Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  Despite this declaration of love, and Misia’s undoubted affection and admiration for Reverdy, the two did not embark upon an affair. Instead, the poet’s passion was transferred to Chanel, and Misia appeared to offer her tacit approval, urging her friend to spend time alone with him, and to read his poetry, in much the same way that Sert had encouraged Chanel to discover the glories within the museums and art galleries of Italy. Whatever else Misia’s intentions, perhaps she recognised in Reverdy the contrasts that were in some ways reflected in Chanel; these two outsiders drawn to Paris, both of them compelled by its sophisticated society, yet also suspicious of it. Reverdy had arrived in Paris in 1910, not long after Chanel established herself there, and although he was prone to silence, as she was (at least at the beginning of her career), he also had tumultuous outbursts. ‘I was born to be a boxer, a bullfighter,’ he said to Picasso. ‘But thank God poetry, like painting, is a man’s work and tough, a violent combat that is decided in one single round.’

  As contradictory and contrary a character as Chanel, Reverdy also declared that, to be a poet, one must be ascetic. His dictum – both for himself, and for the Surrealists influenced by him – was ‘to work on an empty stomach and in a cold state’; the opposite approach to that advocated by Rimbaud (‘the systemic disorder of all the senses’). In order to create, said Reverdy, an artist must retain lucidity, ‘to seize the object on the wing’; and there is a faint echo of his words in Chanel’s subsequent maxim: ‘Fashion is not simply a matter of clothes; fashion is in the air, borne upon the wind …’ She did not see herself as an artist like him – she repeatedly described herself as an artisan who ‘works with her hand’ – and yet her precision and commitment to her craft was reminiscent of Reverdy. Like him, she seized what she saw ‘on the wing’, making the elusive into something material. But unlike him, she became rich in doing so; and while material gain eluded Reverdy, he also eluded Chanel. She had left the abbey of Aubazine far behind her, even though its shadows and purity were incorporated into her work; but she could not keep her poet beside her. Reverdy, a committed Catholic convert, fled from Paris to the abbey of Solesmes in 1925, needing its silence and austerity in order to write; his wife joined the adjacent nunnery, where she remained for the rest of her life. He spent two years at Solesmes without seeing anyone outside the monastic community; then returned to Paris for a short time in 1927, before disappearing once again to the abbey, where he lived as a recluse until his death in 1960.

  At some point, before his withdrawal from Paris to the abbey, Reverdy and Chanel fell in love, with Misia as an observer, almost a third party to their secret relationship, like Reverdy’s silent wife. He gave Chanel his books, inscribing his name, and hers, in the frontispieces of slim volumes that she treasured alongside her famous collection of diamonds and pearls; and he continued to present her with his first editions, sometimes his manuscripts, with handwritten dedications, from 1921 to his death in 1960. (On the 1926 manuscript of La Peau de l’homme, he wrote to her, ‘You do not know, dear Coco, that light is best set off by shadow.’)

  She gave him her own words, too, a selection of aphorisms that she paid him to polish to perfection. Reverdy was dependent on her financial support, and she may have offered him this task as a tactful way of providing him with some vital income; and yet he also remained independent from her, in an unspoken balancing act, which pivoted upon Chanel’s respect for him. Long after their affair ended, she continued to express her admiration for Reverdy, celebrating his writing as consummate artistry, and expressing her dismay that others had eclipsed him in fame and worldly success. When he advised her to read François de La Rochefoucauld’s seventeenth-century Maximes, she did so, and strived to emulate his concision in epigrams of her own, refined and reworked by Reverdy:

  ‘If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent their growing.’

  ‘Luxury is a necessity that begins where necessity ends.’

  ‘True generosity means accepting ingratitude.’

  ‘To disguise oneself is charming: to have oneself disguised is sad.’

  ‘For a woman, to deceive makes only one kind of sense: that of the senses.’

