Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [29]
At the races, we see Léon de Laborde holding Gabrielle’s chin in a gesture both intimate and proprietary. Another photograph shows Gabrielle, Léon and Etienne at the Royallieu stables. Léon has his arm around Gabrielle’s waist and stands between her and her lover. Here and in other photos, one could be forgiven for assuming that Léon, not Etienne, was her lover. (Almost certainly, at some point, he was.)
If a rich man played the game, when he grew tired of his mistress from a lower class, on separating from her he would make her a parting settlement so as to tide her over until she could find another “protector.” With no lover, a mistress was out of “work.” A small number of men gave an indefinite settlement. When the time came for Gabrielle to be rejected by Etienne, if she was lucky, she would pass on to one of his friends or acquaintances. But as her looks faded, unless she had cleverly squirreled away a tidy sum, her future would be one of increasing poverty.
Preoccupied with her sense of powerlessness, by 1908, Gabrielle’s ambition to get to Paris was forming into a plan. She wondered aloud to Etienne what would happen to her. He teased her about being bourgeois and asked her whether she wasn’t all right there at Royallieu. Etienne worked hard, but his mistress had little with which to occupy herself and soon mentioned her future once again. Etienne gave the same response; and so it went on for several months.
Etienne’s wealth meant that he could enter or reject society as he chose. While on the one hand benefiting from the privilege his wealth afforded him, on the other he was irritated by the social codes of his class, its obsession with security, family, property and honor handed down from father to son. Instead, Etienne focused on a particular kind of earthy impermanence. He loved risk: the transience of a horse race, the playing of juvenile games and pranks, a brief, intense affair or a sophisticated gamble begun one day and finished on the next. Gabrielle appears to have stirred in him something different.
No doubt spurred on by her talk about her future, Etienne was apparently moved to ask his shop-assistant mistress to marry him. In years to come, Gabrielle would say that Etienne’s elder brother, Jacques, came twice to Royallieu and asked her to do so. (Etienne may have sought his brother’s assistance here.) When Gabrielle protested, telling Jacques that she didn’t love his brother, he replied that it wasn’t important; she should marry Etienne anyway. With Etienne and Jacques’ parents dead, perhaps Gabrielle’s status as a kept woman with no background mattered less to the Balsan brothers. Gabrielle recalled Jacques’ anger at her refusal, and that he told her she would end up with nothing. When she replied that she wanted to work, he retorted angrily that as she didn’t know anything about anything, what on earth did she think she was going to do?
Work indeed became Gabrielle’s new conviction; it was her only possibility of escape from her position as a demimondaine. She would later recall how, as a mere twelve-year-old, she had realized that “without money you are nothing, that with money you can do anything . . . I would say to myself over and over, money is the key to freedom.”18 She told Etienne that although she was good on a horse, she wouldn’t be permitted to earn her living as a female jockey, so she would like to open a hat shop. One can imagine Etienne’s surprise. He knew she was unusual, but employment was not expected of a mistress.
He was probably only vaguely aware that for some time, female visitors to Royallieu had asked Gabrielle where she found her hats. Almost beyond our comprehension today, it is worth remembering that at that time, virtually everyone, however old or young, rich or poor, wore a hat. (In many early photographs, where we see men, women and children too poor to wear shoes, they are, nonetheless, almost without exception,