Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [46]
Her lover, meanwhile, was, like her, possessed of tremendous energy; he was forever on the move. After the launch of Deauville’s polo club by his friend Armand de Gramont, other grounds had sprung up in a small number of country estates and elite summer resorts and, with his friends, Arthur played them all. Thus, in January 1911, The New York Times announced he would play at Cannes, while another newspaper reported his arrival with his polo ponies on the Côte d’Azur. In May, he was taking part in a tournament at Compiègne, and in August he was back competing at Deauville. At Dieppe, and then Châteauroux, in August, Arthur and Etienne Balsan coursed their greyhounds, and then played more polo. The personification of the modern man, Arthur was either in a state of distraction or doing something at breakneck speed.
After the hunting, the galas and the balls, he even managed to find time to expand his fortune. Apparently, Gabrielle didn’t feel neglected by her lover’s tremendous pace; to a degree, it matched her own. She admired in him “the mindset of a businessman . . . not hampered either by precedent or hierarchy,” and she loved his “eccentricity.” Yet in the whirl of Arthur’s life, how much of it included his mistress? A man in the vanguard of his times, he was, for example, a staunch believer in the emancipation of women. No doubt bearing Gabrielle in mind, in a political treatise he was soon to write he would say:
The door to the future city is still closed to women. For centuries women have been considered by their masters as inferior creatures, as beasts of burden or of pleasure. The time has come to liberate them. Already they are liberating themselves . . . The education of women tends to teach them only the art of pleasing. In society as it is conceived, the woman who is incapable of pleasing falls into a state of dependency and inferiority. As the convent is no longer very much in fashion, one must choose between prostitution and work. The latter has shown that the inferiority of women was only an illusion of the other sex.9
However, with the customary tension between belief and practice, Arthur’s actions weren’t always quite consistent with his sentiments. It was common knowledge that he lived with his mistress, but where a liberal upper-class hostess might now welcome a bohemian artist, writer or musician into her salon, it was a rare one who yet dared do the same for a tradeswoman. But if attendance with one’s mistress was out of bounds in the salons of the haut monde, obliging contemporary double standards enabled navigation around such prohibitions. In the theater, in fashionable restaurants and bars, it wasn’t only acceptable, it increased one’s cachet to be seen out with one’s mistress. And at private suppers where fellow diners were not all entirely “respectable,” Gabrielle felt at ease. These people, too, lived at the edge of society.
And yet, largely untrammeled by the constraints of family, Gabrielle had also been left rudderless by her dysfunctional upbringing. With the exception of Adrienne and Antoinette, she saw very little of her family. This was the great significance of her statement that Arthur was her brother, her father, her entire family. Meanwhile, Gabrielle’s failure to become a singer in the café-concerts in Vichy had left her hankering after something other than hats, and her tremendous energy and rich inner life hadn’t yet found an adequate outlet for expression. While Arthur was often away and understood Gabrielle’s need for occupation, he now encouraged her in an activity that, although unrelated to her work, did have a bearing on her perception of herself as a modern woman.
Back in the 1870s, France had taken up “physical culture,” and following Britain, sport for men was promoted as patriotic and a healthy and moral outlet for the newly