Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [15]
After a year and a half under the Desboutins’ watchful eyes, at the age of twenty-one, Gabrielle could bear it no longer. Escaping her oppressive surveillance, she set off to live somewhere of her own choosing. Although her room was in the most downmarket neighborhood, her liberty must at first have felt quite heady, and she persuaded Adrienne to strike out from the Desboutins and join her. As seamstresses, the Chanel girls had joined the thousands upon thousands of others working at what was then, along with domestic service, the most common of all female employment. A seamstress’s wages were generally pitiful. Like many others, the girls took on a Sunday job to bolster their paltry earnings, working at one of the town’s several tailor shops.
With hundreds of officers stationed around Moulins, there was a lot of tailoring work available, altering uniforms and kitting out local worthies for the racing each season. The most exalted of the cavalry regiments was the 10th Light Horse, whose members were drawn from the highest echelons of Parisian society as well as the landed gentry. Although forward-thinking politicians and military men now regarded cavalry regiments as outdated, the old guard saw them as the most distinguished.
Legend has it that one Sunday, Gabrielle and Adrienne were at work in the tailor’s shop when a party of six young lieutenants turned up for some last-minute alterations. Standing around, some in their shirt-tails, they noticed the two pretty girls busy in the next room. Despite determined overtures from the young men, they remained studiously absorbed in their sewing. Intrigued, the officers quizzed the tailor, discovered the girls’ other place of work and waylaid them with an invitation to watch the horse jumping. The girls agreed, but with an hauteur that further captivated the distinguished young men. All went well, and soon Gabrielle and Adrienne were being escorted to La Tentation for sorbets, or passing the time flirting with their admirers at the smart set’s favorite rendezvous, the art nouveau Grand Café.
The Chanel girls were enthralled by these encounters and savored this unfamiliar admiration from their socially superior escorts, some of the most eligible young men in France. Confident in their youth and pedigree, the officers exuded the casual charm of those accustomed to having their own way.
Gabrielle and Adrienne were invited to evenings at La Rotonde, a large café functioning as a small-scale music hall to entertain the army in garrison towns. A poor cousin of the far more worldly Parisian café-concerts, such as the Alcazar and the Eldorado, where celebrated performers like Yvette Guilbert and the great Mistinguett took to the stage, the beuglants (the name given to provincial caf’concs) was an altogether less sophisticated affair. Café-concerts had developed around midcentury as simple shows for the populace at cafés on Paris’s boulevards. Performers sang about the travails of everyday urban lowlife, their acts full of erotic innuendo, with catchy nonsensical choruses. Before the cinema took off in a big way, the caf’conc was the pivot of social life for the newly urban working classes. They paved the way for music halls and cabarets, such as the Folies-Bergère, the Moulin Rouge and the Mirliton, that became popular with other sections of society. Bohemian painters, poets and writers routinely patronize these café-clubs, and the bourgeoisie got a frisson from their raffish and anarchic atmosphere.
The Chanel girls relished their visits to the beuglants, whose bawdy, quick-talking showmanship must have reminded them of the fairs and markets of their childhood. The singer, accompanied by a pianist, belted out her numbers over the cheery din of the crowd. Behind her sat a ring of poseuses— young hopefuls who stepped forward, one by one, to fill in with popular refrains while the lead took her well-earned break. The poseuses were there above all to strike