Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [85]
Returning to Paris, Gabrielle appeared to have emerged from her emotional retreat, and the Serts pronounced her cured. Gabrielle would never be entirely cured of Arthur’s loss, bearing forever its scars. Nonetheless, her powerful urge for life was too strong to lie dormant in her for more than a certain amount of time. Exhilarated by the two Serts’ mad adventures, she had decided “to live.”
One of the first signs of this more positive frame of mind was that Gabrielle now made a dramatic move. There are several versions of this story. One has it that she appeared at Diaghilev’s hotel and asked if she might see him. Another, which subtly alters the balance of power, has it that she asked him to come and see her. One suspects it was the latter, and that her description is correct:
I understand that there is a great tragedy. He has fled London because he could not pay his debts . . . “I live at the Ritz hotel, come and see me, say nothing to Misia.” He came to my apartment . . . I gave him a check . . . I think he didn’t think it was real . . . He never wrote to me, he never compromised himself by a word.15
The astonished impresario, who had hoped Misia Sert would bail him out, had instead been given a very large sum by Gabrielle to relaunch The Rite of Spring. Her request that he tell no one was to no avail; Diaghilev thrived on indiscretion almost as much as his boon companion, Misia, and in no time at all she knew. The customary explanation for Gabrielle’s gesture of munificence is that she was flexing her cultural muscles: it wasn’t only Misia who could make things happen. Unlike Misia, however, for whom the cultivation of a salon was almost a raison d’être, the artist in Gabrielle meant that she was only moderately interested in one with herself at its center. (As we have already seen, her interest in power was not for its own sake; it was above all a means to an end, usually freedom to do her work and thereby maintain her independence.) Gabrielle never failed to fall under the spell of creativity, and what primarily interested her in Diaghilev’s case was the fact of his being another artist at work. Anything made well, however modest, never ceased to enchant her. There was, however, nothing modest about Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
The maestro, Sergei Diaghilev, was an extraordinary creature, an incongruous, distracted mix of impulse and caprice, generosity and meanness, combined with a breathtaking ability to manipulate. He had no qualms whatsoever about a ruthless dedication to his objectives, which were devoted almost exclusively to his art. As someone remarked of him, “It was not easy to resist Diaghilev’s pressure. He would wear out his opponent, not by the logic of his arguments, but by the sheer stress of his own will.”16 His single-mindedness made him arrogantly selective about his companions, and perhaps it was only in Venice that he first registered Gabrielle properly. Perhaps it was in Venice, too, that Gabrielle understood something better about Diaghilev himself. Certainly, she found his exotic foreignness most attractive. Later, she would describe him as “the most delightful of friends. I loved his zest for life, his passions, his scruffiness, so different from the sumptuous figure of legend.”17
Meeting once again this powerful and charismatic figure,