Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [76]
Much love
Coco8
Another letter, sent by Gabrielle’s secretary, and regarding the renting of her house, refers to the fact that “Mademoiselle Chanel has been unwell lately and was not able to reply right away.”9
By August 18, one week after Arthur’s return with his bride to Paris, we find that Gabrielle had fled the city in an attempt to leave behind her “thousand worries.” She had gone to find comfort with her friends Henri and Antoinette Bernstein, as promised, at a spa town, Uriage, in the Alps. And here Gabrielle was to spend the rest of that summer. Ostensibly, she was part of the grand annual exodus from the capital’s August heat. In fact, she was taking a spa cure to help restore and thereby “cure” herself of Arthur. As it turned out, for much of Gabrielle’s stay, Antoinette Bernstein was summering by the sea at Deauville with her mother. But shortly after Gabrielle’s arrival, Antoinette brought her and Henri’s small daughter, Georges, to see her father at the villa that Gabrielle and he were sharing while taking their “methodical and prolonged cure.” Antoinette stayed for about a week before returning to Deauville. In Paris, meanwhile, the British ambassador was noting in his diary that
Capel is an invaluable . . . link with Clemenceau, but I am very anxious about his health. He is very neurasthenic [the contemporary term for nervous instability, which sounds close to a breakdown], and I am certain he himself thinks he is going off his head . . . Though he talks freely with me, they tell me that when he is alone at home he sits for hours without saying a word and you cannot get him to buckle down to any work. I am sending him away for a fortnight’s holiday.10
The huge stresses of Arthur’s war work would have reduced many to an emotional crisis of some kind. In addition, he had been living for many months under the strain of conducting his romance with Diana with a divided heart. He had never been able to push the source of that division—Gabrielle—very far from his mind. He had not entered into the sacrament of marriage lightly, and the enormity of his action had overcome Arthur and reduced him to a state of emotional collapse. Unbeknownst to each other, he and Gabrielle were suffering a simultaneous crisis.
As Gabrielle made her own attempt at recuperation, also far from Paris, a young observer, Simone de Caillavet, recorded that she was mystified by the relationship between Gabrielle and Henri Bernstein and his wife. She found Antoinette and Gabrielle “equally emaciated” and commented on their “vehement friendship for one another.” Simone was unable to fathom “what bonds link the three units of this enigmatic trio.”11 Henri Bernstein was an incorrigible philanderer and a man possessed of a rather intense and melodramatic personality, rather like the heightened endings of his plays about love, which were so successful at the time. Gabrielle had arrived in the mountains overcome by a sense of rejection and loss, and temporary forgetfulness in seduction by this older man may have given her a welcome respite from her secretly desperate state of mind.
Gabrielle and Henri Bernstein did not, however, spend all their time alone. There were visitors to the villa. Adrienne came to stay, bringing a friend, a former dancer. Photographs show the women, and Henri, walking and picnicking in the summer mountain pastures. The women are all dressed in variations of a Chanel jersey skirt and loose belted jacket. In another photograph, they wear Gabrielle’s linen outfits. Her followers had become women of fashion who, for the first time, were prepared to look very similar. Previously, a couturier had to make endless tiny modifications to a style because one of a woman’s greatest fears was to find herself in the same outfit as someone else.
In other photographs, Gabrielle appears as a dazzling representation of “modernity,” with her bobbed hair and in her outfit of coarse silk pajamas—that same style she had recently