Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [212]
There was her primitive mistrust and her disconcerting feminine resistance . . . these were never to leave her. She knew very well what it was to be lost, to be miserable. But I had a husband; I had two little girls. I felt a criminal that I had to go back home. I had dinner with her at the Ritz, sometimes in her room. And at the end, at the door, you know, I felt a criminal. She hated to be alone. Because she hated to go back to her loneliness without love; to the terrors of the past, to the somnambulism of her childhood; to her dreams. Why? Because she lived again those things. Her father’s abandonment, her mother’s fragility, the deaths; and of Boy . . . The imagination, which is the opposite of the deadly ruthlessness of the world. It gives you peace . . .
She was a woman of life not death; that twin struggle between death and life, we carry on in every act of our life. But she felt life the right way. She had a healthy psychic attitude.21
Indeed, if Gabrielle had not in many ways had a “healthy psychic attitude,” she could not have withstood her past. Nevertheless, each time she was “left,” it was revived and she collapsed. Lilou Marquand remembered an event highlighting Gabrielle’s disproportionate response. It took place on one of the regular visits to Switzerland with Lilou and François at the Grand Palace Hotel. (Gabrielle increasingly preferred the life of a hotel to the little house, Le Signal, she had bought beyond Lake Geneva and restored for her “retirement.”) François was almost always by Gabrielle’s side. She liked his sense of humor, appreciated his uncomplicated, unassuming presence. She gave him money, bought him an apartment, sent him to Switzerland for cures, took him ever more into her confidence. She would say of him, “Ah, how restful they are these ordinary people who are what they are, natural. Not at all like the Parisians, all those liars.”22
As they sat in the hotel one day discussing the next collection, Gabrielle said to François, “You don’t understand a thing, my dear, I’ve asked you three times to abduct me to no avail. Are you pretending not to understand what I’m saying or are you deaf? I say it again in front of Lilou: will you marry me?” François got up immediately, left the table and checked out of the hotel. It took Lilou six days to find him, there in Lausanne, in another hotel, and she said:
He was still in shock, furious that he might have passed for an old lady’s gigolo. He couldn’t believe that a character as extraordinary as Chanel could love him. I asked him to be generous, to understand that she still had the heart of a sentimental young girl and a romantic mind . . . He came back to the hotel and no one ever mentioned it again.23
In the absence of François, meanwhile, Gabrielle had been “distraught. Distraught at the rejection. Then, instead of her single dose of Sédol each day to sleep, she took more. Three, four of them. For days she didn’t go out. It was terrible, terrible. François was in her confidence, he was her support.”24
Back in Paris, François and Lilou had acquired the habit of playing cards outside Gabrielle’s bedroom each evening, to be nearby as she went to sleep:
We had sworn to her that we’d never abandon her. But still Mademoiselle was frightened. My return was always a surprise. Simply to see me, to hear my “Good morning” or my “Goodnight” overwhelmed her. “You see, when you’re here the loneliness, the anguish, it all flies away!” Ah, if only night had not existed . . . If Mademoiselle had been able to go directly from the evening to the morning! She would have lived without the horrible suspicion that she was being abandoned.25
Gabrielle’s unstill mind meant that the sleepwalking from which she had suffered intermittently since childhood had grown worse. In her sleep, she cut up curtains, bedspreads, towels; making them into new designs carefully laid out upon the floor or hanging up on hangers. She was found sleepwalking naked in her rooms; on other occasions, she wandered through the Ritz