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the courtesans and the actresses who had made their own money—but at what long-term cost? As we have seen, the ability of these women to act with real independence was severely curtailed by a series of powerful social constraints. One of the outstanding contemporary exceptions—regarded as an exciting stimulant, and a very dangerous one at that—was the writer-actress Colette. Colette had flaunted her outrageous difference for several years (as a bisexual who had lived with her female lover and performed seminude and in provocative female embrace on stage) and had transformed herself, through tremendous hard work, from being an entirely dependent woman to one who was financially independent.

One of the ways Gabrielle expressed her independence was in establishing friendships with the coterie of artists, writers and musicians that was making Paris the seat of modernist art. She felt most at ease with these people, whose work inevitably made them outsiders. For Gabrielle, the artists’ lives, and the way they were perceived, were not so very different from the courtesans’, living, as they did, both at the center and at the edges of society.

As far as we can make out, the day before New Year’s Eve 1920, Gabrielle and Stravinsky, and a number of these artists, were present at a party later recorded by Paul Morand. He tells how it “started again at Chanel’s” at rue Cambon. A buffet was laid out in the fitting rooms. A good proportion of upper Bohemia was present; several were to become Gabrielle’s lifelong friends. These included Diaghilev’s chief dancer Serge Lifar, Satie, the painter André de Segonzac, the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, who in 1922 would sculpt a bust of Gabrielle, Picasso’s fellow founder of cubism Georges Braque, Picasso himself, the painter Luc-Albert Moreau, Jean Cocteau, his sulky teenage boyfriend Raymond Radiguet, the literary prodigy of the moment, Misia and José Maria Sert, Elise Toulemon (Caryathis), the outrageously modernist writer Blaise Cendrars, and several young composers, who came to be known as Les Six:

The presence of the Russians gave rise to a rather beautiful party . . . Auric [one of the members of Les Six] cracked his fingers on the piano and there was blood running down the keyboard. Jean [Cocteau] contorted, was initiating the Duchesse de Gramont in a broken Cancan . . . Drieu and Larianoff were shoring up the walls of an attic, Chanel, her legs in the air, was snoring on a sofa. Stravinsky was drinking his ammonia. J.M.S. [José Maria Sert] was taking a swimming lesson in the knocked over overcoats. Massine was doing things in the middle of the parquet floor, very quickly, on his own, then fell like a mass, and Rehbinder . . . was taking vodka for the Volga. Ansermet [Diaghilev’s conductor], whose beard Misia wanted to cut, had wrapped a towel around his head, and yours truly went home in the morning with no hat and no tie.14

Gabrielle’s personal involvement in the great cultural shifts taking place in these years made her a most interesting woman. As someone also involved in the forging of a new world, irrespective of whether he spoke about it or not, Stravinsky cannot have failed to recognize, and find stimulating, this difference in Gabrielle. In years to come, Gabrielle’s undignified inclination to represent Stravinsky as younger and less sophisticated than he was may have come about in reaction to her virtual omission from future discussion of this period in his life.

While snobbery was at the heart of the musical establishment’s motivation here, jealousy of Gabrielle may well have motivated the woman who would take charge of constructing Stravinsky’s legacy. This was Vera Sudei-kine, who began her own affair with him shortly after he was rejected by Gabrielle and who would eventually become Stravinsky’s second wife.

Meanwhile, fascinated as Misia was by Gabrielle and Stravinsky, she was also piqued at their affair, and when an opportunity arose, she strove to bring about its ruin. Gabrielle and Stravinsky’s mutual friends could see how deeply he was affected by her, while