Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [57]
In the realm of clothing at least, Gabrielle was no longer interested in fantasy. Embracing what she saw as the reality of her times, she not only gave women practical, stylish clothes but also made them fashionable. And at the end of that hectically busy summer at Deauville, the first of the war, Gabrielle had earned the huge sum of two hundred thousand gold francs. (In today’s currency, this is worth approximately ₤560,000.)
When he could, Arthur rushed back from the front to maintain his business interests and visit Gabrielle and his friends. But life was entirely altered. The majority of his contemporaries were paring down their lives and feeling diminished by the war. To begin with, aside from old men and boys, much of the male population had been packed off to fight. Paris felt unrecognizable:
Rid of its bad ferments, [it] had become popular, fraternal again: we were humble little things at the mercy of events: the stock exchange was closed, theaters were shut, the Parliament was away, luxury cars were in Bordeaux . . . the streets of Paris have become great village streets again, where one communicates from door to door.10
But Gabrielle’s and Arthur’s entrepreneurial spirit—some would call it opportunism—made what they had to offer very salable, and their response to their times united them still further. While Gabrielle sold her simple, stylish and appropriately sober clothes, Arthur used his fleet of ships to become one of France’s major providers of coal, then one of the most crucial resources in the running of a country and a war.
By the end of November 1914, Arthur was based in Flanders with his fellow officers at the Château de la Motte au Bois. Its châtelaine, the Baroness Clémentine de la Grange, noted how appropriate Arthur’s first billet, with two lady milliners, had been, saying that it was “not for the first time . . . that millinery has played a part in his life.” As a close friend of the baroness’s nephew, another intelligence officer, Odon de Lubersac, Arthur was invited to stay at the château.
Shortly before Christmas, Arthur’s commander, General Allenby, offered to have her driven to visit her other son at Reims. She later recorded:
I started in Captain Capel’s car, driven by a Parisian ex-jeweller, his chauffeur. Captain Capel and Lieutenant Pinto asked permission to accompany me to Paris. When passing through the village of Croisettes . . . I stopped a few minutes to see my nephew, Renauld. As I went back to the car I saw a crowd round it. Boy Capel was already seated by the chauffeur, smoking his pipe, with an expression on his face that aroused my suspicions. Lieutenant Pinto and I, before getting into the car, tried to fathom the reason for the villagers’ curiosity. At last we discovered on the back of the car, which was thick with dust, that the wretched Boy had written with his finger, “Honeymoon!” I was the joke of the village!
Capel, though of a most solemn and serious appearance, cannot resist a joke, good or bad. 11
Meanwhile, along with many of the Deauville beau monde, Gabrielle returned to the capital with Antoinette, leaving a saleswoman in charge of the salon. While the war hadn’t reached the rapid conclusion that had been predicted, people realized that, for the moment, Paris wasn’t going to be overrun.
In the meantime, Adrienne had returned to Vichy, apprehensive for the safety of her lover, Maurice de Nexon, now fighting at the front; many had already lost loved ones. Two more deaths, while probably leaving Gabrielle relatively unmoved, nonetheless bore a significant connection to her past. Her grandparents had come to their final rest: Adrienne’s mother, Angélina, had died a year earlier, and now Adrienne had her father, Henri-Adrien, buried beside her at Vichy.
In those months following the initiation of hostilities, with Gabrielle’s greater financial autonomy she took on the responsibility for her little nephew, André Palasse, whose mother,