Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [58]
Following another six months of war, with vast numbers of casualties, there was still no progress along the western front. It has often been suggested that it was the appalling experience of trench warfare that forced the various armies to move almost overnight into the age of technological warfare. By 1915, planes were flying reconnaissance, and flamethrowers, hand grenades and the terrifying poison gas were regularly being used. What Gabrielle called the “age of iron” had well and truly begun.
Early in the summer of 1915, on a brief respite from the front, Arthur took Gabrielle for a few days to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, just south of Biarritz and close to the Spanish border. Originally a fishing port, Saint-Jean-de-Luz had been transformed into a seaside retreat for the wealthy. For those satiated with the large-scale glamour of the more substantial luxury playground Biarritz, there was the culturally more select Saint-Jean-de-Luz. It received an eclectic mix of artistic, aristocratic and literary visitors. Here, embracing a moment of ordinary tranquility in extraordinary times, Gabrielle and Arthur were to be found one day picnicking on the beach with friends.
Gabrielle wore her hair caught back in a headband and a dark bathing costume. Unrecognizable as a swimsuit today, it looks more than anything like a touchingly modest above-the-knee dress. In 1915, however, there was no question: a young woman wearing one of these outfits was rather risqué. Sea bathing had become an important pastime for the French upper classes in the first decade or so of the century, but it was still only intrepid women who took part in this activity.
There are very few images of Gabrielle and Arthur together, but in a handful of recently discovered photographs from that day on the beach, we catch a glimpse of their convivial picnic on the sand. In one, they are with the heir to a sugar-refining fortune, Constant Say. In another, a young woman, lying with her face upturned to the sun, is Constant Say’s mistress, the rising-star opera singer Marthe Davelli. Davelli’s artistic success, and the depth of her lover’s purse, meant that a holiday villa was being built for her nearby. In 1915, suntanned skin was the lot of the poor, forced to work in the sun, and sunbathing was regarded as outrageous. Although it is often stated that Gabrielle was the first woman to make a suntan fashionable, in these photographs, we see that her friend Marthe Davelli had already taken to it with enthusiasm. Another of the picnickers is the aging novelist and playwright Pierre Decourcelle, whose suggestive novels Gabrielle had been caught reading in her days at the Aubazine convent.
Early the following year, when Arthur was again back in Paris from the front, the society painter Jacques-Emile Blanche recorded meeting Gabrielle and Arthur at a dinner party. The guests composed an exalted cast, and Gabrielle’s presence is revealing of society’s awareness of her increased status in changing times. She wasn’t simply the striking mistress of the dazzling Boy Capel but was also acquiring her own reputation as a trendsetting woman of means.
Among those at the dinner were Philippe Berthelot, the suave director of political affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the political essayist Henri-Adrien Massis; the smolderingly beautiful comtesse Anna de Noailles, thought by many (first among whom was herself) to be the reigning poet queen of the literary salons; Abbé Mugnier, diarist, indefatigable socializer and profoundly unjudgmental confessor to the haut monde; and the opium-smoking lesbian princess Violette Murat, who loved nothing better than a night out in the downbeat cafés and nightclubs