Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life

by Lisa Chaney

  Some time before, first Etienne’s father, then his mother had died, each leaving him a large inheritance, making him a very wealthy young man. Immediately after completing his military service, he had launched himself into his life’s work — breeding and training horses. To this end, he had bought and restored a small château, Royallieu, in the department of Oise, and it was here that Gabrielle now traveled with Etienne to begin a new life.

  While Adrienne’s cohabitation with her lover must have shocked her sister Louise and the rest of their family, Louise would have appreciated Adrienne’s discretion and, one hopes, been unprudish enough to rejoice at her sister’s good fortune. Gabrielle’s situation, however, was rather different. We don’t know whether she hid her new life from her family for a time and was subsequently found out, or whether she told them immediately that she was going to live openly with a man out of wedlock. (As so often, it wasn’t quite so much what one did but the way one did it that mattered; discretion counted above all.) Years later, when Gabrielle came to tell of her installation at the château of Royallieu, despite garbling the truth to throw her audience off the scent, one catches a hint of her misrepresentation, which clearly provoked considerable family disapproval.

  Gabrielle told how she had run away. She said that her grandfather in Moulins believed she had returned to Courpière; that her aunts thought she was at her grandfather’s house; and that, finally, someone “would realize that I was neither with one nor the other.”6 Although nomadic, and at the lower end of the social scale, the Chanel family would have been quite aware that (unlike Adrienne), Gabrielle was jettisoning any chance of a good name by going to live at Royallieu.7 Here she was not alone: her new lover’s family regarded him as its black sheep.

  From an early age, Etienne Balsan, a most sympathetic character, was both easygoing and provocative, habitually unsettling his family. They put his intermittent irritability down to the fact that he often starved himself so as to keep his weight down as a jockey. (Etienne frequently rode as the only gentleman rider with the professional jockeys.) When he wasn’t working hard, one of Etienne’s favorite pastimes was courting women. Then he was relaxed and amusing, with a famously caustic wit. Women responded to his cheerful demeanor, and were seduced by his lack of romance and unflinching confidence. One of his stable lads, describing him as a champion jockey, said his only criticism of Etienne was with regard to women: “He focused on them too much. And it tired him out, sometimes.” When he mistakenly gave Etienne the benefit of this opinion, he was called an “idiot,” and Etienne informed him: “It’s no more tiring than riding horses!”

  As a man of respectable pedigree and great means, Etienne could afford not to care about status. He had the freedom to do pretty much as he pleased, something very few women were permitted to any degree. Indeed Gabrielle’s arrival at Royallieu to live with Etienne Balsan had made her entirely disreputable in the eyes of contemporary society.

  During the second half of the nineteenth century, under Louis Napoléon’s Second Empire, Paris became associated with an ostentatious theatricality and a luxuriant, new kind of spectacle. Louis-Napoléon’s mission was to promote his country’s magnificence and superiority to the world, and in this he was assisted by his urban planner, Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This promotion of magnificence in turn contributed to a period of feverishly self-absorbed luxury. Gratification was the imperative, and entertainments of all kinds proliferated. Many of the now famous great restaurants and grand cafés appeared, as did sumptuous new theaters and concert halls, playing nightly to packed houses.

  Another form of entertainment — prostitution — also grew dramatically. At the end of the century, about a hundred thousand women plied their trade to a Parisian population of just under three million.8 At that time, Paris had one of the most highly organized and regulated systems of prostitution in the world. The penal code discriminated against women, and female adultery was considered far worse than adultery committed by a man. The state’s double standard assumed that male extramarital sex was inevitable — in fact, necessary. At the same time, the demimonde, the half-world beyond the bounds of respectability, inhabited by women selling their sexual favors, was rigorously controlled. In doing so, the state believed it was contributing toward the stability of the institution of marriage and simultaneously reducing the incidence of grim syphilis.

