Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [12]
The twelfth-century hermit Etienne de Viezaux (St. Stephen) founded the convent of Aubazine at a remote spot, in his words, “to be far from the concourse of men.” Even today, Aubazine feels distant from any great “concourse,” and soon after its founding, the monastery became a welcome resting place on the great pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. During the terrors of the revolution, a new religious order, the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary, was founded to care for the poor and rejected, and to run homes for abandoned and orphaned girls. The sisters restored the austere buildings at Aubazine, whose towering chapel reflects its previous role as church to the Romanesque abbey. The long, whitewashed corridors and convent rooms are high, wide and airy, and the doors are a contrast in black, the color worn by nuns and pupils alike. When Gabrielle arrived at Aubazine, seven centuries, and many feet, had worn a beautiful dip in the great central stone staircase.
Aubazine’s isolation meant that aside from the odd festival, guided walk or occasional visit to relations, there was little respite from the girls’ regimented and cloistered existence. State education wasn’t always up to much, but religious institutions such as this were often woefully behind even that. The educational drive of such orphanages was the molding of their charges into devout Christians and devoted future employees. Long hours were spent at catechism and the prayer book. Given the convent’s rural location, the majority of its girls were, like Gabrielle, the offspring of peasants. Social hierarchy inside religious institutions rigidly followed life outside them, and social mobility was not something the nuns expected of their charges. They became servants, shop assistants or, if they were lucky, the wives of peasant farmers. Aubazine pupils were an underclass and as such it was presumed they would remain.
Beyond a limited proficiency in reading, arithmetic and possibly French history and geography, lessons were of a very basic nature. What orphanage sisters did regard as essential, however, were housekeeping skills for the girls’ hardworking future lives. They also tried to ensure that their pupils left with the modest trousseau including household linen they had sewn for themselves during their years under the nuns’ care.
Life at Aubazine was busy but deeply uneventful. By contrast, Gabrielle’s first eleven years had been spent in a round of ceaseless activity, either traveling or in the noisy, gaudy bustle and repartee of the markets. She was accustomed to people whose rough and precarious lives were lived on a public stage. Those who succeeded best had the keenest sense of showmanship, the quickest sense of humor and the greatest flair for holding their audience with a tale or a joke. Capturing the imagination, these people knew that the business of selling was, in large part, performance. Transplanted to the seclusion of a convent, Gabrielle chafed at her incarceration. One rare form of escape, however, did provide a feast for her imagination.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as village communities were much reduced and the urban mentality became dominant in France, the hugely expanded popular newspapers developed a vast circulation. These organs of mass communication celebrated speed, spontaneity and all that was unpredictable. They glorified the city, and Paris in particular. The popular press enabled people to make some sense of their newly urbanized world. It also introduced a new concept, the serial novel, the feuilleton, and these soon became something of a national obsession. While many families collected their installments until they had grown into a book, critics lamented the feuilletons’ formidable influence.
Albert’s younger sister, Gabrielle’s aunt Louise, decamped from her daily rounds by immersing herself in the latest feuilleton.