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telling her that he had secured his release from a POW camp in Hamburg. In reality, the sequence of events was appreciably different. Gabrielle had given Hans Schilinger the considerable sum of ten thousand dollars, and asked him to “go to Austria, find von Dincklage, give him the money and if possible conduct him to his home in Schleswig-Holstein.” This we know because Schilinger and von Dincklage were arrested by the British military authorities in the spring of 1945. The military recorded that Schilinger “was apparently accompanying Baron von Dincklage with a view to taking him to the latter’s family estate at Gettorf. Von Dincklage was in possession of US dollars 8,948 which were impounded on his arrest.”58 There was no possibility of getting von Dincklage back into France, and with the burden of Gabrielle’s own blackened reputation acting as a spur, by the winter of 1945 she had made her judicious move to Lausanne.

28

Exile

While Gabrielle’s life had been one of almost perpetual motion for decades, her Swiss exile launched her on an empty nomadic period. For several years before the war, she had spent her days in the rue Cambon and her nights across the road in the Ritz. Forever on the move, she also regularly left Paris for a few days, staying in the house of a friend, at resort hotels, or at La Pausa in the south of France. However, in leaving Paris for Switzerland, Gabrielle had lost something more important to her than any dwelling place—she had lost her business, her all-important work. At the rue Cambon it had always been possible to distract oneself from too much thought. Either a collection was in progress or it was the aftermath of the one just gone. There were the new season’s textiles, braids, buttons, shoes, hats, jewelery and other accessories to be discussed with the appropriate craftsmen and women; the hours with the models on which all ideas must be tried out; the friends, sycophants, and employees proffering queries and comments. Endless activity.

Gabrielle’s lack of occupation during the war had been frustrating enough, but in Switzerland, she didn’t even have the consolation of rue Cambon nearby. Aside from a handful of friendships, for more than twenty-five years, her work had represented the one permanent fixture in her life. Her lovers, her friends, her family, where she lived—these were forever changing. Gabrielle was almost a caricature of the Heraclitean notion that the essence of life is flux, and to resist this change is to resist the heart of our existence.

Whatever she might have sometimes said to the contrary, she had chosen change as her life, and would say, “I am scared only of becoming bored.” Constant movement was the one thing that would keep this fear at bay. She also knew that moving on, carrying no baggage from the past, was the climate out of which she was best able to create. Gabrielle came closest to being a revolutionary when understanding that, within her there was a “deep taste for destruction and evolution.” This was what she meant when she said, “Fashion should express the place, the moment . . . fashion has a meaning in time but none in space.”1

Without her business—both the building and the exercise of designing—as the fixed point in her life, Gabrielle’s incessant movement had lost its meaning and acquired an aimlessness that did not suit her. Leaving Lausanne, she wandered from one grand Swiss hotel to another and back again. With her energies previously harnessed creatively, she now had no outlet for her restlessness and “revealed a certain weariness,” a disenchantment with life, as her old friend Paul Morand put it.

Morand, who had worked for the Vichy government, had recently taken refuge in Switzerland with a number of other political exiles like himself, so as to avoid any legal judgments being meted out by his homeland. He had lost almost everything. As an impoverished and vilified ex-member of the French literary establishment, in the winter of 1946 he took up Gabrielle’s invitation to visit her in Saint Moritz. There, at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel,