Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [70]
Arthur was, like so many, apprehensive about the conflict causing the disintegration of social cohesion, and at this point he felt driven to begin his second book. One of the central planks of this work was the new position of women, and he heralded women’s changed lives, rejoicing that their inferiority had been only an “illusion of the other sex.” His own mistress was acquiring a name as a working woman, and with her growing “equality,” she was the perfect example of just what Arthur was espousing.
Taking into consideration Gabrielle’s later confidences to Morand about her relationship with Arthur, Morand’s description of Lewis sometimes being unsettled by his mistress Irène’s drive and self-reliance seems understandable :
He wondered how she could manage to be so self-sufficient. She was never late, received visitors, wrote notes . . . and it never looked like it cost her anything. Irène’s desk was always clean, tidied up at the end of each morning . . . Irène left nothing to chance; she used everything.7
For all Arthur’s energetic open-mindedness and forward thinking, believing a thing and acting upon it with any consistency are all too often different. And living with a New Woman was no doubt far harder than writing about one. In practice, Gabrielle’s equality may sometimes have been too challenging.
In her post–Second World War conversations with Paul Morand, she would quote Arthur’s advice to her: “Remember that you’re a woman,” and would add, “All too often I forgot that.”8 Arthur’s plea was that Gabrielle be less driven and less cerebral. And Morand has his heroine, Irène, say to Lewis, “Giving up working? You saw, I tried, I cannot remain idle . . . I am an island . . . something simple, isolated, where you cannot live . . . Can we go on living like this? It will tear us apart.”9 Although concealing any vulnerability she might feel, Gabrielle had also blossomed and was luxuriating in her new power. Arthur’s words urging her to remember she was a woman would, therefore, have little effect upon her progress. Arthur’s own progress, however, was now to take an unexpected turn. His affairs with other women did not usually unsettle his emotions, but he was about to become absorbed by someone who never forgot for a moment that she was a woman.
The Honorable Diana Wyndham (née Lister) was the youngest daughter of Thomas Lister, 4th Baron Ribblesdale, who so perfectly exemplified the Edwardian aristocrat in his portrait by John Singer Sargent. Ribblesdale was a soldier, landowner and courtier, and his impenetrably nonchalant style was reflected in his unmistakable hauteur. This was born of confidence in a world that had in fact been under threat for some time. The agrarian wealth of the Ribblesdales and their kind had been undermined by the industrial riches of a new and metropolitan aristocracy, which included families such as Arthur Capel’s. In turn, this metropolitan aristocracy would soon open up its ranks to an even newer variant, in the person of Gabrielle Chanel.
The children of the traditional upper classes would be the last to grow up in the old world. And many of the generation now being slaughtered in the war appreciated, however incoherently, that great change was in the air. To give a minor example, Lord Ribblesdale’s privileged daughter, Diana Wyndham, was a volunteer ambulance driver, close to the front lines of battle.
Diana was a tall, slim, blue-eyed girl whose delicate candor was matched by what someone who knew her well described recently as “a kind of naiveté. She was a very sweet person; most feminine until her dying day.”10 Great loss had revealed early Diana’s self-possession. Her mother had died when Diana was thirteen, then she was widowed in the first month of the war—only seventeen months after her marriage to the Honerable Percy Wyndham—and, by 1915, she had also lost both her brothers.
So unlike Gabrielle, this young woman, with her uncomplicated femininity, brought out the gallant in Arthur Capel, and he had soon visited her near the front. Any discomfort Arthur