Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [159]
By February 1940, Daladier was out and a new French premier, Paul Reynaud, had been voted in. Suddenly the Phony War was over: Hitler attacked and occupied Denmark and Norway, and the Luftwaffe bombed the airfields of northern France. Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu, with the actors dressed by Gabrielle, had had its premiere just prior to the war and had been booed off the screen. The film with its satirization of the upper classes as capricious and self-indulgent, was banned a few weeks into the war as “unpatriotic.”
German tanks crossed into Holland and Belgium, and armored divisions moved on the Ardennes. Neville Chamberlain resigned on May 10, and Winston Churchill, who promised naught but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” became Britain’s new prime minister. By the end of May, the Allies had suffered a disaster, causing panic in London and Paris as General Rommel swept across northern France toward the English Channel, driving the Allies ahead of him. Whenever a break in the weather allowed it, the Luftwaffe fired on the hundreds of thousands of Allies hoping for rescue on the beaches of Dunkirk. Between the end of May and the first days of June, in the most famous rescue operation of the war, instead of the thirty thousand or so Churchill had believed were all that could be rescued, more than three hundred thousand were ferried to safety in England by the Royal Navy and a huge flotilla of volunteer boats of all shapes and sizes.
By June 4, the Germans were bombing the outskirts of Paris. The government instructed everyone who was able to leave the city to do so. Ahead of an advancing German army, millions of men, women and children, in any vehicle to be found, or otherwise on foot, were now fleeing Paris. Along the big west and south highways, motor and horse-drawn vehicles were “piled high with babies’ cribs, luggage, pets, bedding and food, all under a hot summer sun.”5 “The exodus,” as it came to be known, was followed ten days later by the government, itself fleeing south to Tours in a convoy of limousines.
After war had been declared, Dalí wrote to Gabrielle from a villa at Arcachon, not far from the Spanish border, to which he and Gala had withdrawn. He was concerned about Gabrielle, saying he had
sent you two telegrams and we are constantly waiting for a sign from you to know that you are running your little face somewhere. I imagine that you are snowed under with worries, for you cultivate such a “fanaticism of responsibilities’ in everything! . . . Only enormous and very “important” things will be “visible” in the times that will follow . . . When will we meet, where?
Then, in another letter, he tells her about the night bombings at Arcachon and regrets not being able to look at her: “How sweet it is to grab you on the corner of a tablecloth . . . Whatever you do, be careful, I know that you have a crazy and useless carelessness, that you run like a cockerel without being scared of anything.”6
In the first week of June, along with most of Paris, Dalí’s “crazy” Gabrielle escaped, just ahead of the advancing German army. On closing her couture house and laying off all her workers except those in the boutique, Gabrielle had instructed her director, Georges Madoux, to remove all the accounts and archives and take them to a makeshift office he was to set up in the Midi. Madoux, however, had been called up and decided his first priority was to save his family and his own possessions before the administrative hub of the House of Chanel.
Stories differ as to Gabrielle’s precise movements in those hazardous days, but we know she left Paris with a hastily recruited driver in his own car. Petrol had been rationed, and fear walked abroad. Gabrielle decided against her own house, La Pausa, as a refuge. In response to a Royal Air Force attack on