Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [108]
In several rooms, Gabrielle covered the gilded walls with mirror glass from floor to ceiling, and then added Louis XIV furniture, combined with an underlying oriental theme. This took the form of numerous Coromandel folding screens, which became a signature element of Gabrielle’s interiors, and which she first lived with in Arthur’s apartment. In one of the salons, she had a huge Regency sofa covered in orange velvet and set in front of one of these enormous Chinese figured screens. On the side tables were lamps made of large crystal balls set one upon the other, with lampshades made of parchment. (These same elegant lamps are now in Gabrielle’s apartment in the rue Cambon, as are a number of the Coromandel screens.) A small library, with natural, pale woodwork, had fine old carpets, with furniture and curtains, all in beige. This color may sound unappealing, but Gabrielle made it work with such success it was to become one of her trademarks.
A fine classical marble torso was reflected in a mantelpiece mirror, both bought on that recent trip to Italy with the Serts, and now also in the rue Cambon. In Gabrielle’s bedroom were floor-to-ceiling mirror panels covering one wall, while her bed was spread with a dark fur coverlet enclosed by cream silk curtains falling from a wooden baldachin. Coromandel screens stood behind another velvet-covered sofa, and a huge crystal chandelier hung above a small silver table. Hanging on the mirror wall panels was an enormous Venetian mirror decorated all around the edge with crystal flowers. This astounding piece of craftsmanship, today in Gabrielle’s apartment, was bought from the sale of the recently bankrupt and legendarily stylish narcissist the marchesa Luisa Casati. That Gabrielle would keep several of these outstanding pieces of furniture confirms one’s sense that the grammar of her decorative style was already well established.
Gabrielle loved gold, and the colors beige and black. Like Misia, she also loved crystal. However, as for Misia’s own taste, Gabrielle later described her apartment before her marriage to Sert as “all that pile of objects.” Misia’s very busy interior had at first led Gabrielle and Arthur to the conclusion that Misia must be an antique dealer. And Arthur had unashamedly asked, “Is it all for sale?” Gabrielle loathed what she called “the doctrine of clutter.” Speaking of Misia’s, she said, “It wends its way along walls, piles up underneath tables, proliferates on the stairs, the cupboards no longer shut.”1 Nevertheless, Paul Morand, a man of most particular and snobbish tastes, described Misia’s apartment’s “crystal, its lacquer, its general air of exquisite rococo,” without criticism. No doubt Gabrielle did owe something to Misia and Sert’s aesthetic, but she now practiced a doctrine of luxury, size and space whose elements were her own.
Into the magnificent setting of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré she transported Joseph Leclerc, now chamberlain of a bevy of servants looking after his mistress and her steady stream of visitors. By day, Gabrielle perfected and sold the clothes that were making her so quintessentially modern, and by night, she was establishing herself as a sought-after Parisian figure. Preferring, on the whole, the company of artists, it was in this period that she became close to Jean Cocteau. If Cocteau’s following, or “school,” is hard to define, while both loved and reviled, he had, nonetheless, positioned himself as a spokesman for modernist art. His famous personal charm and dazzling conversation were evanescent but almost impossible to replicate, and even Cocteau haters thought “his life was his masterpiece” and that “his talk was the best part of him.” For his detractors, he was full of gimmickry, artifice and vacuity. He, meanwhile, said, “A poet owes it to himself to be a very serious man, and yet, out of politeness, to appear the opposite.”2 For more than fifty years, Gabrielle would oscillate between love and dislike of Cocteau.
After the recent war, artists had continued arguing back and forth: what