The Allure of Chanel

MISIA

“FORGET THESE BOTTICELLIS; these da Vincis, they’re appalling, what rubbish!” Misia would say to me. “Let’s go and buy corals to make Chinese trees.”

Whoever mentions Sert, mentions Misia.

She has been my only woman friend. (My feelings for her, what’s more, were more those of liking than of friendship.) This obliges me therefore to describe how I see her, what she meant to me, and what she is. I have seen her appear at the moment of my greatest grieving: other people’s grief lures her, just as certain fragrances lure the bee.

We only like people because of their failings: Misia gave me ample and countless reasons for liking her. Misia only devotes herself to what she doesn’t understand; yet she understands almost everything. Me, I remained a mystery to her; out of this came a loyalty that was always belied, but which, after some differences, reverted to normal. She’s an unusual human being, who only appealed to women and to a few artists. Misia is to Paris what the goddess Kali is to the Hindu pantheon. She is simultaneously the goddess of destruction and of creation. She kills and scatters her germs, without realising. Satie called her “mother kill-all”, and Cocteau “the back-street abortionist”. That’s unfair. Misia certainly doesn’t create, but in certain dim lights, she performs her useful and kindly act like a glow-worm in the dark.

There’s no denying that, in her case, she’s unaware of her influence; but this Polish woman’s Oriental fondness for destroying and falling asleep after the disaster, the calm soul in the midst of the ruins, is entirely conscious.

Misia has no sense of moderation. “French rational clarity” and the “blue line of modest hills” mean nothing to this nomad from the steppes.

She has an acute thirst for success and a deep and sacrilegious passion for failure. For herself, whom she loathes, for the man she serves, her tactical knowledge and her promotional strategy are always on the alert.

Misia loves me. “You must realise,” Lifar said to me, “that Misia has done for you what she has done for no one else.” It’s true. She craved my affection. This love comes from a great basic generosity mixed with a devilish delight in denigrating everything she gives. Shallow people say she’s “highly intelligent”. If she had been, I would not have been friendly with her. I am not sufficiently intelligent for “highly intelligent” women. “We live,” Misia used to say, “on a reputation for usurped intelligence.”

From the age of fifteen, ever since she posed at Valvins, with her hair in curlers and her blouse rolled up, as women from a brothel for Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Vuillard and Bonnard, up to the time of Picasso, Stravinsky and Diaghilev, Misia has spent fifty years living among the greatest artists and she is completely uncultured. She has never opened a book.

“Take this book, Misia.”

“What for? I wonder when you find the time to read?”

She doesn’t even read her own letters. She has imposed herself on all the great artists of her time, but she has lost them, for they are creators, and she deprives them of oxygen (she only sees them again so as to make sure I don’t see them); she would like them to be without soul, without talent, for her alone, just as her Chinese trees are without leaves.

“Ah! How long it is!” moaned Misia at Bayreuth one day, as she was listening to Parsifal.

An irritated German, sitting next to her, turned to her:

“Are you sure, Madame, that it is not you who are too short?”

Misia has a sickly heart; in friendship she squints and in love she limps. And since she is intelligent enough to tolerate it, this makes her attractive. She aspires to greatness, she loves to mingle with it, to sniff it, to control it and reduce it. The sublime in art, with the deep feelings that accompany it, does credit to her. If having good taste means saying no, Misia is taste itself.

This eternal no, as a natural effect of divine wrath, leads Misia to surround herself with nothing but rubbish, with ghastly little trinkets, with dubious people, who are indecisive even where their sex is concerned. All she likes is mother-of-pearl; a nostalgia for vases probably. Luxury for her is the opposite of luxury. For Misia, it’s the flea market.

So what about her fondness for me? I repeat that it comes from the fact that she has never been able to destroy me, that is to say prove her love to me. “She loves you, Madmachelle,” Sert used to say, “because she has never been able to trick you.” She was never able to find the chink in the armour, which nevertheless exists. For a quarter-of-a-century, the worm has made its way around the fruit without ever being able to get inside it. The steppe has never prevailed over the French countryside. “Monsieur le Président,” Hitler said to Laval one day, “what Poland lacks is a Massif Central.”

