The Allure of Chanel

LITTLE COCO

EVERY CHILD HAS A SPECIAL PLACE, where he or she likes to hide, play and dream. Mine was an Auvergne cemetery. I knew no one there, not even the dead; I didn’t grieve for anyone; no visitor ever came there. It was a little, old country cemetery, with neglected graves and overgrown grass. I was the queen of this secret garden. I loved its subterranean dwellers. “The dead are not dead as long as we think of them,” I would tell myself. I became very fond of two unnamed tombs; these slabs of granite and basalt were my playroom, my boudoir, my den. I brought flowers there; on the humped mounds I devised hearts with cornflowers, stained-glass windows with poppies, citations with daisies. In between two mushroom-picking expeditions, I would bring my rag dolls on a visit, the ones I preferred to all the others because I had made them myself. I confided my joys and sorrows to my silent companions without disturbing their final rest.

I wanted to be sure that I was loved, but I lived with people who showed no pity. I like talking to myself and I don’t listen to what I’m told: this is probably due to the fact that the first people to whom I opened my heart were the dead.

There we are arriving at my aunts’ house, my father and I, at dusk. We are in deep mourning. My mother has just died. My two sisters have been sent to a convent. I, being the most sensible one, am entrusted to these aunts who are distant relations, my mother’s first cousins. When we get there, we are greeted half-heartedly; they cut the wick of the lamp to see my face more clearly. My aunts have had supper; we haven’t; they are surprised that people who have been travelling all day should not have eaten. This disturbs their routine and their household management, but eventually they overcome their harsh, provincial austerity and say reluctantly: “We shall cook you two boiled eggs.” Little Coco can sense their reluctance and is offended; she is dying of hunger, but at the sight of the eggs she shakes her head, she refuses them, she declines, she states in a loud voice that she does not like eggs, she loathes them; in actual fact, she loves them, but after this first meeting, on this dismal night, she needs to say no to something, to say no passionately to everything she is presented with, to the aunts, to everything around her, to the new life. During the ten years that she will spend in the Mont-Dore, little Coco will dig herself ever more deeply into her first lie, her stubborn refusal, until at last the undisputed legend—the first legend, which will be followed by so many more!—is given credence: “little Coco doesn’t like eggs”. Henceforth, whenever I am about to consume a fine mouthful of flambéed omelette, hoping that this myth concerning me will be forgotten, I shall hear my aunts’ caustic voices saying to me: “you know very well they are made of eggs”. Thus does the myth kill the hero.

I say no to everything, because of a fierce—too fierce—love of life, because of a need to be loved, because everything about my aunts irritates and upsets me. Horrible aunts! Adorable aunts! They belonged to that peasant bourgeoisie that never sets foot in town, or in their village, unless driven there by bad weather, for the winter, but which never loses touch with the earth that feeds them. Horrible aunts for whom love is a luxury and childhood a sin. Adorable aunts whose chimney place overflows with salted and smoked meats, dressers with salted butter or jams, cupboards with fine Issoire linen sheets, which our Auvergne hawkers sell all over the world. There is so much linen-ware in their house that they need only send it to the laundry twice a year. I know that people from the Auvergne are not supposed to be very clean, but compared to our well-worn bundles nowadays, it was a great deal of linen. Our servants wear pleated head-dresses, because from the age of fifteen they have cut off and sold their hair; it’s a custom that dates back to the Gauls; Roman women were already wearing our hair. I am sent to school and to catechism classes. I don’t learn a thing there. My knowledge would never have anything to do with what the teachers taught me; the God I believe in would not be the god of the priests. My aunt makes me recite my lesson; since she has forgotten her catechism, she looks in my book for her questions; I answer perfectly, and all the better because I have discovered another catechism in the attic and have torn out the pages one by one, and so can hide the passages I am being questioned about in the palm of my hand.

The attic … what resources there are in this attic! It’s my library. I read everything. I find the fictional material there upon which my inner life will feed. We never bought books at home; we cut out the serial from the newspaper and we sewed together those long sheets of yellow paper. That’s what little Coco lapped up in secret, in the so-called attic. I copied down whole passages from novels I had read, which I would slip into my homework: “Where on earth did you get hold of all that?” the teacher asked me. Those novels taught me about life; they nourished my sensibility and my pride. I have always been proud.

I hate to demean myself, to submit to anyone, to humiliate myself, not to speak plainly, to give in, not to have my own way. Now as then, pride is present in whatever I do, in my gestures, in the hardness of my voice, in my steely gaze, in my anxious and well-developed facial features, in my entire being. I am the only volcanic crater in the Auvergne that is not extinct.

My hair is still black, rather like a horse’s mane, my eyebrows are as black as our chimney sweep’s, my skin is dark like the lava from our mountains, and my character is as black as the core of a land that has never capitulated. I was a rebellious child, a rebellious lover, a rebellious fashion designer, a true Lucifer. My aunts were not wicked people, but I thought they were, which amounts to the same thing. The Mont-Dore was not really a terrible place, but it was for me, and it was what I endured at the time that has strengthened me; I owe my powerful build to my very tough upbringing. Yes, pride is the key to my bad temper, to my gypsy-like independence, to my antisocial nature; it is also the secret of my strength and my success; it’s the Ariadne’s thread that has always enabled me to find my way back.

