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[T]here was a near disaster when Chanel . . . dared Schiaparelli . . . to dance with her and, with purposeful innocence, steered her into the candles . . . The fire was put out and so was Schiaparelli—by delighted guests squirting her with soda-water. The incident added enormously to the anecdotes about the party that provided Paris with conversation for many days.3

Careful to remain in the public eye, Gabrielle continued socializing and was noticed at one great costume ball after another wearing dramatic revivalist outfits. Interestingly, to the modern eye, for the first time, she looks a little dated. Having contributed so much to the look of her century, somehow the clothes of the previous one just don’t look right on her. It is ironic that the woman who had become successful through her radical simplification of women’s dress, in the years before and after the First World War, on the eve of the next cataclysm joined in this escapist attention to the past.

Hôtel Ritz letterhead, dated 1938

Dearest Coco

I arrived just when you had left rue Cambon after an afternoon of colossal “gnawing pains.” Don’t forget about me! I would like to see you tomorrow morning... I will telephone you . . .

Dear Beautiful little Coco

I will write to you . . . Earlier, when Hugo told me you were clinging on to the other end of the phone, it scared me to death . . . and my legs were shaking a little bit... a compulsive tenderness seized my throat... After this phone call I had a . . . representation of your little face, there was a kind of melancholy which I had never seen before . . . a kind of melancholy which is probably . . . absolutely exclusive to you . . .

I give you my love. No one of us must ever die.

La Pausa

1938

Dear beautiful Chanel

. . . It scares me more and more to telephone you, it gives me palpitations, anguish seizes me by the throat and I understand absolutely nothing of what you’re telling me . . . I have to tell you where I stand . . . and it is better to write it to you than not to tell you.

I give you my love and I love you.

Your Salvador

La Pausa, Roquebrune

Late 1938

Dear beautiful little bird

. . . Gala [his wife] is gone . . . While you were here you have truly enchanted La Pausa. One gets used to not seeing this little image . . . One thing is certain is that our meeting is becoming very “good” and very important...

I give you all my love

Your Salvador4

Salvador is Salvador Dalí and, for several months, he and Gabrielle had been having an affair. A few years later, she would brush the romance aside and say she indulged in it only to annoy Gala. Reading the series of Dalí’s letters to Gabrielle, one can see that he, however, had clearly both fallen in love with Gabrielle and was amazed by her. In spite of his (intentionally or not) surreal way of communicating, one sees that Dalí was no fool, and he undoubtedly appreciated something of the great breadth of Gabrielle’s character. This included “seeing” her melancholy. He would no doubt have agreed with her comments when she said: “I provide contrasts . . . which I cannot get used to: I think I am the shyest and the boldest person, the gayest and the saddest. It’s not that I am violent; it’s the contrasts, the great opposites that clash within me.”5

Gabrielle’s horror of loneliness left her still yearning for love and companionship. But after Iribe’s death, disillusionment would harden her. She seemed resigned to the thought that nothing lasts and you take what you can while you can. And for all her growing self-presentation as invincible and hard, as much as anything this was because of those violent contrasts she had described. On the one hand, she was very strong; on the other, her vulnerability never left her. Thus she could say, “Anyway, that is the person I am. Have you understood? Very well, I am also the opposite of all that.”6 Thus one is not entirely convinced by Gabrielle’s protestations that she