  The myriad names for these women subtly delineated their variety, hierarchy and place in male fantasy. Many, such as the “kept” women, the irrégulières or femmes galantes, did their utmost to avoid being registered as prostitutes. Each category of the trade had its own epithet, including the street prostitute, the brothel prostitute, the fille libre, fille en carte, fille de maison or fille de numéro. Then there was the grisette, the young milliner, glover or seamstress, who often took lovers to boost her pitiful earnings.

  Higher up the scale was the lorette, found in the fashionable cafés and restaurants of Paris’s grands boulevards, who often dreamed of becoming an actress, or might even dare to aim for the status of courtesan. The courtesan, the most highly prized prostitute, had many names: cocotte, biche, chameau, camélia (as in La Dame aux Camélias), et cetera. In an era of conspicuous and ostentatious consumption, these women flourished as never before. At the pinnacle of the courtesan class itself were the grandes horizontales, lionesses, mangeuses d’homme, Amazones and the grandes cocottes. In lives of previously unimagined refinement and extravagance, they were a living myth, the image of desire. The loving recorder of the demimonde, Comte de Mournay (pseudonym Zed), aptly described the courtesan as “a luxury that surpasses all one’s wildest dreams.”

  While many men kept a mistress from a class lower than their own, they rarely lived with her, or not openly anyway. Maurice de Nexon and Etienne Balsan were two of the exceptions. While Etienne had already brought the celebrated courtesan Emilienne d’Alençon to the Château de Royallieu, he had now asked Gabrielle to join her. With so few men willing to risk their reputations by marrying their mistresses, if a woman flaunted the loss of her reputation, as Gabrielle was now doing, there was little she could ever do to regain it.

  Etienne was the least conventional of the three Balsan brothers and cared little that his behavior was seen as scandalous. He was stubborn and determined, with a fiery temper. He was also generous spirited, with a rare gift for friendship. Demonstrating his disdain for propriety, at Royallieu sociability was arranged with as much freedom from convention as possible.

  Although the demimondaine was generally shunned at private gatherings of respectable society, society women, just as much as men, were fascinated by the secrets of their success. As Balzac would observe, “Nothing equals the curiosity of virtuous women on this subject.” Unlike the common prostitute, available to any takers, or the ordinary mistress, the irrégulière, normally confined to one man, the courtesan had such power that she chose for herself those privileged enough to share the delights of her company. Indeed, men could offer a fortune for the pleasure of one night.

  Emilienne d’Alençon was one of these, and had earned for herself huge sums. She was a concierge’s daughter who had worked her way up from circus performer to caf’conc dancer to her final position of renown. Like many courtesans, her “payment” was often in the form of pearls or precious stones, giving rise to the grand courtesan’s sobriquet, croqueuse de diamants, or “diamond cruncher.” Caroline Otero, a beautiful and eccentric Spanish courtesan, owned a stupendous jewel collection and famously said, “No man who has an account at Cartier could ever be regarded as ugly.” She had made for herself a notoriously revealing bodice composed entirely of precious stones, and kept it stored in the vaults of her bank. At the sighting of one of these costly Amazones on a son’s horizon, his family was in dread lest he should squander his inheritance.

  Nonetheless, “at once exclusive, alternative and forbidden,”9 the courtesan was worshipped as a status symbol and a trophy. At the same time, courtesans’ sexual tastes were wide-rang
ing; they were often bisexual. The exquisite Liane de Pougy, for example, one of Emilienne’s numerous female lovers, wrote of her: “With an impudence as great as her beauty, she… installed herself in my bed, at my table, in my carriages… vicious and ravishing… Nothing about her was banal or vulgar, not her face nor her gestures, nor the things she dared to do.”10

  Courtesans pursued a life of independence and sexual liberation unthinkable for all but the smallest fraction of other women. While majestically overcoming typically impoverished and unstable backgrounds, they were, more often than not, ill equipped to deal with their fevered lives. Frequently mismanaging their celebrity and huge earnings, they regularly squandered them on a life more lavish than they could actually afford. In addition, a secret yearning for acceptance usually deluded them into believing that marriage would gain them an entrée to society as equals. Seeking anesthesia against their ultimate ostracism, these memorable women all too often became mired in addiction to alcohol or drugs. It was not uncommon for the courtesan, and her “lesser” sisters, to die destitute and forgotten. Liane de Pougy and Emilienne d’Alençon were two who kept their wits about them, not only hanging on to their fortunes but also making impressive marriages.