For I sometimes lose myself. In the maze of my legendary fame, for example. Each of us has his or her legend, foolish and wonderful. Mine, to which Paris and the provinces, idiots and artists, poets and society people have contributed, is so varied, so complex, so straightforward and so complicated at the same time, that I lose myself within it. Not only does it disfigure me, but it reconstructs another aspect of me; when I want to recognise myself, all I have to do is think of that pride that is both my flaw and my virtue.

My legend is based upon two indestructible pillars: the first is that I have come up from goodness knows where; from the music hall, the opera or the brothel; I’m sorry, for that would have been more amusing; the second is that I am Queen Midas.

It was thought that I had a mind for business that I don’t have. I am not Madame Curie, but nor am I Madame Hanau. Business matters and balance sheets bore me to death. If I want to add up, I count on my fingers.

It irritates me when I hear people say that I’ve been lucky. No one has worked harder than me. Those who dream up legends are lazy folk; if they weren’t, they would go and investigate more deeply, instead of inventing things. The notion that anyone could construct what I have built up, without working, as if by magic, by rubbing Aladdin’s lamp and simply making a wish, is nothing but pure imagination. (Pure … or impure.) What I say here will not change anything, in any case: nothing.

The legend has a harder life than the subject; reality is sad, and that handsome parasite that is the imagination will always be preferred to it. May my legend gain ground, I wish it a long and happy life! And many are the times that I shall continue to meet people who will talk to me about “Mlle C whom they know very well”, without realising that it is her they are addressing.

“My earliest childhood”. Those words, which are usually linked together, make me shudder. No childhood was less gentle. All too soon, I realised that life was a serious matter. My mother, who was already very ill, would take us, my two sisters and me, to the home of an elderly uncle (I was five years old) who was known as the “uncle from Issoire”. We were shut away in a room covered in red wallpaper. To begin with, we were very well behaved; then we noticed that the red wallpaper was very damp and could be peeled off the wall, and we tore off a little strip to begin with; it was great fun. By pulling a little harder, a large section of wallpaper came away; it was extremely amusing; we climbed up on a chair; without any effort, all the paper came off … We piled up the chairs one on top of the other: the wall appeared with its pink plaster; how marvellous! We placed the stack of chairs on a table and managed to strip away the paper as far as the ceiling: the pleasure was sublime! At last, my mother came in; she stood stock still, contemplating the disaster. She didn’t say a word to us; in the depths of her despair all she did was weep silently; no reprimand could have had such an effect on me; I ran away, howling with sorrow: we never saw the uncle from Issoire again.

Yes, life was a solemn affair, since it caused mothers to cry. On another occasion, my sisters and I were put to bed in a room, not normally occupied, in which bunches of grapes were hanging on a string from the ceiling. The grapes, in their paper bags, would keep in this way throughout the winter: I took a pillow, threw it in the air, and knocked down one bunch; another followed; then another; the grapes lay scattered on the ground; I hit them with the bolster, this way and that; soon the entire harvest was strewn over the wooden floor. For the first time in my life, I was whipped. The humiliation was something I would never forget.

“These people live like travelling circus folk,” an aunt remarked.

“Coco will turn out badly,” another replied.

“We’ll have to sell her to the gypsies …”

“Stinging nettles …” (domestic chastisements only made me more uncivilised, more fractious).

When I observe how early happiness handicaps people, I do not regret having been deeply unhappy to begin with. You have to be a truly decent person to put up with a good education. I would not have had a different destiny to mine for anything in the world.

I was naughty, bad-tempered, thieving, hypocritical and eavesdropping. I only liked to eat what I had stolen. Unbeknown to my aunts, I would hide away and cut myself huge slices of bread; the cook used to say to me: “You’ll cut yourself in half”; in order to be free, I took my bread to the lavatory. The proud know only one supreme good: freedom!

But to be free, one needs money. I thought of nothing but the money that opens the prison gate. The catalogues I read gave me wild dreams of spending. I imagined myself wearing a white woollen dress; I wanted a bedroom painted in white gloss, with white curtains. What a contrast this white made with the dark house in which my aunts confined me. Shortly before he left for America, my father brought 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! For me, the eldest, not to be able to wear it!

I threw my arms around my father’s neck. “Take me away from here!” “Now, now, my dear Coco, everything will be all right, I’ll be back, I’ll take you with me, we’ll have a home again …” Those were his last words. He didn’t come back. I never lived under my father’s roof again. He occasionally wrote and told me to trust him and said that his business was doing well. And then that was all: we never heard another word from him.

