Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [117]
In December 1923, the Parisian avant-garde was rattled when its prodigy Raymond Radiguet suddenly died. The boy’s book The Devil in the Flesh had become so popular it was even sold on street corners and at train stations, and it had made him famous. Reading France had fallen in love with Radiguet, and was appalled at the speed and premature nature of his demise. He had contracted typhoid when by the sea with friends, then, back in Paris, had once again fled Cocteau to a hotel across town. Here he picked up a girl and lived with her intermittently while revising his second book, Count d’Orgel’s Ball. Radiguet became wracked with chills, and the doctor diagnosed pneumonia. Cocteau was skeptical and called Gabrielle, who immediately sent her own doctor to the patient. He saw at once that it was typhoid and also that it was too late; he sent Radiguet to a hospital all the same. Radiguet’s mother misguidedly left his bedside for the night and in her absence he died, alone. Cocteau neither spent that last night with him, nor would he see him dead, or even attend the funeral.
As always, opinion was divided over Cocteau. Did he behave like “a self-indulgent queen,” or was he so devastated it was best that he keep away? Gabrielle had paid for the doctor, and now she also arranged and paid for the entire funeral, described as “most wonderfully done.” Artistic Paris turned out in force. Valentine Hugo wrote, “We were in utter despair” watching the white coffin, white hearse and white flowers, with just one bunch of red roses. It was all to Gabrielle’s design. The mourners followed in a long procession down the boulevard toward Père-Lachaise, the cemetery already harboring so many fellow writers.
Meanwhile, for several months past, Gabrielle had been spending time with another writer.
20
Reverdy
The date is lost, but at some point around 1922, Gabrielle had begun another affair, this time with Picasso’s old friend the poet Pierre Reverdy.
Reverdy was friend to many of the painters and poets of prewar Montmartre, on its hilltop in northern Paris. When they joined the postwar artistic exodus for Montparnasse, the new Montmartre in the southern part of the city, Reverdy stayed behind. With Max Jacob and the wild modernist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in 1916 Reverdy had founded one of the most progressive and significant literary magazines of its day, the short-lived Nord-Sud. The name referred to the Metro line linking those two artistic Parisian domains, whose inhabitants had fought over modernity within the covers of Reverdy’s magazine.
His great friend Georges Braque believed that while almost no French poets had understood the first thing about modern art, Reverdy was “almost the only exception.” Indeed, Reverdy’s publication on Picasso was one of the few that the artist himself admired. Reverdy was both attracted and repelled by the smart snobberies of the haut monde, famously saying that he preferred the company of artists, and that “life in society is one huge adventure in piracy and cannot be successful without a great deal of conniving.”
By contrast, Gabrielle was less ambivalent about having the haut monde as her friend, although none among them in the end would become as long-standing a companion as the supreme Misia Sert. Gabrielle was more emotionally resilient, more grounded than Reverdy, using her acerbic wit as a jousting tool with which to defend herself and keep mentally in trim. Describing society as “irresistibly dishonest,” she said, “They amuse me more than the others. They make me laugh.” 1 Gabrielle’s famed poise, mistakenly and patronizingly described as having been instilled in her by the Serts, was something she possessed naturally, and in abundance, long before she met them. Thus the confident and graceful Gabrielle felt quite equal to associating