Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [160]
Having managed the long journey down through France, she reached Pau, in the Pyrenees, before turning off farther into the mountains and the small village of Corbères-Abères. Here André Palasse had his château, and Gabrielle came to a halt there for a few weeks. She had bought the château for André in 1926—the sale was negotiated by Gabrielle’s old lover Etienne Balsan, living nearby—and, most summers, Gabrielle had spent time there with André and his family.
Other refugees soon began to arrive. Gabrielle Labrunie, André’s daughter, tells how these were her great-aunt’s employees who had nowhere else to go. In all, there were about fifteen. Madame Labrunie remembers that some of them “were rather lost, confused . . . they were quite old . . . and no longer able to work . . . We’d heard that Paris was going to be very dangerous, so they all came to Corbères.”7 One of the refugees was a pregnant girl called Annick. She was the daughter of Madame Aubert, the redhead who had been Gabrielle’s right-hand woman for so long. Another of those who ended up at Corbères-Abères was Gabrielle’s friend the socialite Marie-Louise Bousquet.
On June 14, the Germans occupied Paris; Reynaud’s coalition government then collapsed, and Marshal Pétain was chosen as France’s new premier. On June 16, he requested an armistice. At dawn, a week later, Hitler arrived in Paris accompanied by his entourage, including his architect, Albert Speer, and the neoclassicist sculptor Arno Breker. With them he made his notorious lightning tour of the defeated city. Stopping at the Opéra, the party continued down the Champs-Elysées and on to the Trocadéro. Hitler posed for the infamous photograph in front of the balustrade overlooking the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. At Les Invalides, he stood musing over Napoléon’s tomb. He was impressed by the proportions of the Panthéon but was uninterested in other monuments signaling the illustriousness of Paris. The rue de Rivoli, however, delighted him, and the military governor of Paris requisitioned the Hôtel Meurice there for himself and his associates.
By 9:00 a.m., Hitler had finished his tour. He told Speer, “It was the dream of my life to see Paris. I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled.” He later told Speer that he had often considered destroying the city, but it was clear that instead they must continue with the new buildings of Berlin, so that “when we are finished Paris will only be a shadow.”
France had agreed to accept its military defeat. On June 21, in a clearing in that same forest of Compiègne that Gabrielle had ridden through many times with Etienne Balsan and their friends, and in the same carriage in which the Allies had watched the Germans sign their defeat in the First World War, the Germans now dictated their terms to the French delegation. On hearing the news in the faraway Pyrenees, Gabriele Labrunie tells how her great-aunt shut herself up in her room for several hours and wept, scandalized at Pétain’s surrender without a fight.
After a few weeks of hiding in the hills, Gabrielle decided it wasn’t for her. Dalí was right: she wasn’t really “scared of anything”—with one exception: being abandoned. On July 14, she sent a telegram to a Spanish sculptor friend of Picasso’s, Apelles Fenosa, who had fled Paris for Toulouse, and told him that she would be “reaching Toulouse Monday afternoon. Please find me somewhere to stay . . . Greetings. Gabrielle Chanel.”
Apelles Fenosa was an exiled Spanish Republican sculptor who had arrived in Paris in 1938 with nothing. Picasso had helped him escape from Spain, and Cocteau had introduced him to Gabrielle in early 1939. By this time, Fenosa’s work was selling well, and Gabrielle commissioned him to sculpt her. (For some time, Picasso had failed to persuade his friend to sculpt him, but Gabrielle finally encouraged Fenosa to do so.)
Fenosa was a dynamic, attractive