At the time, I often used to think about dying; 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. They kept on telling me that on my father’s side I came from a family of nobodies. “You wouldn’t hold your head so high if you knew that your grandmother was a shepherdess,” they used to say. In which they were mistaken, for I found it delightful to have a granny with a crook, putting sheep adorned with ribbons out to graze. (Up until the day not long ago when, during the Occupation, I was with my aunt, Adrienne de Nexon, my grandparents’ daughter, who was obliged to provide proof of her ancestry; we discovered that this shameful side of my family, in spite of the shepherdess, was better than the other side.)

I behaved properly in front of strangers. The local people used to say: “Little Coco has good manners”. I was well brought up, like a dog that has been well trained. I kept my fits of madness to myself, except for one occasion when I slid down the banisters and landed in the middle of the drawing room, among the guests. If I was given a five-franc coin, I would squander it on presents. “You’ll end up poor,” my aunts kept on saying.

Another aunt of mine, my father’s sister, who was much younger than the others and was beautiful, with long hair, would sometimes come to the house.

“We’re going to take tea,” I would say.

“Tea? Where have you heard about taking tea?” asked the other aunts.

“In the fashion magazines. In Paris, they take tea; whether you like it or not, that’s what happens. There’s a whole ceremony. You place the teapot beneath a ‘cosy’; that’s what it’s called. You invite your friends; you serve them from an embroidered table mat.”

“Coco, you’re crazy!”

“I want tea.”

“There isn’t any.”

“The chemist has some.”

When I got my tea, my Aunt Adrienne said:

“Let’s play at being ladies. Strong or weak?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Ladies don’t say ‘I don’t want to’.”

“What do you mean by ladies?”

“Those in ‘aristocratic circles’.”

“Who will take us there?”

We drained our cups. I ventured to ask my Aunt Adrienne:

“Apart from ladies, who goes to tea parties?”

“Elegant men, those who do nothing; they are far more handsome than those who work.”

“Don’t they do anything?”

“You should see them … They do lots of things.”

“Adrienne, leave the child alone; you’ll bewilder her.”

My aunts owned some grazing land, for they had a little property; fields of close-cropped grass, which were poor for producing milk, but very much enjoyed by horses. They bred horses, in the most basic sort of way, which meant allowing the animals to graze freely. They sold their best products to the army (who, then, spoke about the infantry!). Untameable, like our chickens, I ran all over our farm buildings with the little peasant children. I mounted our horses bare-back (at sixteen, I had never seen a saddle), I caught hold of our best animals (or occasionally other people’s, as I fancied) by their manes or their tails. I stole all the carrots from the house to feed them. How I loved it when the handsome soldiers did their rounds, and the visits of the cavalry officers who came to see our herd. Fine hussars or chasseurs, with sky-blue dolmans and black frogging, and their pelisses on their shoulders. They came every year in their beautifully harnessed phaetons; they looked in the horses’ mouths to see how old they were, stroked their fetlocks to check that they weren’t inflamed, and slapped their flanks; it was a great party; a party that for me was fraught with a degree of anxiety: supposing they were going to take my favourite horses away from me? But they didn’t choose them; they were careful not to, for I had made them gallop so much on hard and flinty ground while they were unshod and in the fields, that their feet had been affected. I can still see the officer coming into our house, after the inspection, and warming himself by the kitchen hearth: “These horses have hooves like cattle, their soles have gone and their frogs are rotten!” he said, referring to our best-looking creatures. I no longer dared to look the officer in the eye, but he had seen through me; as soon as my aunts had turned away, he whispered in a low voice: “So you’ve been galloping without shoes, eh, you little rascal?”

It’s not that I love horses. I’ve never been like the ‘horsey folk’ who groom them and comb them for fun, or like the Englishwomen who, as soon as they have a spare moment, spend it in the stable.

Yet it is nevertheless true that horses have influenced the course of my life.

This is how:

It so happened that my aunts had sent me to spend the summer at Vichy, with my grandfather, who was taking the waters. I was so glad to have escaped from Mont-Dore, from the gloomy house, from needlework, from my trousseau; embroidering initials on the towels for my future household, and sewing crosses in Russian stitching on my nightdresses, for a hypothetical wedding night, made me feel ill; in a fury, I spat on my trousseau. I was sixteen. I was becoming pretty. I had a face that was as plump as a fist, hidden in a vast swathe of black hair that reached the ground. Vichy! How wonderful after Mont-Dore! I was no longer under the eye of my aunts; how much I preferred the patriarchal supervision of my grandparents! I walked outside on my own all day long, I strode out ahead of me, nose in the air. Away from my chestnut groves, Vichy was a fairyland. A ghastly fairyland in reality, but wonderful to fresh eyes. At last I could see at close hand those ‘bathers’ whom we did not dare look at behind Persian blinds in Thiers; we were forbidden to look at those ‘eccentrics’, the women who wore tartan dresses. In Vichy, I could satisfy my hunger. I found myself in the heart of the citadel of extravagance. Cosmopolitan society is like taking a journey without moving: Vichy was my first journey. Vichy would teach me about life. Young girls know everything today; as for us, we knew nothing, nothing, nothing. I don’t regret it.