Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [13]
For the most part, however, Gabrielle’s time at Aubazine was to remain a poorly healed wound. To contemporaries, an illegitimate birth, impoverished childhood and abandonment to an orphanage were slurs upon one’s reputation, and once out in the world, Gabrielle set about concealment. If, once or twice, the burden of this anxious secret left her feeling so alone she was driven to confide it in full, her confidantes were decent enough to tell no one.
While we catch only glimpses of these crucial formative years, over time Gabrielle found ways to tell her story. She described repeatedly, for example, a profound antipathy for a group of women she called her “aunts.” Unpicking the web of misinformation she wove around herself, one sees that these “aunts” were not one but two sets of women. They were a conflation of her real aunts and the sisters of Aubazine. Together they took the brunt of Gabrielle’s youthful resentment, the memory of which still rankled more than half a century later. Above all, she believed that for her “aunts”—her family and the nuns—“Love was a luxury and childhood a sin.”15 Surrounded as she was by unloving authority figures, Gabrielle’s early experience was one of disharmony, repression and neglect.
4
Things That I Should Be and Which I Am Not
In their eighteenth year, when the girls left the confines of Aubazine, the nuns saw themselves as responsible for their continuing welfare. First Julia-Berthe, then Gabrielle and, finally, Antoinette left behind this remote place that had held them for so long. What we don’t know is why, on leaving Aubazine, they didn’t set off, along with the thousands of other girls from humble backgrounds, in search of work. Instead, the nuns arranged for the Chanel girls’ transfer to another convent. This was in Moulins, a small town more than a hundred miles to the north.
The convent of Notre Dame was a local finishing school of sorts, with a contingent of charity pupils whom Gabrielle joined in 1901. Seated in a lower position at table and in church, and wearing clothes of poorer quality, the charity pupil was seldom permitted to forget her inferior status. At Moulins, young Gabrielle’s position was even more irksome to her than at Aubazine, where at least the girls had all sprung from similarly modest backgrounds. As a final humiliation, the Moulins charity girls were obliged to fulfill domestic duties to supplement their keep. Despite the fact that Gabrielle’s sisters were at Aubazine, she always gave the impression that her childhood and youth were spent without siblings or friends. At Moulins, however, she found a friend.
Adrienne Chanel was the youngest of Henri-Adrien and Angélina Chanel’s nineteen children. Their eldest, Albert, Gabrielle’s father, was twenty-eight years older than his youngest sister. Adrienne had been boarding at Notre Dame since the age of ten, and she made Gabrielle feel most welcome. The girls were separated by only two years and looked much like sisters. Adrienne’s self-possessed and tranquil nature was a strong contrast to her defensive and pent-up niece. A photograph of the girls together, taken shortly after Gabrielle’s move to Moulins, is a striking illustration of their different personalities. Adrienne places one hand fetchingly on her hip; the other is behind Gabrielle’s head, as if showing