The Allure of Chanel

ALONE

IT IS NOT WITHIN VIEW of my native Puy-de-Dôme that I am speaking to you, this evening, it’s in St Moritz, overlooking the Bernina Pass; it’s not in our gloomy house where, one day, a proud and inscrutable little girl was taken in, without affection or warmth, that I begin telling you the story of my past life; it’s in a brightly lit hotel, where the rich take their pleasure and their laborious rest. But for me, in the Switzerland of today just as in the Auvergne of yesteryear, I have only ever found loneliness.

At the age of six, I am already alone. My mother has just died. My father deposits me, like a millstone, at the house of my aunts, and leaves immediately for an America from which he will never return. An orphan … ever since then, this word has always paralysed me with fear; even now I cannot go past a girls’ boarding school and hear people saying “they are orphans”, without tears coming to my eyes. Half-a-century has passed, but in the midst of the luxury and happiness enjoyed by the last happy people in a miserable world, I am alone, still alone.

More alone than ever.

These initial remarks are preceded by the word “Alone”; I would not write “Alone …”, I would not follow it with an ellipsis, as if to tint my isolation with a note of melancholy that is not in my nature; nor with an exclamation mark: “Alone!”, which would have had the pointless effect of appearing to challenge the world. I merely observe that I have grown up, lived, and am growing old alone.

It is loneliness that has forged my character, which is bad-tempered, and bronzed my soul, which is proud, and my body, which is sturdy.

My life is the story—and often the tragedy—of the solitary woman, her woes, her importance, the unequal and fascinating battle she has waged with herself, with men, and with the attractions, the weaknesses and the dangers that spring up everywhere.

Today, alone in the sunshine and snow … I shall continue, without husband, without children, without grandchildren, without all those delightful illusions, without all those delusions that make us believe that the world is inhabited by our other selves, to work and live ‘alone’.