Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [73]
Meanwhile, the British ambassador, Lord Derby, irritably confided to his diary:
. . . of all the stupid things today the War Office telephoned here to know exactly where the shells from Big Bertha had fallen . . . as it is the one thing you are not allowed to talk about and . . . can be of no possible use to the Cabinet—unless it means they are frightened to come here—I told Capel . . . that he had better not send any reply.19
Several of the women then staying at the Ritz came over to Chanel on the rue Cambon—situated just across the way from the hotel’s rear entrance—in search of something appropriate to wear should the shelling take place at night. Taking sudden shelter down in the Ritz’s cellars, what could Gabrielle substitute for their delicate nightgowns? The enterprising Gabrielle brought up and offered the rich refugees a consignment of men’s scarlet pajamas. The dashing young couturier decreed that these were not only acceptable, they were also stylish. She was soon reproducing them in coarse pale silk, and her more bold clients were delighted. “It was very chic, very daring and very new, as pajamas would only really become popular three or four years later, on the Lido at Venice.”20
By the summer of 1918, the Germans had concluded that their only remaining chance of victory was to defeat the Allies before the overwhelming resources of the United States forces could be deployed against them. Meanwhile, Old Tiger, as Clemenceau was now known, traveled from one headquarters at the front to another, haranguing the generals and endearing himself to the troops by hobbling down into trench after trench to rouse and inspire them. He threw out the French commander in chief, Philippe Pétain, and replaced him with Ferdinand Foch. Paris was now bombarded from the air; the distant cannons continued hurling shells into the city, and once more the fighting had almost reached the capital. Again there was an exodus. Those who could went by car, while the rest squeezed onto crowded trains and any other transport they could find.
And while Arthur and Diana vacillated about their feelings for each other, Gabrielle was at the mercy of their uncertainty. Arthur may have gone for periods without seeing Gabrielle, but he found it impossible to give her up.
Between the strenuously hard work and the heartache, Arthur somehow made good progress on his new book. Here, complaining of a neglect of the art of maternity, and the prevalent system of marriages of convenience, he asked, when mothers married off their daughters for wealth, “What becomes of love and virtue in these barters of gold and beauty?” He believed that the natural result of this prison for women was that they turned to adultery, and “discretion replaces virtue.”21 Arthur believed that “this conception of marriage is a crime; a dreadful crime against the woman . . . Intelligence, beauty and virtue are the most precious gifts of a race. They all depend on motherhood.” 22 The war was turning Arthur’s thoughts toward the regeneration of society, and thus he was being led to a new estimation of motherhood. And he must, at least partly, have had Diana in mind when he went on to say that “the English aristocracy . . . does not give a dowry to its daughters and leaves it to love to unite its children . . . the future role of women consists of making a Utopia a reality by giving birth to a generation that will be capable of thriving in it.”23
At last, in that spring of 1918, Arthur and Diana came to a final decision. Somehow, Arthur broke the news to Gabrielle: he had found someone else and he had asked her to marry him. Perhaps Gabrielle had no longer been able to bear what she sensed already and had initiated this confession. But no matter how much she