  Gabrielle eschewed the path of the courtesan and became an irrégulière, a mistress, entirely dependent upon her lover. Her rejection of the courtesan’s jewel-encrusted path was significant. Over time, she would admire and be influenced by them, but she would also strive to distance herself from their glamorous dependence. She was groping her way toward an idea of self-determination that might bring her a more genuine autonomy. In one sense, the courtesan’s life was a heightened, more dramatic version of the usual power brokering that takes place in relations between men and women. This drama involved the power of the courtesan’s lover over the courtesan, and the power in her potential to damn a man’s life if he should fall in love with her.

  Gabrielle was unusual in that she wasn’t interested in that kind of power — power for its own sake. For this reason, although she was aware of her ignorance of château life — and set about to learn about it — her interest in status was limited. Ultimately, this gave her great confidence. What really interested Gabrielle was influence. Over the span of her life, her interest in influence would be misconstrued over and over again as a desire to wield power. But Gabrielle would come to wield power above all as a means to an end, the creation of her art, her work, and, through work she would secure her independence.

  Though Gabrielle remained stubbornly coy about the identity of her earlier lovers, Etienne Balsan was probably not the first of her Moulins officers. Hinting darkly at a brief entanglement when still an adolescent, she would later say that girls of this age “are terrible. Anyone can have them who uses a little subtlety.”11 The young officers at Moulins may have entertained liberally, but the expectation of a reward was implicit. Gabrielle’s move to Royallieu marked far more long-sighted ambitions.

  In part, it was realism. Not cynicism, but simply the realization that the world Etienne inhabited represented a heaven-sent means of escape. For this reason, Gabrielle referred to it as “a dream.” She liked Etienne, and he found her exotic. His mixture of drive, devil-may-care attitude and antipathy toward bourgeois proprieties made him an attractive lover. While Etienne was never outrageously unconventional, he was nonetheless regarded by his fellow officers as a sympathetic outsider, a quality that endeared him to Gabrielle, the outsider from a different class. And if it so happened that Emilienne d’Alençon was staying at Royallieu when Gabrielle arrived, there was no question of Gabrielle’s making any objection.

  By 1906, we find Gabrielle’s name on the census returns for Royallieu. The household was large, with jockeys, grooms and servants, but Gabrielle’s name is placed immediately after Etienne’s. She is described as sans profession: she is a kept woman, a luxury. Yet in the early years of the new century, change was in the air. A crucial aspect of this concerned the position of French women. In 1906, still denied rights of citizenship, they were neither permitted to vote nor to stand for political election. Married women were second-class citizens, minors in the eyes of the law. In 1900, only 624 women gained entry into higher education. Despite rumblings of discontent across the political spectrum, the shrill moralist response was that a woman’s place was “by the hearth.” Most men were extremely reluctant to contemplate an alternative order, believing the present traditional one was natural and unalterable. Meanwhile, on terms of massive inferiority, women made up a third of the French workforce. More than half of those working in textile factories were women; their wages were half the men’s.

  With hindsight, one sees that the image of woman as siren, as femme fatale, was competing with a new one. This would become more recognizable as the new century wore on, and was an image that Gabrielle herself was to embody.

  A few years before Gabrielle jettisoned any pretense to honor by moving in with Etienne Balsan, another young woman whose work would influence her times was making her first steps in this direction.

