Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [31]
It was probably at this point that Etienne proposed to her for the second time. It seems that Gabrielle may for a while have played a more worldly, more courtesanlike part than she would ever admit to in the future, and shared her favors. Now, leaving Royallieu, she was put up by Arthur at the Ritz. While officially Etienne’s mistress, she had several admirers. Miguel de Yturbe, Léon de Laborde and Arthur Capel were young men at the heart of Parisian society, and all were on hand to court her.
Yet while Gabrielle may have had the looks, the wit, the character and intelligence, as well as the necessary hardheadedness to become a fully fledged courtesan, she refused to foster some of those qualities that led, first, to a courtesan’s success, and then to her survival. Besides, Gabrielle’s insecure beginnings had left her too preoccupied with her future. Without quite knowing it, she had also caught the scent of change upon the air. She wanted influence, but she wanted it via a route that wasn’t dependent upon her willingness to act the courtesan part of a possession. In other words, although she may have been making herself available to more than one lover, ultimately, Gabrielle wanted independence and didn’t see the role of professional lover as her way to secure it.
Notwithstanding this reluctance, one notices how the trajectory of her life has a number of parallels with the lives of the most stellar demimondaines . First, she had imbibed from them the notion of continual inventiveness, and then, just as their inventiveness was translated into fashion, so Gabrielle would discover in herself their ability to remain just one step ahead of it. Balzac, in his brilliant description of the courtesan Valérie Marneffe, called these steps “the supreme efforts, the Austerlitzes of coquetry or love,” which are then transformed into what is “fashionable in lower spheres, just when their happy creators are looking round for new ideas.”3 We will see how, once Gabrielle had made something new, she was at once impatient to move on. And in this way, she would perfect the courtesan’s sometime role, indeed would make it her vocation. She would show first society women and then the rest how it was they should look for the new century.
We don’t know when one or two amorous encounters with Arthur Capel developed into a full-blown affair. But sometime around 1909, Gabrielle told Etienne that her “entanglement” with Arthur was becoming serious. Etienne was overcome, and set sail for Argentina. Gabrielle would say that he had been “packed off . . . by his family.”4 She also hinted that on his return from the New World, nothing had been resolved, and her relationship with her two lovers became ever more fraught and confused. While Gabrielle ensured that the details of this triangular relationship would be lost, it appears that as far as Etienne was concerned, a dalliance with another man was acceptable, but the basic commitment was clear: Gabrielle was his. Arthur’s interest in Gabrielle also reminded Etienne how much he wanted her. Whatever the games Gabrielle might have played, and the discord this provoked, there was never really much doubt: whatever previous liaisons she might have hidden from us, once Arthur had made his feelings clear, this particular young woman was his.
While Gabrielle frequently obscured her past with invention, in this case her claim that she and Etienne were never in love with each other may have been a salve for her conscience. What she meant here was that she was never in love with Etienne. The story has it that her passing from him to Arthur was, in the end, amicable. Etienne’s family, meanwhile, remembered