Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [214]
She changed her mind constantly, one minute telling Claude she was going to give it all up, that she wouldn’t do it anymore; then, away from work, she was waiting only until it was time to go back to the rue Cambon. On her bedside table was Erlanger’s Richelieu; she told Claude it was “the best story there is in the history of France . . . it’s better than Alexander Dumas, but it hasn’t got so much passion.”
On that Sunday, January 10, Claude returned and lunched with Gabrielle, then accompanied her on her customary drive around the Longchamp racecourse. The sun shone pale through the wintry mist. Later as they drove back through the place de la Concorde—the great square through which Gabrielle had fled, almost sixty years before, from Arthur Capel’s truth about her business not making any profit—Gabrielle bowed, telling Claude she was saluting the moon. It was full. Bidding Claude farewell, Gabrielle told her, “I’ll be working tomorrow.”
In her suite, she told Céline that she was very tired and must lie down; Céline could only persuade her to remove her shoes. Gabrielle lay drowsing. Later, she told her maid she would eat in her rooms, read the restaurant menu, then cried out, “I’m suffocating . . . Jeanne . . . the window.” Céline rushed to her side; Gabrielle’s face was taut with pain and she held her hands over her chest. She was too weak to break the phial of morphine always by her bed, and taking the syringe, Céline injected her to relieve the pain. Gabrielle murmured, “So that’s the way one dies.” Celine immediately phoned the doctor, but when she returned, she saw that her mistress was quite still. She closed Gabrielle’s eyes.
Next day, newspapers across the world announced the death of “one of the greatest couturiers of the century,” and tried to encapsulate her achievements as the woman who had become a legend in her own lifetime. Claude Delay returned to pay Gabrielle her own respects and found her “very small under the white Ritz sheets drawn up to her heart.” On Gabrielle’s bedside table was the beautiful icon Stravinsky had given her in 1921.
On January 14, a funeral service was held for Gabrielle in the Madeleine, the great parish church of the Parisian elite, close by the rue Cambon. Gabrielle’s small coffin was covered in a mass of white flowers, with the exception of two wreaths of red roses, one from the Syndicat de la Couture, the other from Luchino Visconti.
Whatever the personal feelings of her fellow couturiers, virtually all of them were there to render her homage, including Balmain, Balenciaga (whose graciousness and forgiving nature sent him there “to pray for her” despite her having destroyed their close friendship with unkindness), Castillo, Marc Bohan and Yves Saint Laurent. Notwithstanding Gabrielle’s criticism of most of them at one time or another, they cannot but have been conscious that her remarkable life’s work had brought great credit to their profession. Gabrielle’s friend Michel Déon made a plea for compassion in one’s final judgment:
One shouldn’t turn one’s back on Coco but, on the contrary, help her to erase everything that had embittered her so much it was making her suffocate. Between the imaginary world where she was taking refuge and the cruel world which had hurt her . . . the gap remained impassable. 30
Meanwhile, standing in the front row for the entire funeral ceremony were Gabrielle’s models, all dressed in Chanel suits. Behind them were the forewomen and foremen, the seamstresses and numerous assistants who made up the team at rue Cambon, without whom Gabrielle’s ideas would have been impossible. A fascinated crowd joined Paris society, and Gabrielle’s friends, who included Salvador Dalí, Lady Abdy, Antoinette Bernstein, Serge Lifar, André-Louis Dubois, Robert Bresson, the Mille brothers, Jacques Chazot and Jeanne Moreau, whose friendship