The Allure of Chanel

MADAME DE CHÉVIGNÉ

I HAD A DELIGHTFUL OLD FRIEND, the Comtesse Adhéaume de Chévigné. When I lived in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, she was staying in the rue d’Anjou, almost opposite me. In this rue d’Anjou salon, in about 1900, all the most respected ‘clubmen’ and elegant women in Paris, from the other faubourg, had streamed by, in the days when one took lunch at half-past eleven, when one called on people at three o’clock, before social gatherings took place, and where the gentlemen came in and sat down, with their top hats on their knees. With her red wig, her loud, hoarse voice that delighted Marcel Proust, her authoritarian manners and her peremptory tone of voice, Madame de Chévigné was a character out of Saint-Simon, parodied by Swann. She looked like an elderly actress; or more accurately, it was Madame de Chévigné whom Marguerite Deval, Moreno, Pauline Carton and all those actresses who specialised in playing the parts of ridiculous old women, down through her son-in-law, Francis de Croisset, did their best to copy. What with the actresses imitating the countess, and she, imitating them in turn, they were soon inextricable.

Madame de Chévigné was the first woman in the world to have said merde.

Her conversation was intoxicating; it was a chronicle, a memoir, an end-of-year revue …

“Today, my dear, young women are ignorant and foolish. Men don’t teach them anything any more. Not even the social graces. In our case, we knew men who had no need to learn manners, they were born into them … I learnt everything I know through making love. A lover teaches you those sorts of things, not a husband. My lover used to take me to the Louvre. You can’t spend your whole time … kissing one another! You’ve got to like those things … As for being hot-blooded, well, Cécile5 and I were certainly hot-blooded … But you have moments of leisure, even in bachelors’ apartments. I’m talking of a time when people had bachelors’ apartments and you wore a veil to go in; nowadays, people do it anywhere, on top of anything, between two doors, in front of the servants. Look, take my daughter (that one, my youngest one, now I can swear that she is certainly by Monsieur de Chévigné. What’s more all my children are Adhéaume’s. No bastards, whatever happens!). Well, my daughter has been learning since she was three years old, now she’s sixty and she doesn’t know a thing!

“You don’t have to learn in order to know, Madame; Misia, for instance, is considered to be a great musician yet I’ve never heard her play more than four chords by Chopin.

“Let’s talk about her! She adores the Jews. Furthermore, my dear, Misia lives in the ghetto; look at all those members of the chosen race she has dragged around behind her, Thadée Natanson, Bernstein, Edwards, Alfred Savoir … Me, I’ve got nothing against Jews … And I’ve got plenty to prove it. To put it plainly, at the time of Félix Faure, the Rothschilds, they didn’t count for much … at the Jockey, my dear, there was only Haas,6 and even then, he had been elected in ’71, during the Commune, one afternoon when there was no one there to blackball him …”

Madame de Chévigné died shortly before the war. For some years she had not been receiving visitors. Her door was only open to her family, to close friends, to me. If Misia came to see her, she would only have her brought in so that she could speak to her harshly, to her face.

“You wouldn’t understand that, you who know everything!”

And she would wink surreptitiously at me, click her tongue, and give me a mischievous kick under the table, without Misia realising.

“In 18—, we knew how to behave. F— loved me; or so I thought. One day, after a journey, I arrive on the arm of Monsieur de Chévigné for a grand dinner party. In the anteroom, I cast my eyes over the list of guests. I read: Comte and Comtesse de F. The fickle fellow had got married without telling me. I feel flustered … but all of a sudden I pull myself together, and I say to myself: ‘You are Laure de Chévigné, née Sade.’ (Sade! What a lovely name … Misia would sigh. What would I not give to be born Sade!)

“We’re French, we are! These foreigners, they think they know it all! Can’t stand the Russians … I was in Petersburg … I stayed with the Grand-Duchess Vladimir. People are polite over there, too polite. You’re treated well in Russia, but they don’t respect you; they give you presents with diamonds, but they use you as they would an object. And then, their wealth, I went to Tsarskoe Selo, and it wasn’t as smart as all that!”

Occasionally Auguste, the elderly servant, would come in.

“What is it now, Auguste?”

“Madame la Comtesse, it’s Madame X.”

“Could you not have said that I was unwell? I am with Mademoiselle.”

“Madame la Comtesse, I can’t lie.”

“Then why are you a servant? Servants are supposed to say no.”

Worried that I might weary the Comtesse, Auguste returned a little while later.

“Madame la Comtesse should think about dinner.”

“Leave me alone! I’m having fun! That fellow wants to force-feed me! He gives me my soup; he thinks he can do as he pleases! I’m not doddery, but he’s convinced I am! What were we saying? That Misia didn’t know three notes of Chopin? Reynaldo, by Jove, now there’s a musician! In Venice, my dear, Madame de Vantalis would arrange for a piano to be put on the gondola for him; the moon, the Grand Canal, and off we go, with everyone following. And Madrazo! Coco, have you heard Madrazo singing ‘la Tour Saint-Jacques’? It was quite different from Jacques Février! … What was I telling you … Remind me please, I no longer know where I am, because of that idiot, Auguste … Ah yes, we were talking about the young women of today … They’re all tarts! And worse! (In my day, even the tarts had manners.) Have you noticed that nowadays women don’t even know how to walk into a drawing room? Shall I show you how they introduce themselves?”

There followed an imitation by the Comtesse, who had leapt out of bed, of a woman of today, slightly awkward and slightly pretentious, who is always clumsy and ‘coarse’.

“In our day, we cut a better figure! Do you call that making an entrance? Well, look!”

After this violent exercise, Madame de Chévigné went back to bed, out of breath.

“I’m short of breath, my dear. My heart’s packing in …”

I reassured her that it was simply lack of fitness. She turned her gaunt, tragic old clown’s mask towards me, with its Punchinello nose, its downturned mouth, and her muted, gruff voice that seemed to come from beneath the ground:

“My children have forced me to leave rue d’Anjou; I lived there for forty years; I have obeyed; but I know very well it will bring me bad luck: one only leaves one’s home to die. I’ll die because of it. If I feel better, if I can go out, ask me round. But not with old people, whatever you do. Invite me with the young. Otherwise, come back and see me. I’ll talk to you about Madame Standish (née des Cars) and about Madame Greffulhe. Those were women, they were! They knew how to curtsey. At Fordsdorf I watched them curtseying, it was quite different …”

“Auguste, drive Mademoiselle home … You’re very likely to find me in bed again next time. You see, at my age, when a woman has removed her corset and her hairpiece, my dear, she never puts them on again!”

The day came, in fact, when Madame de Chévigné did grow weak. Marie-Thérèse de Croisset came to tell me:

“Maman is very ill. She thinks she’s at your house …”

A few days later, I went to her burial.

5 Princesse J Murat

6 Swann