Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [147]
At the end of the transaction, she was left with a sense of Gabrielle’s decisive toughness. These two remarkable women may not have felt great warmth for each other, but they did feel a strong mutual respect. Gabrielle described Colette, correctly, as “this highly intelligent woman,” saying, “The only two female writers who appeal to me are Madame de Noailles and Colette.”
In 1933, by which time everyone who was anyone summered in the south of France, Misia met Colette one day and gossiped about Gabrielle and Iribe’s engagement. Colette then wrote to a friend: “I’ve just been told that Iribe is marrying Chanel. Aren’t you horrified for her? That man is a most interesting demon.”7 Iribe’s first wife had been a good friend of Colette’s. Colette didn’t like Iribe. Finding him fawning, she was suspicious of his thrusting drive to succeed. She described him as wrinkled and pale and said that he “coos like a pigeon.” His friend Paul Morand felt rather differently.
Back in Paris, having foretold the transatlantic cataclysm . . . having sensed that the time for misery was to come; Iribe felt that one had to fight against these curses and die, as a French artisan, for the individual and for quality. In love with the homeland he was returning to and disappointed by it, he was publishing Témoin.”8
Iribe had founded the magazine Le Témoin before the First World War, and now persuaded Gabrielle to fund its relaunch. With forceful Iribe graphics, this time Le Témoin served to support a growing French nationalism. In one illustration, Marianne, female symbol of liberty in France, was Gabrielle, under a bench of sneering judges: Roosevelt, Chamberlain, Mussolini and Hitler. Iribe was now an archpatriot who despised his nation’s present government. Fierce antirepublican sentiment—the same that had brought Hitler to power in Germany not so long before—spawned a number of right-wing leagues, the aim being to overthrow the French Third Republic in favor of a strong, uniting individual. One of the most powerful right-wing elements, the Action Française, under François Maurras, wanted a restoration of France’s monarchy. Iribe wasn’t a monarchist, but he believed that democratic government was ineffectual.
As one element of the drive to patriotism, Le Témoin was anti-German and anti-Jewish. Above all, it was antiforeign, claiming France for the French alone. However, in 1934, Gabrielle was as shocked as the rest of Paris when a demonstration by forty thousand right-wing associations and war veterans ended by being one of the bloodiest since the Paris commune of 1871. Sixteen people were killed, more than two thousand were injured, the Right was narrowly defeated and the communists and socialists were roused to sink their differences in a new party, the Popular Front.
After more than a decade of entertaining and “show,” Gabrielle now gave up the Hôtel de Lauzan on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and moved into a large suite at a hôtel pension in the Ritz; her rooms were situated on the rue Cambon side. The furniture and objects she wished to keep were moved into a third-floor apartment she had made for herself in her rue Cambon building, at number 31. Here she would keep her clothes. For the rest, when Gabrielle felt the need of a home, she could travel south to La Pausa.
This move into the hotel had possibly come about after some prodding from the demanding Iribe. He had told her he thought her way of life was corrupting and didn’t understand why she needed so much. If she lived more simply, he might live with her. He said he hated complex people. Gabrielle apparently obliged, moving into two rooms in a family house nearby. After a short