Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [72]
All this, my “ blonde,” is very complicated and I don’t give a damn about knowing why I love your lips and your big blue eyes and your brave smile when your soul gives me the illusion that it’s talking to my soul...
Be happy and I will be too.
Boy the Wanderer 16
And while Arthur wished that what he suspected was the “illusion” of his and Diana’s love would be real, Gabrielle was to say to Paul Morand that she’d been having so much fun she had “forgotten about love.” Yet by the time she came to her senses and halted her incessant round of activity for a moment, her intuition told her that something was very wrong. Arthur, meanwhile, rushing from meetings with the military and politicians in France then on to their counterparts in London, made no mention (any more than he normally would have) of his assignations and letters to Gabrielle’s English competitor.
The French president, Raymond Poincaré, had asked Georges Clemenceau, who was then seventy-six, to take over as prime minister in November 1917. Irritable and recklessly brave, Clemenceau had already been prime minister between 1906 and 1909. While disliked by the Right and the Left, he insisted upon unity above all. Temporarily surmounting political differences, he succeeded, as no one else had, in reenthusing his compatriots with the will to fight and win the war. 17 Upon Clemenceau’s appointment, Arthur immediately sought an audience with him, offering to place his fleet at the service of the French government and to supply the country with coal. Clemenceau accepted Arthur’s offer, their friendship blossomed and Arthur was increasingly called upon to liaise at a high level between the British and the French. Having already gained considerable respect as liaison officer to General Allenby’s Cavalry Corps, alongside Edward Spears he now became (formally) one of the two most important officers liaising between the French and the British governments.
In Paris, in the spring of 1918, we find Arthur’s favorite sister, the exuberant and capricious Bertha, watching the showing of Gabrielle’s new season’s clothes, upstairs in the gold-trimmed salon at rue Cambon. (Gabrielle was one of the first couturiers to have live models walking back and forth, wearing her collections in a floor show.) On April 1, Vogue would describe the collection as ingenious, admiring the knitted-jersey dresses’ “silken suppleness, clinging so closely to the body.” Citing the society women wearing Chanel, such as Princess Radziwill, Vogue said that “many well-dressed women” were wearing versions of Gabrielle’s gray silk jersey “costume” embroidered in gray cotton, and that Mlle. Saint-Sauveur had sported one, this time embroidered in gold, “just a few days ago at a lunch at the Ritz.” At the same lunch, Princess Violette Murat showed off one of Gabrielle’s embroidered dresses “of blue silk jersey,” while Mrs. Hyde and Mlle. d’Hinnisdal also wore dresses by Gabrielle.
As the floor show got under way, without warning, Bertha Capel and her fellow guests were shocked out of their state of self-absorption by the sudden thump of an explosion that blew in windows and rocked the buildings nearby.
Paris was under fire from one of the huge long-range German cannons (nicknamed Big Bertha), the like of which had never been seen before. Shells followed one another every twenty minutes. A friend of Bertha’s at Gabrielle’s show remembered that at the first cannon shot, “the little emaciated models continued their walk, impassive.” “It is a rather extraordinary thing,” she [Bertha] says, “to watch the show of a mellow spring collection, during which the rhythm of the bombings sets the pace for the models presentation.”18 The cannons launched their shells on the city from as far away as seventy-five miles. Arriving without warning, the German bombardment could continue