  In doing so, Chanel was not his muse, nor simply his patron, but they did participate together in a form of artistic enterprise, beyond the usual conception and formations of a love affair. She used Reverdy to hone herself, in her ongoing act of self-creation, so that she dazzled alongside the Divine Misia (perhaps drawing strength from the knowledge that her polished sheen would be offset by the simplicity of her trademark little black dress). The oddness of this collaboration did not detract from its power – the self-made woman drawing upon a man who sought to lose himself in faith; a couturiere for whom fashion was a religion, falling in love with a poet for whom mysticism and materialism combined in the striking imagery of his work. ‘Jewels are caught in the lyre/Black butterflies of delirium’, he wrote in ‘Le Coeur tournant’, a poem first published in 1931, although possibly written before then (‘Les bijoux sont pris dans la lyre/Les papillons noirs du délire …’). And while ‘Toujours l’amour’ – a poem that appeared at the beginning of 1927, at the same time as Reverdy resurfaced in Paris – is generally interpreted as an otherworldly exploration of the love of God, it contains within it the gleam of the worldly, a proliferation of light, in a luminous vision of diamonds and pearls. (‘Sous les lueurs des plantes rares/les joues roses des cerisiers/les diamants de la distance/Et les perles dont elle se pare.’)

  Reverdy wrote in the shadow of the abbey of Solesmes, his faith in God sometimes shaken by doubt; Chanel worked beneath the dazzle of her crystal chandeliers, her faith in herself occasionally receding into the darkness at the corner of the room. The contemporary writer Paul Auster has observed, ‘Reverdy’s strange landscapes, which combine an intense inwardness with a proliferation of sensual data, bear in them the signs of a continual search for an impossible totality. Almost mystical in their effect, his poems are nevertheless anchored in the minutiae of the everyday world; in their quiet, at times monotone music, the poet seems to evaporate, to vanish into the haunted country he has created. The result is at once beautiful and disquieting, as if Reverdy had emptied the space of the poem in order to let the reader inhabit it.’

  Open one of the faded leather-bound volumes of Reverdy’s poetry that still stand on a bookshelf in Chanel’s private apartment, and she seems close at hand, hovering in that mysterious white space between the poet’s enigmatic lines, shimmering for an instant. Then she vanishes, as you leaf through the pages; but perhaps once upon a time she found herself there, a perfect composition of darkness and light, just as a reader or writer would have wished her to be.

  NUMBER FIVE

  ‘Paul Valéry used to say: “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.” Well, he was quite right.’ Coco Chanel, interviewed in 1965.

  ‘Spray yourself wherever you might be kissed. A woman who overdoes it with perfume has no future, for she will only offend her friends and admirers.’

  Chanel quoted by Pierre Galante in Les Années Chanel Coco was always contrary, which is the first thing to remember when telling the story of Chanel N°5; a story that is a fairy tale, yet also the solid foundation of her empire. N°5 was multiplied a million times over – and more, far more – in a dizzying proliferation that made Coco Chanel rich and recognised around the world, so that her name became a brand, and her face as famous as her logo. But in the beginning, before the beginning … Where do you begin with once upon a time?

  You could start in the summer of 1920, when Coco Chanel met Ernest Beaux, an expert perfumer who had established a laboratory in Grasse in the south of France. She had been introduced to him by her Russian lover at the time, the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, who knew Beaux as the perfumer to the tsars. If anyone had scent in his blood, it was Beaux: he was born in Moscow in 1881 to a French father and German mother, and his elder brother Edward was the administrator of Rallet, the leading perfume and s
oap manufacturers in Russia, and suppliers to the Imperial Court, with factories employing hundreds of workers. At 17, Ernest began his career as a laboratory assistant at Rallet, rising to become the company’s technical director by 1907, a position that he held until the revolution in 1917 forced him to leave. He had already achieved great success in Russia with the launch of his ‘Bouquet of Napoleon’ in 1912, created to mark the centenary of the Battle of Borodino. If this seems a curious inspiration for a perfumer, given that it marked a blood-drenched and short-lived victory for the Napoleonic troops in their invasion of Russia, Beaux nevertheless received widespread acclaim for his work.

