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By Root 640 0

Gabrielle would have lost her raison d’être. She was quite right when she said, “I have a boss’s soul,” and she needed to feel significant. The success of her political mission would have put her into the history books in a way she felt was commensurate with her intelligence. Her return visit to a man as powerful as Schellenberg must have been a kind of proof to herself that she had been taken seriously on a far grander scale than merely for the creation of dresses. In company with many exceptional artists, Gabrielle understood her own worth because she lived so wholeheartedly in the present, but she also underestimated the value of what it was she had done for her century. Through dress and her lifestyle, she had made a genuine contribution toward forcing the first century of modernity to face up to what it was, something more than many of those in the political sphere ever managed.

With almost nothing to go on, we are left to speculate on the reasons for Gabrielle’s prompt release by the Resistance. Remembering Arletty, whose popularity with her compatriots had not been enough to set her free, Gabrielle’s fame alone can’t have been sufficient to procure her release. The routine speculation is probably the closest to the truth: an influential figure let it be known that no proceedings were to be taken against Gabrielle. It is said that when the British forces reached Paris, some officers had been deputed to make sure of her safety. They couldn’t find her. She was no longer at the Ritz or the rue Cambon, and none of the staff were forthcoming. Gabrielle was eventually found, keeping a low profile at a modest hotel on the outskirts of the city. It was said that the orders to discover her whereabouts had come from Churchill himself.55

Churchill liked Gabrielle, and one of his closest friends, the Duke of Westminster, was her ex-lover, with whom she had remained on close terms. Westminster may have stepped in and asked the prime minister to help her. Churchill’s possible intervention may have been encouraged by the knowledge that Gabrielle might have had things to say about the rumored pro-Nazi sympathies of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, with whom she was acquainted. This would not have gone down well.

While many of Gabrielle’s compatriots were amazed at how she “got away with it,” a young English journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, marveled. He wrote:

By one of those majestically simple strokes which made Napoleon so successful a general, she put an announcement in the window of her emporium that scent was free for the GIs, who thereupon queued up to get the bottles of Chanel No.5, and would have been outraged if the French police had touched a hair of her head. Having thus gained a breathing space, she proceeded to look for help to right and to left . . . thereby managing to avoid making even a token appearance amongst the gilded company—Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry and other worthies—on a collaborationist charge.56

Gabrielle’s lawyer, René de Chambrun, as the son-in-law of the Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval, was himself living very discreetly. He advised Gabrielle that she ought to do the same thing, and outside France. Gabrielle knew and liked neutral Switzerland, and that was where she chose to go into voluntary exile.

Before she left, however, she received a postcard from a young GI who had called on her at the Ritz early in 1945.57 Hans Schilinger told her he had been sent by her friend, the now-celebrated photographer Horst, who had fled France for the United States early in the war. Horst had managed to get his compatriot Hans Schilinger to the States, where the young man then joined the U.S. Army. Horst had told his friend that if he was in Paris, he must “give my love to Coco,” and this Schilinger had done. The story is usually told that Gabrielle, in turn, asked Schilinger, if ever he came across someone called Hans Günther von Dincklage, to please write to the Ritz and let her know.

Schilinger had indeed come across von Dincklage, and is supposed to have written Gabrielle a postcard