  5. A Rich Man’s Game

  In 1900, a notorious Parisian hack, Henry Gauthier-Villars (known as Willy), published a novel he claimed to be the work of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, Claudine. Claudine à l’école and the follow-up novels were hugely successful. Heralded for their style, their frankly sexual subject matter also tainted their author’s reputation with scandal. Willy’s cynical claim that Claudine at School had been written anonymously would eventually be exposed by its real author, his wife, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, writing to order for her husband. By the time she revealed her true identity, she had left him.

  That some find the sexual promise of an adolescent arousing is nothing new. But the traditional French view, in which a woman becomes more seductive as she grows beyond her teens and twenties and gains experience, had an unorthodox competitor in the raw young Claudine. On the surface, the Claudine novels served as soft porn for the bourgeoisie, but below the titillation and sexual heresy, Colette was articulating an unsettling version of a gnawing contemporary problem: the battle between the sexes.

  Many men were ambivalent about women. On the one hand, woman was Venus, whose corseted and exaggerated hourglass figure was worshipped; on the other, the male fin de siècle mindset had become increasingly preoccupied with the image of the femme fatale, the man-consuming sphinx. One of the best examples of this was the proscribed, ritual drama played out between the fin de siècle courtesan (the femme fatale) and her lover. And many found this a more insidious relationship than the traditional balancing act of man-woman relations described in earlier literature.

  In the provocatively unorthodox Claudine, Colette had captured something in the contemporary mind, and literary versions of the character became common in literature. Nothing like the seductive and majestic grandes courtisanes, this younger woman, with her unripe allure, had an edgy, anarchic femaleness, her ignorance and unself-consciousness liberating her from constraint. In the future, a man of experience would write, “Today, I miss… the time one spent waiting. The penitence and the continence that society imposed on us imparted an unbelievable flavor to the opposite sex, and they conferred something sacred that has been lost.”1 In contrast, devoid of cultivation, Claudine was confrontational, revealed her confidence in a caustic sense of humor, cared little for tradition and was utterly impervious to the notion of maturity. While encapsulating an important aspect of the sexual flavor of the period, the anarchic Claudine would also emerge as its most unsettling female image.

  There is no doubt that Gabrielle’s particular allure lay somewhere in this mold.

  Nevertheless, for all the apparent unorthodoxy of Royallieu, she had no more real scope than any traditional mistress. She was “kept” by Etienne, and with her solemn elfin beauty, in photographs Gabrielle often looks fiercely at the camera with an air of studied defiance. Whatever Claudine’s influence, like other women with any ambition, Gabrielle was faced with “a choice as dramatic as it
was contrived: between retaining the prestige of their femininity, which left them at the mercy of their men; and renouncing it for the sake of man’s autonomy… which set them adrift in an environment hostile both psychologically and economically to emancipated women.”2

  The constant stream of visitors to Royallieu brought a cheerful mix of aristocratic sportsmen, stars of the turf, actresses, singers and demimondaines — young people whose lives revolved around entertainment of one kind or another. Etienne’s friends were strongly discouraged from showing up at Royallieu with their wives. Mistresses were preferred. But if Etienne’s life appeared a carefree round of riding to hounds and house parties, this omits an important detail: in many ways, he wasn’t a carefree soul at all. While his love of playing the fool went in tandem with an aversion to emotional responsibility, in fact, a vein of absolute commitment ran seamlessly through his life: Etienne was dedicated to horses. He knew them, loved them, understood their foibles, their worth, and was capable of fierce competitiveness about them too. When purchasing one or taking part in a race, he was a formidable adversary. As a result, his rise to prominence as both trainer and gentleman rider was rapid, and would eventually make him one of the most famous horse breeders in France. His obsession also left Etienne prepared to live in the country, something most young men of his status were loath to do.

  The country house to which he brought Gabrielle was a handsome one. First a hunting lodge for kings, it became La Maison du Roy and, eventually, simply Royallieu. A priory, then an abbey, it was extended and altered over time. Finally, the château became a stud farm, which perfectly suited Etienne’s needs. Royallieu was close to the Chantilly racetrack, in the province of Oise, regarded as the best purebred training ground in France.