Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [4]
Some time after the night that drove her to her new purpose, her business began to prosper, and she would emerge from her understudy role as a kept young woman with a hat shop. As her rebellious and progressive style gradually became synonymous with her controversial life, Coco Chanel would embody an influential and glamorous new form of female independence. Later, she would say, “But I liked work. I have sacrificed everything to it, even love. Work has consumed my life.”6
In the meantime, as her profits became substantial, she proudly told Arthur she no longer needed a guarantor and that he could withdraw all his securities. His reply was melancholy: “I thought I’d given you a plaything, I gave you freedom.”7
1
Forebears
While state roads have carved up our landscapes with a rigorous efficiency, leaving few places distant or mysterious, the region of Gabrielle Chanel’s paternal ancestors, the Cévennes, retains a strong sense of its earlier remoteness. One of France’s oldest inhabited regions, it is a complex network of peaks, valleys and ravines that form the southeastern part of the Massif Central. Cut off from the Alps to the east by the cleft of the river Rhône, its vast limestone plateaus, dissected by deep river gorges, were traditionally the preserve of shepherds and their sheep. By the eighteenth century, the valleys of the Cévennes were dependent upon silk farming and weaving and the cultivation of the mulberry. Below the highest peaks, fit only for pasture, millions of chestnut trees, long a source of income for locals, still dominate the landscape.
In 1792, only three years after the revolution, Joseph Chanel, Gabrielle’s great-grandfather, was born in Ponteils, a hamlet of stone houses surrounded by chestnut groves. As a journeyman carpenter, he used his fiancée’s modest dowry to set himself up as Ponteils’ tavern keeper in part of a large farmhouse standing on a little knoll above the village. In time, the farmhouse became known as The Chanel, a name it retains to this day. The tough and forthright Cévenol mentality, which enabled the local early Protestants, the Huguenots, to withstand terrible persecution appears to have passed down the Chanel line. In years to come, Gabrielle’s friend Jean Cocteau would say: “If I didn’t know she was brought up a Catholic, I would imagine she was a Protestant. She protests inveterately, against everything.”1
Today, the only memorial to any of the Chanels is Joseph’s tavern. The Chanels of Ponteils were unexceptional; theirs were the lives of countless country people. Between 1875 and 1900, the region was hit by a series of exceptional natural disasters. Phylloxera ravaged the vines in the lowlands; silkworm farmers reeled from the effects of a silkworm disease epidemic; and the vast chestnut forests of the uplands were eaten up by la maladie de l’encre, a disease specific to the species. With the core of the rural economy devastated, the villagers of Ponteils could struggle on for only so long. Thousands in the region forsook their birthplace in search of work, and between 1850 and 1914, the population of the Cévennes dropped by more than half.
Joseph Chanel’s second son , Henri-Adrien—Gabrielle’s grandfather—and his two younger brothers were among those whom la maladie de l’encre forced to leave Ponteils. As mountain dwellers, their skills weren’t much use down in the valleys, but eventually Henri-Adrien found work with a silk-farming family, the Fourniers, in Saint-Jean-de-Valériscle. Youth, ignorance and a taste for adventure permitted him the luxury of confidence. This same confidence soon led him to impregnate his employer’s sixteen-year-old daughter.
Virginie-Angélina’s parents’ fury was intense and they insisted that Henri-Adrien should marry their compromised