The Allure of Chanel

FAUBOURG SAINT-HONORÉ

IT WAS AT ABOUT THIS TIME that I left the Ritz Hotel and moved into the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

People said of the way the place was furnished that it was in England that I learnt about luxurious decor. That’s wrong; luxury, for me, meant the house of my uncle from Issoire, and that has remained with me: fine Auvergne furniture ‘polished by age’, dark, heavy woods from the countryside, purple cherry wood, pear wood that was black beneath its sheen, rather like Spanish credence tables or Flemish sideboards, Boulle clocks in a tortoiseshell stand, cupboards with shelves that bent under the weight of clothes. I had thought that my childhood was a modest one, but I realise it was sumptuous. In Auvergne, everything was real, everything was big.

So you see, when I arrived in Paris, I wasn’t particularly overawed. It was people who amazed me, not their furnishings. I wanted to meet Cécile Sorel, about whom the contributors to l’Illustration (Christmas issue) engrossed their country readers. Capel took me to her house. It was some time in 1916. Sitting at the table was a woman who did not take her eyes off me: it was Misia. I was seated next to Sert. I liked Sorel, but the unpolished woodwork seemed to me to be made of plaster, the gold tablecloth was not gold, and was dirty what’s more; they had casually placed fruit over the stains to make it look like a garden of Eden. The silverware was even less polished than the furniture.

Opposite me, the lady with the little chignon in the shape of a shell, with a sort of mandarin orange stuck on the top of her head, seized hold of me after dinner, and never left me.

“I also overlook the river, a few doors along. Come and see me.”

Misia lived above the Journal officiel (she really did) on the second and top floor of a small, ancient house on the corner of the rue de Beaune. When I saw all that pile of objects, I thought she must be an antique-dealer. Capel, who came with me, thought so too. He asked, quite shamelessly: “Is it for sale?” Those fish in aquariums, those ships in bottles, those negroes made of spun glass, those windows full of fans with steel sequins, overlooking the Place Royale; I was appalled. It smelt of filth downstairs; there was no surface upon which you could use a duster or apply any polish; scarcely a flurry from that horrible object, the feather duster, which fortunately one only sees nowadays beneath the arm of servants in the first acts of plays. There was the same doctrine of clutter at Catherine d’Erlanger’s home; it wends its way along walls, piles up underneath tables, proliferates on the stairs, the cupboards no longer shut … Where was I? There: I’ve caught my train of thought again. When, later on, I lived in England, I rediscovered the luxury of my uncle from Issoire, oak furniture polished with white wax, large pieces of furniture, real ones, the tranquillity of the Middle Ages. The interior of a home is the natural projection of the soul, and Balzac was right to attach as much importance to it as he did to clothing.

And so I furnished the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Plush carpet everywhere, ‘colorado claro’ in colour, with silky tints, like good cigars, woven to my specifications, and brown velvet curtains with gold braiding that looked like coronets girdled in yellow silk from Winston’s. I never discussed prices; only my friends protested, and Misia pulled out her hair in despair. Polovtzoff had bought a Savonnerie carpet from the Duc de C, for one hundred thousand francs.