Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [83]
As a young woman, Misia had acquired a salon and become one of the undeniable queens of Paris. Paul Morand described her then as “a beautiful panther, imperious, bloodthirsty and frivolous.” He also said that she was “brilliant in perfidy, and refined in cruelty.”6
Misia Godebska had grown up in the world of haute bohème, where artists and society met. Musically gifted, she had married, at twenty-one, Thadée Natanson, founder of the La revue blanche; then, in order to clear her husband’s debts, she divorced him and married a fabulously wealthy newspaper magnate, the monstrous Alfred Edwards. Full of perverse nonchalance, Misia cared little about the scandal her behavior provoked.
Misia’s stormy friendship with Sergei Diaghilev had been forged at their first meeting when, after hours of talking, Diaghilev recognized the quality of Misia’s musical and artistic appreciation. Diaghilev and his impresario, Gabriel Astruc, knew that in order to succeed on any scale, they needed the patronage of the self-absorbed world of artistic fashion. Astruc called these patrons “mes chers snobs” and cultivated them with great flair. Like these “snobs,” Misia Sert was wealthy. However, her feeling for art ran far deeper than snobbery or fashion. Her generosity to the financially incompetent artistic genius Diaghilev was interspersed with endless disputes, reconciliations and Slavic declarations of affection. Without Misia, much of Diaghilev’s work might never have reached the stage.
Paul Morand said that Misia was a “harvester of geniuses, all of them in love with her—Vuillard, Bonnard, Renoir, Picasso”; the list also included Toulouse-Lautrec, Ravel and Debussy as well as poets such as Verlaine, Mallarmé and Apollinaire. Having divorced, Misia began living with José Maria Sert, a master voluptuary who revealed her own as yet unfulfilled sensuality to her. In Sert, Misia had finally discovered her life’s companion. Misia’s impromptu and bohemian entertaining had an infectious and exciting quality, reflecting the newer Paris rather than the “studied grandeur” of the older haut monde. As for Sert’s serial infidelities, the new bride had for long schooled herself to ignore them, even treating them with a “grudging admiration.”
En route to Venice, the Serts and Gabrielle stopped off at Padua, where Gabrielle went with Misia to the Basilica of Saint Anthony. Misia insisted it would dissolve Gabrielle’s despair, that Saint Anthony would give her peace. Gabrielle was reluctant, but constantly close to tears, she had obliged. Where Donatello’s high-altar masterpiece still stands, Gabrielle found herself before his statue of the saint.
Asking for help to recover from her ceaseless mourning, she saw before her a man resting his forehead on the stone floor: “He had such a sad and beautiful face, there was so much rigidity and pain in him, and his exhausted head touched the ground with such weariness that a miracle took place within me.” All at once, Gabrielle felt shameful. “How could I compare my sorrow . . . with someone in this distress? Energy flowed through me. I took new heart and decided that I would live.”7 Gabrielle believed she wasn’t alone, that the man she had loved was near her “on the other side, and wouldn’t leave me.” She now told herself that as long as she felt Arthur was waiting for her, she had no right to weep. “It doesn’t matter that you’re alone on this side still, for a while.”8 Gabrielle later told a friend how the woman “who had turned into a shadow, came out of that church transformed.”9
In Venice, the reborn Gabrielle understood better Misia’s fascination with Sert, the Spanish painter of grandiosity. Intense, short and vibrant, José Maria Sert was full of impassioned self-assurance, and also possessed a cruel streak.