Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [120]
For Gabrielle to trust a man was most unusual. But over the years, whatever the tumult of her relationship with Reverdy, she never ceased admiring him and remained devoted to his poetry. It was immaterial that Reverdy was married, or that their love affair was turbulent. In turn, until his death, Reverdy would send copies of all he wrote to Gabrielle, with touching dedications :
Dear Coco
The time that passes
The weather outside
The time that flies
Of my obscure life I had lost the trace
Here it is found again darker than the night
But what remains clear is that with all my heart I give you my love
And all that follows doesn’t matter.5
Despite all Gabrielle’s best efforts, she had lost yet another man, and with Reverdy’s final departure, she was left wretched. While outsiders had little comprehension of this relationship, they could yet see that between this strange pair there was a deep rapport. Sometime later, Abbé Mugnier, that inveterate old commentator on the Parisian comedy of manners, wrote, correctly, that Gabrielle’s affection encouraged Reverdy to write and that she herself was not the same as she had been before their affair.
Cocteau’s mother’s comment on the relationship as “the return of a peasant woman to a peasant,” albeit said in snobbery, went some way toward understanding Gabrielle and Reverdy. It wasn’t exactly that they were peasants—they had both traveled way beyond those roots, and neither of them could have either lived with or been accepted by their kin—it was the residual element of their inherited connections to the earth and tradition. Despite the strains of their relationship, in Reverdy Gabrielle had discovered someone whose significance, while not replacing Arthur’s, reconnected her with the pastoral nature of her roots, giving her emotional and spiritual nourishment. Reverdy had written to her, “You know well that whatever happens, and God knows how much has already happened, you cannot render yourself anything other than infinitely precious to me, for ever.”
With Reverdy’s departure, Gabrielle’s heart had been dealt a ferocious blow. But her habit of concealing the depth of her feelings was not so difficult to achieve because the worlds in which she moved were noted for their particular egotism and self-regard. All the same, one suspects that in her entire life, there may only have been a handful of people who understood this highly intelligent, paradoxical and defensive woman with anything like the emotional imagination necessary to do so.
In that same year, 1924, Gabrielle was once again asked by Cocteau to design the costumes for a new Ballets Russes production, Le Train Bleu, whose inception arose out of a Diaghilev fit of pique. Following the death of Radiguet, Cocteau had gone to Monte Carlo to find distraction with his musical friends Stravinsky, Poulenc and Auric. Whatever the histrionics, Cocteau was genuinely prostrate at the death of his youthful amour and would take years to recover from it.
In Monte Carlo was the music critic Louis Laloy, a man of great cultivation who was also addicted to opium. In 1913, his notorious Le livre de la fumée, a history and manual of opium smoking, was credited with the great popularity of its practice in postwar Europe. Cocteau would write, “My nervous suffering became so great, so overwhelming, that Laloy at Monte Carlo suggested I relieve it in this way,”6 and so, with Poulenc, Auric and Laloy, he began smoking in earnest. By the time he left Monte Carlo a few weeks later, he was hooked, and in the future he would at times be reduced to an appalling state by his addiction. While Gabrielle would complain about Cocteau, she also remained his supporter, paying on several occasions for his rehabilitation.