Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [38]
It has always been said, mistakenly, that he went on to Downside School, in the county of Somerset. However, a move from a Jesuit college (Beaumont) to a Benedictine one (Downside) would have been highly unlikely. Arthur in fact went on to one of England’s most venerable Jesuit institutions, the college of Stonyhurst, in Lancashire.9
It was only recently that Catholics in England had been permitted to obtain degrees, in a handful of Catholic colleges such as Stonyhurst. In 1897, some years after Arthur’s uncle’s failure to make the London Catholic university prosper, Stonyhurst was the most important place of Catholic higher learning in Britain. And Arthur was duly welcomed into its small senior group, holding the illustrious title of “Gentlemen Philosophers.” These young grandees’ college lives were part country-house living, part finishing school and part Oxbridge college. They played much sport, rode, hunted and shot (keeping their own horses and dogs at the college); they also wore extravagant clothes “and bore themselves with a careless dignity.”10 The Gentlemen Philosophers were ferociously sociable; they acted, made music, debated fiercely and conscientiously smoked and drank their way through their privileged college years.
Arthur was one of the youngest of the Gentlemen Philosophers, but more focused than many seventeen-year-olds, he flourished in this climate and took several academic prizes. Armed with Stonyhurst’s excellent intellectual training and his battery of awards, at the end of 1899, following his eighteenth birthday, he left behind the safety of academia and went out into the world.
With the exception of a few tantalizingly brief references, after Stonyhurst, his trail all but disappears. Three years later, we find him bound for France on board a ship from America.11 Almost certainly this was to see his ailing mother. Two months later, at only forty-six, she would die. It was 1902. Arthur was twenty-one. And then there is silence.
We know that Arthur completed a roving apprenticeship in his father’s businesses, in London, Paris and America. Quite probably, he traveled farther afield, to North Africa, Arabia and Persia, where other Capel interests were flourishing. Having progressed to fully fledged membership in his father’s firm, Arthur reappears in 1909.12 Now twenty-seven, he had bridged the complex social divides between the superwealthy bourgeois of his father’s acquaintance and the haut monde of ancient titles, great houses and estates, and had become a young Parisian of note.
Arthur Capel has often been described as a self-made man, but as we see, it was not Arthur but his father who rose so far above his origins to become a figure of considerable social standing. Compared to Gabrielle’s upbringing, Arthur’s was one of unimaginable privilege. Without the need to strive for more, once he had learned the arcane rules of business, he turned it into a kind of sport—the sport of making money. Thus, in Morand’s Lewis et Irène, Morand would have his hero, Lewis, say: “I work for fun. Negotiating a loan entertains me more than sailing does; drawing up a company act more than playing poker. That is all.”13
Yet for all the suavity his upbringing had conferred upon him, Arthur also concealed a seriousness beneath the amusement, and was motivated by an urgent ambition. This revealed itself in his transformation of moneymaking into a game, his love of competitive sport, at which he regularly beat his friends, and his serial conquest of women—sometimes their women. (Did this come about in part because he was the favored only son with several sisters?) Whatever its source, within Arthur there existed a tension that women found compellingly attractive.
There were several, including Paul Morand, who explained Arthur’s slightly mysterious past with a rumor. While never mentioning his mother,