Had Gabrielle ever even seen herself in the violet dress, summoned up from the paper pages of a romance? In the house of her aunts, there were no mirrors. She could not glimpse her reflection anywhere; she was nowhere to be seen. If she made up stories from then on, you can understand why; for out of these loose threads, Gabrielle created an image of herself.
When Gabrielle turned 18, she finally left the nuns at Aubazine, who kept on only those girls with a religious vocation to join the order’s novitiate. She was not completely abandoned, however; nor was she without family, despite her father’s continuing absence. He had been one of 19 children, and his parents were still very much alive; indeed, their youngest daughter, Adrienne, was only a year older than Gabrielle. Although her father’s family seem not to have figured in her early life, or when he abandoned the children after their mother’s death, several relatives did appear thereafter. That they included two aunts (neither of them nuns, nor at all like the ‘aunts’ Chanel described in her subsequent stories of childhood) has added further confusion to the task of her biographers. But at some point during Gabrielle’s later years at Aubazine, she began to spend an occasional holiday with her paternal grandparents and Adrienne, to whom she became as close as if they were sisters, and also with another of their daughters, her aunt Louise, who had married a railway employee, Paul Costier. Louise and Paul had no children of their own, and invited Adrienne and Gabrielle to visit them in Varennessur-Allier, a station on the Vichy to Moulins line, where Paul was employed as stationmaster. And it was to Moulins that Gabrielle was sent at 18 to the Notre Dame school, a religious institution run by canonesses where her aunt Adrienne was already being educated.
It is not entirely clear whether Gabrielle’s sisters, Julia and Antoinette, accompanied her to Moulins; according to one of the stories that Chanel told Claude Delay, Julia had left an orphanage at 16 and was married. But she also spoke to Delay of a holiday spent with her sister at a convent in Corrèze. The food there was awful, she said, and the nuns were foolish little country girls who played shuttlecock, not at all like the fierce aunts in whose house Gabrielle had been raised. In this strange and unlikely sounding convent, Gabrielle played the organ and sang, impressing the nuns, who were amazed at her talent; just as they had been astounded by Julia’s piano playing: ‘When my sister had been playing the piano they used to look at her fingers to see what she had on the ends of them. Little peasants!’
But no one was impressed by Gabrielle in the Notre Dame school in Moulins, for she was one of the charity pupils who were provided with a free place, and therefore treated differently to those whose family could afford to pay for their education. Here it was Gabrielle who was dismissed as a little peasant – the kind of girl who might be made to feel inferior to those who had piano lessons; a girl who wore a plain pauper’s uniform with second-hand shoes rather than the more expensive outfits of the fee-paying students. It was here, too, that she was given further instruction in how to sew, which had already formed a substantial part of her education at Aubazine. If she was not to be a nun, then she must earn her living like other orphans, and there was always work available for a seamstress. More sewing took place during Gabrielle’s holidays with her aunt Louise, from whom she learned how to trim and embellish hats, to add to the practical needlework skills she had acquired from the nuns. Adrienne also visited, and as well as darning, the girls fashioned new collars and cuffs out of remnants of white linen to trim their sober black convent uniforms. In the evenings they read the romances that Louise had cut out and saved from magazines and periodicals, hand-sewn together, and carefully stored in the attic.
‘You don’t know the damage country attics can do to the imagination,’ Chanel told Delay, recalling the stories that she had absorbed as a girl. Her favourites had been by Pierre Decourcelle, a prolific author of romances who also wrote for Le Matin and Le Journal. Chanel described him to Delay as ‘a sentimental ninny’, yet also acknowledged his influence on her as her ‘one teacher’. But to Marcel Haedrich, she admitted that her ‘aunts’ had educated her to recognise the ‘solid substance’ of orderliness, ‘for having things done right, for chests filled with linens that smell good, and gleaming floors’.
While the nuns taught her the value of cleanliness, Pierre Decourcelle gave her a taste for the forbidden. As Chanel remarked to Haedrich, she lost herself in his stories, ‘melodramas in which everything happened in a wild-eyed romanticism’, and longed to live in their world, instead of in her aunts’ house:
‘I thought all that was awful because in my novels there was nothing but silk pillows and white-lacquered furniture. I’d have liked to do everything in white lacquer. Sleeping in an alcove made me miserable, it humiliated me. I broke off bits of wood wherever I could, thinking, what old trash this is. I did it out of sheer wickedness, for the sake of destruction. When one considers all the things that go on in a child’s head … I wanted to kill myself.’
It was not the only time that Chanel talked about her desire to kill herself as a child – as if her longing to escape, and her craving for glamorous romance, could be fulfilled in suicide. ‘At the time, I often used to think about dying,’ she told Paul Morand. ‘The idea of causing a great fuss, of upsetting my aunts, of letting everyone know how wicked they were, fascinated me. I dreamt about setting fire to the barn.’
If her suggestion was that in being wicked she would reveal the wickedness of others, then perhaps she believed that by dying she might find her rightful place in life. Gabrielle grew up to discover that suicide was not her way out; yet in a sense (however nonsensical it might appear to others), she did need to kill something of herself in order to make her escape. She felt unloved – by the ‘aunts’, by the family who had abandoned her to the care of nuns, by her absent father – although the stories she read had taught her that love conquered all; that desire and passion set men and women alight. An element of her conflict emerges in the tales she told of love (and the lack of it); of the sacred and the profane. Given her aversion to providing any detail about her family – other than the fictional aunts who stand in for the nuns at Aubazine (and possibly those at the convent school in Moulins) – the occasional mentions are significant. To Claude Delay, she referred to her uncle Paul Costier, the stationmaster, sending her a first-class railway ticket (‘because I wouldn’t go second-class – it was a bore’). In other versions, Chanel described her abortive attempt to escape to Paris with Adrienne from her uncle and aunt’s house in Varennes. They had only enough money for second-class tickets, but Gabrielle insisted on sitting in the first-class carriage, for which they were fined by the conductor; without any funds to sustain them in the capital, the runaway girls were forced to return home. Except that Gabrielle did not feel herself to be at home anywhere – not at Aubazine, nor at school in Moulins, nor in the Costiers’ house. When she arrived to stay with Paul and Louise, she told Delay, her uncle was warmly affectionate, but her aunt was detached and cold. At night, Paul came into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight, and said, ‘You’ll stay a nice long time, won’t you?’ But Gabrielle sensed that her aunt didn’t approve of her, and so she left the next day. According to Claude Delay, more than half a century later, Chanel ‘still felt the chill’ of rejection, expressing it as if she had been left entirely alone.
She was also without God, or at least that was what she told Delay. Gabrielle’s loss of faith had occurred in Aubazine, at her First Communion, after her father had supposedly sent her the dress from America. It is unclear from her account whether she was actually wearing this unsuitable dress in church – instead, she spoke of her fascination at the sight of the barefoot mendicant monk who conducted a three-day retreat with the children before their First