The Allure of Chanel

THE SIMPLE LIFE

THE MOST COMPLICATED MAN I ever knew was Paul Iribe. He criticised me for not being simple. (By that remark alone, ever since Jean-Jacques’ day, you can recognise a complex human being.) I thought I was. Deep down, perhaps I’m not? Simplicity does not mean walking around barefoot or wearing clogs, it comes from the spirit, it springs from the heart.

“I don’t understand,” he said, “why you need so many rooms … What’s the point of all these objects? Your way of life is ruining you. What a waste! Why do you need all these servants? One eats too well in your house. I’d come here more often, I might live close to you, if you knew how to be happy with nothing. I loathe pointless gestures, vast expenditure and complicated human beings.”

Filled with the hypocritical desire to refine my needs and a sincere wish to be pleasant to him, I replied:

“So be it. I shall become simple. I shall reduce my standard of living.”

Not far from the rue Cambon, I found a ‘family house’ in which I rented two rooms. Since this modest accommodation did not include any bathrooms, I had one built. I installed another, arranged my favourite books, a Coromandel screen, two heaters and a few fine rugs. When he saw me leaving my house, Iribe was annoyed, jealous, unhappy.

“I’m boarding out,” I told him. “It’s very convenient; I’m round the corner from my home and I’m going to start living the famous simple life.”

“Does it amuse you,” he said, “to play the midinette?”

I told him that he was responsible for all these changes. I was waiting for him, too, to rent some modest room, since he loved the simple life so much. But he did nothing of the kind and asked me irritably:

“Are you happy?”

“Very happy.”

“What are you playing at? Do you plan to stay there for long?”

I put on an act.

“You wanted me to leave the wood panelling, the marble and the wrought iron: here’s my cottage. The concierge does her cooking on the stairs. Your feet knock into empty milk bottles. Isn’t this the life you wanted me to lead and that you youself want to lead?”

“Do you think I’m used to living in such hovels?” he said in disgust.

And he moved in to the Ritz, opposite me.

My relationship with Iribe was a passionate one. How I loathe passion! What an abomination, what a ghastly disease! The passionate man is an athlete, he knows neither hunger, nor cold, nor exhaustion; he lives miraculously. Passion is Lourdes on a daily basis: look at that paralysed old woman who is wounded in her love: she runs down the stairs with the legs of a twenty-year-old. The passionate man takes no notice of the outside world or of other people; he sees them merely as instruments; the weather, happiness, the neighbour’s rights, these things don’t exist for him; he knows no obstacles, he overcomes everything; he possesses the patience of an ant and the strength of an elephant. He has no respect for other human beings. Along with fear, passion is the true paroxysm. The passionate man will go and wake up the President of the Republic to satisfy his vice, or, without a moment’s hesitation, he will commit all sorts of wrongdoing and go back to sleep, fully placated.

I had great affection for Paul and was very fond of him, but now that he is dead, and after such a long time, I can’t help feeling irritated when I think of the atmosphere of passion he built around me. He wore me out, he ruined my health. When Iribe had left Paris for America, I was beginning to be very well known. My emerging celebrity had eclipsed his declining glory. He loved me, subconsciously, when he returned in 193– so as to be free of this complex and in order to avenge himself on what he had been denied. For him I represented that Paris he had been unable to possess and control, from which he had departed in a sulk to join Cecil de Mille, down in his boring, gloomy studios in California. I was his due. He hadn’t had me when he should have had me and he intended to take this belated revenge. Too belated for both of us; but it’s never too late to mollify those phantoms that we call complexes.

Iribe loved me, but he did so because of all those things that he never admitted to himself, nor admitted to me; he loved me with the secret hope of destroying me. He longed for me to be crushed and humiliated, he wanted me to die. It would have made him deeply happy to see me belong totally to him, impoverished, reduced to helplessness, paralysed and driving a small car. He was a very perverse creature, very affectionate, very intelligent, very self-seeking and exceptionally sophisticated. He would say to me:

“You’re a poor fool.”

He was a Basque with astonishing mental and aesthetic versatility, but where jealousy was concerned, a real Spaniard. My past tortured him.

Iribe wanted to relive with me, step by step, the whole of that past lived without him and to go back through lost time, while asking me to account for myself. One day, he took me to the heart of the Auvergne, to Mont-Dore, to set out on the trail of my youth. We found the house of my aunts … As I walked beneath this avenue of lime trees, I really felt as if I were beginning my life again. I lingered behind. Iribe walked on alone and, on the pretext of finding somewhere to stay, he asked to see my aunts. They had not changed their attitude towards me, after so many years; he was told that if I showed my face, I would not be made welcome.

He came back towards me, soothed and satisfied, having found everything just as I had described it to him. Except that the local people, instead of wearing wool and alpaca, now bought their clothes at the Galeries Lafayette, and the pretty fluted headdresses had disappeared.