, because it’s a time when you had hopes, expectations. I remember my childhood by heart.’
If Chanel’s memory did survive intact, she nevertheless obscured her past from others, reshaping its heartaches, smoothing away the rough edges. Even her birth certificate is misleading – her father’s surname, and hers, were misspelt due to a clerical error as Chasnel. But she could not keep all the details hidden: her mother’s maiden name was Eugénie Jeanne Dévolles, and despite attempts by Chanel in later life to erase the date, the official record shows that her mother gave birth to Gabrielle on 19th August 1883 in the poorhouse in Saumur, a market town on the River Loire. Eugénie (known as Jeanne) was 20, Henri-Albert (known as Albert) was 28, and listed as a marchand, or merchant, on Gabrielle’s birth certificate. They were not yet married but already had one daughter, Julia, born less than a year previously, on 11th September 1882.
‘I was born on a journey,’ Chanel told an American reporter in answer to his question about the exact location of her birthplace. Although this was an evasion – she was born in a hospice for the poor, run by an order of nuns, the Sisters of Providence – her parents were generally on the move, itinerant market traders selling buttons and bonnets, aprons and overalls, travelling between towns, just as her paternal grandparents had done. Gabrielle’s father was the son of a peddler, and like her, he had been born in a poorhouse (in Nîmes in 1856); his surname had also been misspelt on his birth certificate, but on this occasion as Henri-Albert Charnet. The mistake was not corrected in official records until over two decades later, in 1878, when a court decree stated that Charnet be replaced on the certificate by Chanel, ‘which is the true name’.
‘My father was not there,’ she explained to another journalist, Marcel Haedrich (editor-in-chief of Marie Claire, and a man who had spent enough time with Chanel to regard himself as her friend, drawing on his conversations with her in a biography he wrote soon after her death). ‘That poor woman, my mother, had to go looking for him. It’s a sad story, and very boring – I’ve heard it so many times.’
Thus she dismissed the beginning of her story, and never told it with any accuracy herself; never acknowledging that the truth was far from boring, but too troubling to reveal. Gabrielle’s father was not present at her birth, setting a pattern that was to be repeated thereafter. A man who often appeared to be on the run from his family, he had already vanished when Jeanne became pregnant with their first child, and refused to marry her when he was finally tracked down, a month before she gave birth to their daughter Julia. Consequently, both the girls were born illegitimate; it was not until Gabrielle was 15 months old that her parents eventually married, in November 1884. Soon afterwards, her mother was pregnant again, and on the move through the Auvergne in south-central France, an isolated region where Jeanne had been born into a peasant family in the village of Courpière. She would have found little refuge there: both Jeanne’s parents were dead by the time she had met her elusive future husband, and although her brother had done his best to protect her interests when she fell pregnant, her illegitimate babies did nothing to soften the weight of local disapproval. A boy, christened Alphonse, was born in 1885; another daughter, Antoinette, in 1887; a son, Lucien, in 1889; and the final baby, Augustin, who died in infancy, in 1891.
Chanel rarely talked about the circumstances of her birth, but she did occasionally mention a train journey that her mother had undertaken just beforehand, in search of the elusive Albert. ‘What with the clothes of that time,’ she remarked to Haedrich with her customary, circuitous vagueness, ‘I suppose no one could see that she was about to have a baby. Some people helped her – they were very kind: they took her into their home and sent for a doctor. My mother didn’t want to stay there.
‘“You can get another train tomorrow,” the people said, to soothe her. “You’ll find your husband tomorrow.” But the doctor realised that my mother wasn’t ill at all. “She’s about to have a baby,” he said. At that point the people who had been so nice to her were furious. They wanted to throw her out. The doctor insisted that they take care of her. They took her to a hospital, where I was born. One of the hospital nuns was my godmother.’
The name of this nun was Gabrielle Bonheur, according to Chanel, ‘so I was baptised Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel. I knew nothing of this for a long time. There was never any occasion to check my baptismal certificate. During the war I sent for all my documents because one was always afraid of the worst …’ In fact, the name Bonheur does not appear on her baptismal certificate, but perhaps Gabrielle felt the right to make it her own in later