Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [77]
Then finally, this appalling war, waged at the cost of so many lives, was at an end. On September 29, 1918, the German Supreme Command informed Kaiser Wilhelm II that the military situation was hopeless. With no choice but to take his command’s recommendation, the Kaiser then asked the Allies for an immediate cease-fire. The negotiations that followed dragged on, and on, and the social deterioration of Europe grew worse than it might otherwise have been. This included a revolution in Germany, the abdication of the Kaiser and the proclamation of a German Republic on November 9. Finally, on November 11, the armistice was signed, famously, in Marshall Foch’s private train carriage, in that same forest of Compiègne where Gabrielle had ridden so many times with Etienne Balsan and their friends. During the course of the war, 11 percent of France’s population, approximately 6 percent of Great Britain’s, and 9 percent of Germany’s had been killed or wounded. The number was almost unimaginable; in all, approximately nine and a half million men had lost their lives.
While the armistice ended the fighting, it took another six months of negotiation at the Paris Peace Conference for the Allied victors to set peace terms for Germany and the other defeated nations. During those six months, Paris effectively became the seat of world government, as the negotiators brought to a close the reign of bankrupt empires and redrew the world map. As new countries were created, the infamously punitive peace treaty with Germany declared it must bear full guilt, and the Allies required that reparations be paid to them. Many thought this excessive. As assistant political secretary to the British delegation, Arthur was kept very busy for many months to come. Notoriously, if the aim had been to pacify, conciliate or permanently weaken Germany, it had failed; the Paris Peace Treaty would prove fertile ground for the roots of the Second World War.
If Arthur’s marriage had driven Gabrielle to leave the city, she now continued outside it in a villa she rented in the leafy outlying suburb of Garches. Here, with a view over Paris, she returned after long days of work for peace and the company of her dogs, to whom she had become very attached in recent years. If Gabrielle entertained any doubts about whether, at thirty-five, she could still be found attractive, she need not have worried. Henri Bernstein took her to meet his ex-lover, the beautiful ex-courtesan Liane de Pougy—now Princess Ghika. Writing of Gabrielle and Bernstein’s visit, de Pougy said, “Bernstein . . . brought . . . the dressmaker, Gabrielle Chanel—the taste of a fairy, the eyes and voice of a woman, the hair-cut and figure of an urchin.”13 Gabrielle had no shortage of admirers. When the armistice had at last been signed, Paris went mad and Gabrielle was to be seen at the festivities with a new lover, another handsome playboy, Paul Eduardo Martínez de Hoz, who was a member of the Jockey Club and scion of one of Argentina’s wealthiest families.
King George V came to Paris to celebrate the armistice, and a large and distinguished party met at the Capels’ apartment to watch the procession from their balcony. The English socialite and diplomat’s wife, Lady Helen d’Abernon, later one of Gabrielle’s clients, recorded:
It was a wet day and the entry was far from imposing, although guns fired and the streets were lined with troops and with spectators the whole way to the Elysée . . .
I passed most of the morning in the company of monsieur Bondy, a quiet but charming writer, and at intervals “Boy” Capel