Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [5]
While only fifty miles from Ponteils, Nîmes was a world away from Henri-Adrien’s life in the mountains. Even so, he knew that there were already other refugees from Ponteils there. The town might be frightening, but it was also a powerful lure, with the prospect of higher wages, shorter hours and better medical care. Gabrielle Chanel’s forebears followed the great drift toward France’s towns. A slow but irrevocable change was taking place in the national mind-set, the corollary of France’s transformation into an industrial and metropolitan nation.
As for Henri-Adrien, there were few options available to him and, almost inevitably, he turned to market trading. Markets and fairs were still essential elements in the economy, serving the majority of everyday needs. Some people bought enough for just one day at a time; others traveled miles to market to store up their provisions. Many made the journey to the markets and fairs simply for the contact with the outside world. Everything was there, from clothes—or the wherewithal to make them—to livestock, food and tools, to the strolling players: “charlatans, magicians, musicians, singers . . . and gamblers.”2 Some fairs even functioned as marriage marts, where, effectively, one could buy a wife.
For almost a year, Henri-Adrien and his wife, Angélina, stayed put at Nîmes. Their son Henri-Albert (always known as Albert) was born there. Then, one day, collecting up their meager belongings and their little boy, they were gone. For years, the Chanels were to continue as itinerant market traders, eventually producing nineteen children in a series of cheap lodgings across the south of France.
Meanwhile, helped by the extension of roads and the spread of the railways, a revolution was sweeping across the land. Life in the provinces had continued in much the same way for centuries but, in the fifty years before 1914, it was set to change out of all recognition. The gradual and sporadic nature of change would be swept away by an avalanche of modernization as France was catapulted into the machine age.
Henri-Adrien and Angélina Chanel cobbled together an existence, but their class would be left behind, rendered virtually obsolete by the changes. As for the children, their lives were to straddle two entirely different worlds, one predominantly rural and agrarian, the other modern, industrial and urban. Success depended upon firmly grasping the new. Although now often traveling by the newfangled train, Henri-Adrien remained wedded to the traditional markets and the fairs—tied, like them, to the season-bound rhythms of rural life.
As the Chanels’ children grew up in a succession of backstreet lodgings, they were soon put to work. The eldest, Albert, and his younger sister Louise worked with their parents from earliest childhood. Life was hard for the children, made harder still by being much of the time outside, tending the stand in all weather. The Chanels’ nomadic lifestyle stoked in Albert a desire for the romance of the road and a constant urge for movement. He, too, became a market trader like his father, and sold haberdashery and domestic tools.
In November 1879, Albert stopped at Courpière, a village in the region of Livradois. With winter’s approach, itinerant traders and peddlers did their best to settle down. Albert found a room for himself with a young man called Marin Devolle, left fatherless at seventeen. That November, Marin was twenty-three, and while his carpentry business was going well enough, he could do with the extra money from hiring out a room. Albert and he were soon firm friends. Marin’s younger sister, Eugénie Jeanne (called Jeanne), lived close by with their maternal uncle, Augustin Chardon, a winegrower. Jeanne also kept house for her brother.
Family tradition has it that the twenty-six-year-old Albert was, like his father, a charmer and a showman who had a way with words and