Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [9]
In searching for reality in Gabrielle’s stories, what one repeatedly finds is that the truth of an event for her lay not in the fact but in the feeling. She retained the emotional and psychological residue of the past. As a result, at the heart of her tales one often discovers the tenor of what happened. “My earliest childhood. Those words,” she said, “make me shudder. No childhood was less gentle. All too soon I realized that life was a serious matter.”2
Gabrielle recalled her mother in no more than a handful of anecdotes. In most of them we notice the little girl’s capacity for destructiveness, and her mother’s telling response. In one incident, when the children were staying with their mother at Uncle Augustin’s, the adults had shut the children out of the way. Bored with their seclusion, Gabrielle and her siblings noticed how easily the damp wallpaper could be removed. At first it was just a little strip they took off, but then, to their great amusement, they found they could pull off whole sections at once. They peeled off more, then clambered on chairs they’d piled up, gradually revealing the pink plaster. Then they stripped the ceiling! Their mother eventually came in to discover this “disaster.” She didn’t reprimand the children, she just stood silently weeping. Little Gabrielle was so taken aback by her mother’s response that she “ran away howling with sorrow.” Gabrielle soon recognized that life was indeed “a solemn affair, since it caused mothers to cry.”3
On another occasion, the children were put to bed in a workroom. Bunches of grapes were hanging from the rafters in paper bags, to preserve them for the winter. Throwing a pillow, Gabrielle brought down a paper bag. This was hilarious. She felled another one, then set to work with a bolster. Finally, she had “brought the entire harvest of grapes down, so that they were strewn over the wooden floor . . . For the first time in my life I was whipped. The humiliation was something I would never forget.”4
Jeanne’s family scorned her ramshackle life with Albert, and her aunts made superior remarks, such as “These people live like traveling circus folk.” As for the children, Gabrielle sensed particular disapproval of herself. One aunt prophesied that she would “turn out badly”; another talked of “selling her to the gypsies” and “discussed beating her with nettles.” Her defense was “stubborn defiance.” Thus upping the stakes, she provoked still greater chastisement, which in turn “only made me more uncivilized, more fractious.”5 One of the saddest legacies of this pattern of behavior was the self-loathing Gabrielle described. In childhood and youth, she believed she was ugly, almost cursed. Only much later was she proud of whom she had become.6
After Jeanne’s death, her aunts, uncles and grandparents were unwilling to take responsibility for Albert’s children. And by now it was clear he was not going to do so himself. Perhaps no one could afford to feed and house these extra mouths; perhaps their impoverished and seminomadic lifestyle had left them unacceptably feral in the eyes of their relatives. Clearly, the bond between the children and their extended family wasn’t strong, or a way would have been found to take in at least one or two of them. Gabrielle was left with an undying grudge against her family. She struggled to camouflage it, but her father’s abandonment was to haunt Gabrielle, revealing its corrosive power over and over again.
The pain of blaming her father was more than she could bear. So she did the only thing that gave her any control: she retold their story. In the retelling, Albert was absolved of almost all blame. Gabrielle would tell how, after her mother’s death, when she was still in deep mourning, she had arrived with her father at the miserable house of some unwelcoming old aunts. Albert ignored