Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [98]
As they left Lyon, the sun shone, and they drove with the Silver Cloud’s roof rolled down. After lunch, they abandoned the major road and drove out “across country.” With the Rolls impressively negotiating the winding road through high and remote terrain, Dmitri noted their frequent stops to admire the drama of the Auvergne landscape, where the peaks are often snow covered. On reaching Vichy, he was less impressed, finding it flat and unattractive. The weather had turned, and the resort was mournful in its dearth of tourists. Thanks to the low season, they met no one there they knew, for which Dmitri was grateful. On a desultory walk around the town, little could he have known that his companion had a clear agenda: she was secretly reliving her youth. As far as we know, Gabrielle hadn’t returned to Vichy since her failed bid for the stage more than fifteen years earlier. How her life had changed.
The next day, she suggested a trip to Thiers, the center of the French cutlery trade since the fifteenth century. She must have had to sell this detour to Dmitri with some enthusiasm, for Thiers is almost twenty-five miles in the opposite direction from their final destination, Paris. But Gabrielle was now in earnest; she was intent on traveling through the terrain of her childhood.
While Dmitri innocently noted Thiers’s reputation, Gabrielle was reliving her memories of her father’s buying his scissors and knives there for resale throughout the Midi. Dmitri recorded that after a bad meal they “made a little excursion around the area.”12 First navigating the tortuous mountainous roads through the chestnut and pine forests in their “little excursion,” Gabrielle must next have suggested they follow the river Dore just six miles farther south to Courpière, her mother’s birthplace.
How strange it must have been to see the place where Gabrielle’s mother had left her and her siblings in search of her renegade husband, the place where Gabrielle had played those lonely childhood games in the churchyard. Gabrielle gave away nothing to Dmitri about the significance of this remote Auvergne backwater, but her thoughts must have been brimful of the past. Driving in one of the world’s most luxurious cars and supporting herself as one of the world’s most avant-garde designers, she was the personification of female modernity. She was being sought out by the Parisian elite, could name among her friends some of the most famous artists, writers and musicians of the day, and now her traveling companion was a grand duke. Did Gabrielle feel triumphant, remembering those Courpière relations who had said she was useless, and who had pitied “poor Jeanne” for following that no-good Albert Chanel around? Jeanne, the woman her daughter defended with the comment: “Hadn’t she at least married the man she loved?”
Gabrielle had not only traveled way beyond that humiliation, she had also outgrown the mind-set burdening her with those judgments. And while, from her origins, she drew her stubborn and forthright tenacity, for the rest, Gabrielle Chanel had long since outgrown her roots. Ironically, it was that inherited capacity for endurance that had permitted her to make the leap from a fantasized self-transformation to one sustained by reality and hard work. These were the two opposing yet complementary aspects of Gabrielle’s nature. Like any artist of caliber, she possessed an outlandish imagination, which had allowed her to reinvent first herself and then the wardrobes of the female population; she also possessed the essential counterpart of a vivid imagination: practicality.
Gabrielle would say, “People say I’m an Auvergnat. There’s nothing