Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [99]
From Canada, Gabrielle’s sister Antoinette had continued sending despairing letters to Gabrielle and Adrienne, and they had continued urging her to persevere. But Antoinette was entirely unsuited to her new life. In response, Gabrielle had recently dispatched a young Argentinian with a letter of recommendation to Antoinette’s father-in-law. The reasons are lost with the letter, but he may have been an emissary sent to discover the extent of Antoinette’s plight. Antoinette found the young man entertaining, and within days of his departure for Buenos Aires, she had fled her in-laws’ household, leaving everything behind her.
Whatever precipitated her departure, once Antoinette arrived in Buenos Aires, her movements are a mystery. All we know is that any hopes she might have had of beginning again were disappointed, because, on May 2, she gave up the struggle and took her own life. This was almost certainly with an overdose of drugs. Until the recent discovery of Antoinette’s death certificate,14 the story has usually been told that she had already died, a year earlier, in 1920, a casualty of the postwar Spanish flu epidemic.15 Gabrielle and Adrienne possibly never knew the real cause of Antoinette’s death. On the other hand, they might have fabricated the Spanish flu story so as to conceal her despairing end and avoid the stigma of another family suicide.
Gabrielle’s response to her sister’s suicide is nowhere recorded. But Antoinette had been part of Gabrielle and Adrienne’s undertaking to transform their lives, and she had worked hard for her older sister. She had benefited, but in reality, Antoinette had only taken on the trappings of their new lives. She hadn’t possessed Adrienne’s prudence, which would finally lead to her marriage to the man she loved. Nor did Antoinette have the inspired, rule-breaking originality of her sister Gabrielle. In the end, poor Antoinette lacked their tenacity and force of personality. She neither succeeded in marrying “above herself” nor in making herself into a truly New Woman, dependent upon no one but herself. Perhaps there was no connection, but for many years Gabrielle didn’t present a wedding dress at the end of her show, a tradition all the couture houses followed.
Gabrielle saw Adrienne, and occasionally her brothers, who periodically called on her in rue Cambon. She regularly sent one of them a check, and looked after André, her dead sister Julia-Berthe’s son, mostly away at boarding school. Aside from this, Gabrielle now had very little to do with her extended family. With Antoinette’s death, one more connection with her childhood was lost, and she was a little more alone. Years later, in referring to her relations, Gabrielle would say that no one in her family grew old: “I don’t know how I escaped the slaughter.”16
As Gabrielle made her secret journey through her past with Dmitri, their sojourn was concluding. Dmitri would write that Gabrielle was “sad that tomorrow our trip comes to an end.” With many miles ahead of them, on the final morning they were up early and drove through rain, then thick snow, until eventually halting for coffee to warm up. Setting off again, Dmitri wrote that “the highway was covered in snow, and the countryside looked Russian. It was rather sad and moving.”17 The weary travelers finally reached Paris, where Dmitri would again ask his diary why it was they had made that detour around Vichy.
Laughing off rumors of marriage to Gabrielle during his “adventure,” Dmitri was less sanguine about the rumor put around in their absence that she was keeping him. He did nonetheless go and see her the following evening.