Misia believes sincerely that she loves me: it’s unrequited love; seeing me makes her unhappy, but she gets fed up if she doesn’t see me. My friendships make her demented and this dementia gives an irreplaceable pungency to her life. When she turns Picasso against me, she says: “I saved you from him.”

Having loved her, Vuillard came to hate her. He wanted to paint my portrait; Misia made it up with him merely in order to prevent it. She is like the St Bernard who brings you back to the shore with your head under water. Misia is full of malice, in both the modern and the archaic meaning of the word.

She does everything by calculation; but if she knows how to divide and subtract, she is incapable of adding up.

She dug out some extraordinarily amusing clothes, which she kept for months, for years, and she knew how to give them a very makeshift appearance at the last moment.

She had absolutely no shame, no sense of honesty, but she had a grandeur and an innocence about her that surpassed everything one usually observes in women. (Let no one criticise me here for my harshness: for it’s because of all this that I adored her.) Gaffes terrify me; Misia loves them as one would some wonderful savoury dish. So far as love is concerned, Edwards and Sert were for her what gaffes are in the social sense: gaffes that were intended, premeditated, relished; for women without sexual drive, like her, these stimulants are necessary. What allowed her to retain her Jewish soul were the Jews themselves.

In a woman there is everything, and in Misia there was every sort of woman. She has no life of her own, she lives through others. She’s a parasite of the heart. Her love is atomic, it’s the splitting of the love atom. If I am bored somewhere, but especially if I’m having fun, Misia comes up to me:

“I can’t go on! Come home with me. We shall have fun.”

Once we’re in the car:

“Thank goodness we left, I was going to explode!”

And since she is a first-rate super-flirt, she soon makes me forget the place we had just left, she livens things up, she becomes marvellous, and all her virtues begin to shine.

Misia has the most serious virtue of all: she’s never boring, even though she’s always bored.

To distract her—everything to do with me amused her—and to inflame her curiosity, I invented bogus love affairs, imaginary passions. She was always taken in.

We were at anchor off Trieste, the time of day one whispers secrets.

“I’m returning to Venice, dear Misia, because I am suffering abominably; I’m madly in love with a man who loathes me.”

The word “suffering” elated Misia.

“There was I convinced that you had never suffered! How could you not have come and told me that earlier?”

When I threw down my cards, when I cried “April fool”, when I said to her: “Seeing you were bored, my dearest, I invented this little story,” Misia was appalled.

A few days later, in Venice, I almost perished from a fever; Misia was so disappointed and angry that she didn’t even ask for news of me.

And another time:

“If you swear you won’t repeat it, Misia, I’m going to tell you a secret.”

“Go on! Go on!”

“I … I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales! But not a word!”

“I … I’m going to stay here with you, because if I go away, I’ll spill everything!”

Misia is neither good nor bad: she’s one of the frailties of humanity, but she’s a force of nature. Her mere presence makes you want to speak badly of people. You don’t feel happy leaving her house; you regret the bad things you’ve said. She is generous: as long as you suffer, she’s ready to give everything, to give everything so that you suffer all the more.

As soon as she has spoken ill or done something harmful to someone, Misia is overcome with fear and runs over to her victim’s home as a precaution, overwhelms her with kind words, and explains that it’s for her own good; in short, she makes the first move. When I see her arrive, from the morning onwards, I welcome her like this:

“The things you must have said about me yesterday!”

In my case, I sometimes bite my friends, but Misia, she devours them.

Even when Misia speaks the truth, she finds a way of being amusing. I hate asking questions; I’m full of admiration for Misia’s brazen interrogative manner.

Misia’s tragedy is that she that she misses her opportunities, after having made everybody else miss theirs. But she miscarries only freaks. In this way all the important men, precisely because they were important, have eluded her; she has retained only what she has destroyed, that is to say nothing. There’s nothing left for Madame Verdurinska but to embroider her existence, under the marvelling eye of Monsieur Boulos.

Misia has not succeeded in corroding certain indestructible French spirits. My aunt Adrienne de Nexon, who lives near us, says of her:

“I called and had tea with ‘your Polish woman’.”

“My Polish woman?”

“Yes, that lady who wears satin slippers in the mornings … I don’t like her. She tried very cleverly to drag every secret out of me. I replied: ‘Madame, do you take me for an information service? …’ You’ve got some strange friends … How can you get on with these foreigners who are so badly brought up?”