Brive-la-Gaillarde is a traditional railway town, a junction on the main line from Paris to Toulouse, occupying a central position in the vast heartland of France; as good a starting point as any for a pilgrim in search of Chanel. Take the road eastwards from the station; it runs through the centre of the town, then follows the curves of the river across a flat plain, towards forested mountains in the distance. After a few miles there is a narrow turning off the main road, climbing in serpentine twists, apparently coiling in on itself up the steep ascent. But at last it leads to Aubazine, a medieval village dominated by the dark bulk of a twelfth-century Cistercian monastery and abbey, founded by St Etienne in 1135.
This is the place to which Gabrielle’s father drove her in a cart from Brive, along with her two sisters, Julia and Antoinette, soon after the death of their mother. The boys were left elsewhere – deposited with a peasant family; foundlings used as unpaid labour – and the three girls were handed over to the nuns who ran an orphanage within the abbey walls, the sisters of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary. The children’s father promptly disappeared. Gabrielle later claimed he had gone to America in search of a fortune in a promised land, the New World, far away from the ascetic cloisters where he had abandoned his daughters.
Not that Gabrielle ever described it as abandonment; nor did she use the word ‘orphanage’. Instead, she told a number of embroidered stories about being left with her ‘aunts’, while her sister (she was vague about which one) was sent to a convent. There were two ‘aunts’ in her various narratives: black-clad, cold-eyed, stern and always nameless. ‘Actually, they weren’t my aunts, but my mother’s first cousins,’ she once remarked to Marcel Haedrich, adding that she lived with them in ‘the remotest corner of Auvergne. My aunts were good people, but absolutely without tenderness. I was not loved in their house. I got no affection. Children suffer from such things.’
Then, in a longer outburst, she gave away something of the misery she had felt, in a denial that also serves as a kind of confession: ‘People say I’m an Auvergnate. There’s nothing of the Auvergnate in me – nothing, nothing. My mother was one. In that part of the world, though, I was thoroughly unhappy. I fed on sorrow and horror. I wanted to kill myself I don’t know how many times. “That poor Jeanne” – I couldn’t stand hearing my mother talked about in that way anymore. Like all children, I listened at closed doors. I learned that my father had ruined my mother – “poor Jeanne”. All the same, she’d married the man she loved. And having to hear people call me an orphan! They felt sorry for me. I had nothing to be pitied for – I had a father. All this was humiliating. I realised no one loved me and I was being kept out of charity. There were visitors – plenty of visitors. I heard the questions put to my aunts: “Does the little one’s father still send money?”’
But there were no visits, and no money; just stern nuns and locked doors. Gabrielle spent seven years in the orphanage, until she was 18. Her father never returned to see her or her siblings, although she created a version for Marcel Haedrich in which he did visit; but even in that fantasy he did not rescue her: ‘When my father came to visit, my aunts did themselves up for him. He had a great deal of charm, and he told many stories. “Don’t listen to my aunts,” I said to him. “I’m so unhappy – take me away …”’
Like her father, Gabrielle told many stories, and she used them to protect his memory, identifying herself with him, rather than her sickly mother. It was as if she felt her father had been right to leave his wife and children, and sought to portray his flight as an act of youthful strength. In this version of her past, Gabrielle reinvented him as a far younger man – ‘not yet thirty’ – and the father of only two daughters, rather than a man approaching 40, who had cast off five children, along with a dead wife. ‘He’d made a new life,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘I understand that. He made a new family. His two daughters were in good hands. They were being brought up. He had more children. He was right. I would have done the same thing. No one under thirty could have coped with the situation. Imagine, a widower with two daughters! He really loved me. I represented the good days, fun, happiness …’
In reality, happiness was scarce in the orphanage, nor was there much love there. Gabrielle Chanel went to live in Aubazine not long after her mother’s death in February 1895; over a lifetime later, at the same time of year – a season when winter has not yet loosened its grip on the mountains – I came to stay in the abbey myself. Little has changed in the last century: only the orphans have disappeared. But you can still see their bedrooms in the original monastery building that adjoins the abbey, the simple iron beds lined up against whitewashed walls hung with crucifixes. Each of the rooms has the name of a saint on the door, and when the wooden shutters are open, a view of the forests that surround Aubazine. Beyond the forests, far away, is the railway track out of Brive, but you cannot see a trace of it from here; only the groves of chestnut trees and the mountains wreathed in a pale, frosty mist.
Visitors seldom come in winter, and the dwindling community of nuns spends much of its life in silence: silent prayer, silent meal times, silent contemplation of God. If ever there was a place to feel close to God, it should be here, high on the hill, nearing the sky; yet somehow, sometimes, the walls that enclose the monastery seem to get in the way. Inside the abbey is darkness, the stone floor as cold as the unadorned walls, a chill rising from the ground that feels as if it has been frozen since St Etienne walked here. A few shafts of light pierce the shadows through the opaque grey and pearl-white windows; there is no figurative stained glass in this Cistercian abbey, but the panes form geometric patterns, knots and loops that look eerily like the double C of Chanel’s logo.
Did Gabrielle gaze through these windows? Did she stare up at them, when she should have kept her eyes down to the ground, her head bowed in prayer? Towards the end of her life, Chanel told a story of sitting with other children in a wooden pew in church. A nun poked her with a stick when Gabrielle sang ‘Ave Maria’ too loudly; meanwhile, alone on another bench, was a hunchback. ‘I’d have liked to sit down beside him and touch his hump,’ she said to Claude Delay, ‘and tell him that it didn’t matter, he could still be loved.’
The abbey is empty when I walk through its pews, my steps the only sound in the silence. To the right of the altar is the stone tomb of St Etienne, a shrine where his sacred relics are preserved; to the left, a Madonna and headless Child. Along the walls are wooden misericords, ledges for the monks to rest against during the long night vigils, with strange leonine creatures carved into the ends (and in their faces you can see something of the lion that watches over Chanel’s apartment from above the fireplace in her salon). On the far side of the church, so shadowy that it takes a little while for one’s eyes to make out the detail, is a stone staircase that leads up to an ancient wooden door, heavy and blackened by the centuries. This is the staircase that Chanel walked up and down every day on her way to and from her prayers; 36 steps from the orphanage to the abbey, from Vespers to Matins, from dim morning to dark night, over and over again.
Climb the stairs, and push the black door open. It leads into a long corridor on the first floor of the monastery; on one side are more doors, into the sober bedrooms and offices of the nuns; on the other side are high windows, their frames painted beige, overlooking the central walled courtyard and the fountain in the middle, carved out of a huge boulder by the followers of St Etienne. The corridor is paved with an intricate mosaic, thousands of tiny pebbles formed into patterns of stars and a moon; a bishop’s mitre and a Maltese cross; flowers with eight petals each; and another, more cryptic pattern (of loops and a square formed of circles and triangles) which the current inhabitants of the monastery cannot decipher. But the nun who acts as my guide accepts it as a holy symbol of God’s plan, a creation that leads to the Creator. ‘All we know is that it was made by the monks, like everything else here,’ she says, ‘and it has a special meaning.’
‘Of what?’ I ask her.
‘Of the language of numbers, the mystery of the Holy Trinity,’ she says. ‘The meaning of God, which we cannot always understand, and yet we know to be the truth.’ There is no more that she can tell me about the magic or the logic of the mosaic, and by now it is time for prayers again, so I follow her down another stone staircase,