Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [82]
Regarding the emotional complications of Arthur’s short life—he was thirty-seven when he died—and his regret at having given up Gabrielle, his comment to Elisabeth de Gramont springs to mind: “It is easier . . . to organize the trade of coal than one’s private life.”2
The few who cared to look behind Gabrielle’s professional demeanor would see that three months after Arthur’s death, she had not begun to pull herself out of the misery into which it had plunged her. Her mourning was now to play itself out in a dark and complex fashion.
Early that spring, she would move with her two German shepherd dogs, Soleil and Lune; their three puppies; the two terriers, Pepita and Popee (her last present from Arthur); Joseph and Marie Leclerc and their little daughter, Suzanne, to a large art nouveau villa, Bel Respiro, just a short walk from La Milanaise, the one Gabrielle had rented for the previous year. It has always been said that she bought Bel Respiro.3 Gabrielle did indeed buy Bel Respiro, but not for a whole year after her move there. This was because, at first, the owner permitted her only to rent it. To all intents and purposes, this move was to help Gabrielle make a fresh start, with her friends Henri and Antoinette Bernstein as next-but-one neighbors. The real story of Gabrielle’s move was, however, much stranger than that, and until now has not been known.
On moving to Bel Respiro, she had the shutters painted an intense black. This was strongly disapproved of by her neighbors, but Gabrielle was not in a fit state to care. Indeed, those black shutters were the first indication that Bel Respiro was to be both her refuge and a kind of mausoleum for her memories. And in fact, it wasn’t the proximity of her friends but her memories that were the most significant reason for Gabrielle’s move here.
Extraordinarily, it turns out that Bel Respiro belonged to Arthur—it was the very house he had bought for himself and Diana the previous year.4
This explains the mystery of a letter from Diana to Duff Cooper, written not long after Arthur’s death and headed “Bel Respiro.” Diana had told Cooper that “I have been and still am, & I suppose I shall go on being, so terribly, desperately unhappy . . . I can’t write more because there is nothing to say . . . I have to lead the life of a recluse, otherwise I can’t sleep . . . I suppose I shall leave here soon and return to England.”5
Diana did indeed soon leave France, and almost never visited it again.
Meanwhile, Gabrielle was not only aware that Bel Respiro was Arthur and Diana’s house, this was exactly why she wanted it. How better to immerse herself in Arthur than by living in his home? It didn’t concern Gabrielle that Diana had only recently left, or that she knew it was Gabrielle who took up the lease. (Diana must have been beyond caring that the new tenant was toto be her husband’s old lover.) Gabrielle cared only that by being there, in some strange way she would be “living” with Arthur. In addition, her presence in his house would erase Diana from his life, and Gabrielle would gradually “replace” her.
For several months, she lived out this half-cracked existence at Bel Respiro with no one, besides Joseph and Marie, really aware of what she was doing. In her state of semibreakdown, Gabrielle, who could always move from reality to fantasy in one bound, now did so more readily. At the same time, each day, she was driven into Paris to the salon, and business prospered. Although she was a wreck and often close to tears, work really was the only thing that kept her from collapse. One wonders how she responded to the news that Diana Capel had given birth to another baby girl, in June of that year, 1920. Named June, the baby had been conceived only three months before her father’s death.
It was Misia Edwards’s marriage that August, to José Maria Sert, her lover of twelve years, that would finally initiate Gabrielle’s recovery.
Misia’s efforts to lift Gabrielle out of her blackness had so far failed. So, after the wedding, she