Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [156]
Gabrielle came and went from La Pausa, regularly allowing one or more of her friends to stay for lengthy periods in her absence. During the thirties, one of these guests had been Pierre Reverdy. While Reverdy had exiled himself to the monastery outside Paris in the twenties, periodically he found the life of an ascetic insupportable and returned to the outside world. For some time, this had also involved an intermittent “return” to Gabrielle.
In that summer of 1938, Dalí’s letters to Gabrielle repeatedly stress how they are “terribly anxious about this nightmare you are living with Roussi.” This was Roussadana, the Russian girl who had married José Maria Sert.
Sometime before, Roussadana had become addicted to morphine, and in recent months she had also been reduced to a painful thinness. When she and Sert arrived to stay at La Pausa, Roussadana looked terrible; she was permanently feverish and coughing. Gabrielle took over. Sert didn’t “believe” in illness and, anyway, he was far too selfish to take a proper interest in his wife’s failing health. Gabrielle insisted they take Roussadana to a specialist for X-rays, and the verdict did not surprise her: Roussadana was in an advanced stage of tuberculosis. The doctors insisted she must enter a sanatorium, but the ravaged young woman absolutely refused to do so. Finally, Gabrielle used the ruse of paying a visit to her doctor in Switzerland. Would Roussadana come with her? When their train had set off, Roussadana showed Gabrielle the bruises given her by Sert in his fury at seeing her leave. She called them “Sert’s last gifts.”
Arriving in Switzerland, Gabrielle persuaded her to enter a clinic. On receiving the news in Paris, Misia rushed to Switzerland to see her, but once there, she was repeatedly refused entry. She was told that the smallest upset could be fatal for Roussadana. Distraught, Misia returned to Paris, convinced it was Gabrielle, not the doctors, who had prevented her from seeing the dying young woman. She may well have been correct. Misia suffered terribly at not being able to see the woman who had not only destroyed her marriage but whom she also adored.
As a final pathetic twist, tradition has it that Roussadana’s morphine addiction was now so relentless that although mortally ill from tuberculosis, she could survive only short periods without a new fix. Ever the resourceful one, Gabrielle procured a substantial quantity, then brought Roussadana a large basket of marzipan “flowers,” ordered from Fauchon in Paris, into each one of which she had inserted a “dose” of morphine.7
Not long after Roussadana and Sert had married, Abbé Mugnier dined at the Robert Rothschilds. The Abbé talked with Misia about what he called her “peculiar social situation.” Painting a touching portrait of her, he was amazed at her lack of vitriol, saying that she “didn’t speak ill of her husband either.”8 And when, on December 16, 1938, Roussadana Mdivani Sert was released from her suffering, Misia had been prevented from bidding her farewell. Jean Hugo (great-grandson to Victor and the writer and artist whose benign personality led Maurice Sachs to describe him as having no enemies) wrote that Roussadana lay smiling as the Reverend Conan Doyle administered the last rites. The insane Sert had arrived with a blue eiderdown in which he wanted to wrap Roussadana’s body. The eiderdown was too big for the coffin, but he was determined. Gabrielle was also determined to have her lilies in the coffin, and they argued; a depressing image.9
A few weeks earlier, on September 21, the Western powers had abandoned Czechoslovakia to its fate, agreeing to appeasement rather than confrontation with Germany. The following day, Churchill had voiced the opinion of many when he wrote to The Times:
The division of Czechoslovakia, under pressure from England and France, is equivalent to the total surrender of western democracies to threats of Nazi force.