Here is the place that Gabrielle prayed, and sewed, and slept; here is a world contained by high walls, where the hours are divided into devotions. How did she feel, within these immovable confines, knowing that outside her father was always travelling, always beyond her reach? On Sundays, the orphan girls walked to the Calvaire, a cross on the hill beyond Aubazine. They came out through the gate that separated them from the village – a gate kept locked and bolted at all other times – and walked up the path behind the abbey, following the mountain stream that provided water for the followers of St Etienne. The path is steep, through chestnut woods and pine forests; and it is still quiet here, footsteps muffled by fallen leaves and damp earth, the silence broken only by the occasional cry of a bird. In a clearing, you can look down the gorge to the monastery, and it seems smaller when seen from this perspective, yet monolithic nevertheless, as much a part of the landscape as the forested hillsides.
This was where Gabrielle walked; though the contours of the landscape were still taking shape in Chanel’s imagination decades afterwards, when she looked back to Aubazine from the sumptuous salon of Rue Cambon. She told her friend Claude Delay about the woods into which she escaped from the house of her aunts; fleeing there early in the morning, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, hoping that the gypsies would steal her away. The horses were wild in her legend, unshod and reared for the cavalry officers who came to see her aunts once a year. The aunts never dreamt that she could ride; nor did they know that she was accompanied by a red-headed farmer’s boy. She spun a story of romance, telling Delay of the time she was given a present of rose-scented soap by one of her boy cousins. The fragrance was intoxicating for both of them: ‘My cousin kissed me passionately, I let him. The frenzy of the provinces … I didn’t see him again for three months. That’s the sort of thing that makes a woman of one.’
Did Gabrielle truly become a woman at Aubazine? She lived in the convent until she was 18, as did her sisters. One of them, Julia, fell pregnant here in mysterious circumstances; a nominal father was found to give the baby boy a name – on his birth certificate he was registered as André Palasse – but when Julia died in 1910, the boy was left an orphan. Chanel seldom referred to her elder sister; on the occasions she did, her remarks were contradictory. ‘She only loved the convent,’ she told Delay, yet also claimed that Julia had loved her husband, that she killed herself by slitting her wrists when she discovered that he had a mistress.
Whatever the true circumstances of André’s birth and his mother’s death, Chanel took on her six-year-old nephew and brought him up as her own – indeed her lover, Boy Capel, became his godfather – yet she chose not to keep him in Paris with her, but sent him to be educated at an English boarding school. People used to speculate about André’s origins, as they still do. Even now, if you talk to the elderly lady who lives in a house across the road from the abbey, where she was born, just as her mother and grandmother were before her, you might hear another story, that the baby was Gabrielle’s, not Julia’s. ‘That’s what I heard,’ says the old lady, ‘but who knows if it is true?’ What she does know for certain is that Mademoiselle Chanel returned to Aubazine from time to time, long after she had become rich and famous. ‘She arrived here in a big black car, we used to see her, but she was always very discreet, very private. Mademoiselle Chanel would visit one nun in particular, who still lived in the convent, and I wondered if she came to visit her whenever she was broken-hearted? She used to give money to the nuns, and she would stay and talk to them for a while, but she never stayed the night here. No, she never again slept within the walls of the abbey …’
Mademoiselle Chanel did not mention Aubazine to her friends; nor even utter its name to her great-niece Gabrielle Labrunie, the daughter of André Palasse, to whom she was very close. ‘I wouldn’t have dreamt of asking her about the past,’ says Madame Labrunie, when I question her about Aubazine. ‘And if I had asked, she would have told me it was none of my business. She always said she was interested in what was ahead of her, not what had already finished.’
But Chanel did allow some stories to slip out. To Claude Delay, she spoke of being taught to sew by the aunts, hemming and seaming her trousseau; and of how she wore a white shift in which to bathe herself, because it was a sin to look at one’s body. She said that she sewed cross-stitches on her nightgowns, to make them look Russian. Sometimes she used to rub her nose to make it bleed at night; the blood dripped on her white nightdress, and when she cried out for someone to come to her bedside, a nun would emerge. Slashes of red appeared elsewhere in her narratives: two cherries that she stole to eat before her First Communion, before she panicked and sought absolution from the priest for her wickedness; the bloodstains on her nightdress when she reached puberty, not understanding what had happened to her but believing she had hurt herself; and her reddened skin, when the aunts beat her. ‘I remember that they used to take my knickers down to spank me. First there was the humiliation. Then it was very unpleasant, your bottom was as red as blood.’
She talked in vivid detail about the dresses and linen she remembered from childhood, elaborate stories that may have contained a kernel of truth, though perhaps they came from the serialised romances that she read as an adolescent (‘I found them in the attic of my aunts’). Her aunts had huge cupboards filled with shelves of freshly laundered white linen that smelled of verbena and rosewood. When they went to mass, the aunts wore jade crosses and veils over their faces, their throats edged in white material, in contrast to their black dresses. When Gabrielle saw a school of black-clad orphans go past, she said, she hid away to weep for them; she felt sorry for them in their black aprons.
But Gabrielle insisted that she was not an orphan; nor was she to be pitied like them. Her father sent her a white dress from America for her First Communion. It was all ruffles and lace, she told Delay, with layers of billowing organdie petticoats and a long veil, two rosaries, a string of pearls, and a pair of silk stockings to wear underneath. Gabrielle loved the dress as a child, but in later life she declared that it must have been chosen by her father’s girlfriend, a ‘tart’ with dubious taste. She gave a slightly different version of the story to Paul Morand: ‘Shortly before he left for America, my father bought me a first communion dress, in white chiffon, with a crown of roses. So as to punish me for being proud, my aunts said to me: “You’re not going to wear your crown of roses, you’ll wear a hat.” What agony it was, on top of so many other things, such as the shame of having to confess to the priest that I had stolen two cherries! To be deprived of the crown!’
Yet another version of the story (to Marcel Haedrich) did not involve a white dress from America, nor her father. Instead, in this telling of the tale of the First Communion, her aunts wanted her to wear a cap like a peasant girl’s, but Gabrielle insisted on something different, and in the end she got her way, and wore a white paper crown of thorns with artificial roses.
Such victories were rare, however. Gabrielle was more often thwarted by the aunts, as she explained to Haedrich, with all the minutiae that you might expect from a woman whose early career was as seamstress and milliner. Unlike the orphan girls at the convent, who wore black uniforms, she claimed to have had a little tailored black alpaca suit; her aunts gave her a new one every year in the springtime. ‘I should have liked a pink dress or a sky-blue one,’ she said wistfully. ‘I was in mourning all the time, while the peasant girls wore blue and pink. I envied them.’ In the summer, the aunts gave her ‘a horrible leghorn hat’, the details of which still haunted her, with its ‘little piece of velvet and a rose above the brim’. In the winter, she was made to wear a cloche, ‘very hard, with a kind of feather on it. I was told it was an eagle’s feather, but I knew it was a turkey’s, stiffened with paste. There was a little rubber band in the back that went under one’s hair, to hold the hat in place when it was windy. I thought the whole business was very ugly.’
At last, at the age of 15, Gabrielle was allowed to order a dress of her own, without