  And Beaux himself was a soldier, as well as a chemist, a combination that might explain his scented celebration of Napoleon; or perhaps his Bouquet was suggestive of his French ancestors, or the alliance between Russia and France, renewed in 1893. At any rate, he served in France during the First World War, from 1914 to 1917, and was awarded the prestigious Croix de Guerre and Legion d’Honneur for his bravery by the French authorities. After the Revolution, when Rallet was seized by the Bolsheviks, Beaux was commissioned by the British to join the White Russian army as a counter-intelligence officer, and travelled to the far north, to Arkhangelsk (a stronghold of the anti-Bolshevik White Army, supported by Allied Entente forces). Yet again, his courage was honoured: this time with the British Military Cross.

  In 1919, he finally arrived in the south of France, to be reunited with a number of former colleagues from Rallet who had set up a new operation in La Bocca, near Cannes. When Beaux started work in the laboratory, he was determined to re-create a note of perfume that he had encountered during his military service; and in order to do so, experimented with aldehydes, the new chemical compounds that were to become an essential ingredient of Chanel N°5. According to a speech that Beaux gave in 1946, he remembered the precise circumstances of the origin of the scent, as well as the specific note that had inspired it: ‘I’ve been asked some questions about the subject of the creation of N°5. When did I create it? In 1920 exactly, upon my return from the war. I had been part of the campaign in a northern region of Europe, above the Arctic Circle, during the midnight sun, where the lakes and rivers exuded a perfume of extreme freshness. I retained this note and recreated it, not without difficulty, for the first aldehydes I was able to find were unstable and unreliable. Why this name? Mademoiselle Chanel, who had a very fashionable couture house, asked me for some perfumes for it. I came to present my creations, two series: N° 1-5 and 20-24. She chose a few, one of which was N°5. “What should it be called?” I asked. Mademoiselle Chanel replied, “I’m presenting my dress collection on the 5th of May, the fifth month of the year; let’s leave the name N°5.” This number would bring her luck.’

  That’s the story, anyway; and it gave rise to the fable that Chanel N°5 was also launched on 5th May – a pleasing tale, for which there is an unfortunate lack of evidence. Nor is there any proof of the equally pervasive legend that the design for the geometric bottle-top was inspired by the outlines of Place Vendôme, upon which view Mademoiselle had gazed with Dmitri from her suite at the Ritz. All that is known for certain is that the scent went on sale in 1921. But further speculation has run along these lines: that having been taught the precepts of theosophy by Boy Capel, Chanel would have known the numerological significance of the number five, as representative of the fifth element – the legendary quinta essentia of the alchemists; the Classical quintessence of which the cosmos is made. No matter whether or not these precepts can be directly linked to the five-sided stars in the paved mosaic in the corridor of Aubazine, or to her astrological birth sign of Leo, the fifth sign of the zodiac, the number was said to be etched in Chanel’s psyche, embedded in her subconscious like the stones of the abbey at Aubazine. Together, these supposedly occult components formed a myth as enduring as it is alluring (and after all, myth is as important an ingredient in Chanel N°5 as aldehydes).

  But if Gabrielle Chanel believed in magic, it was more likely to be of her own making. Towards the end of her life, when she talked to her friend Claude Delay, Chanel often mentioned her invention of N°5 – her creation, no one else’s. In Delay’s retelling of the story, Chanel had gone to the south of France to escape from her grief over Capel’s death. ‘She took refuge on the Cote d’Azur where, breathing in essences and the fields of roses, she invented the perfume – N°5 – which was to obsess the world. The name was a chance, not premeditated. She called it that because it was the fifth bottle and five is a pretty number.’ Even so, while five may have had no particular meaning to Chanel, at least not in this particular account, the perfume that came to represent the future also had links to her past. Chanel spoke to Delay about the potent scent of her childhood memories: of the smell of lye soap at her aunts’ house, of their linen cupboard fragrant with herbs; of the polished floors and furniture, in a place where everything was clean. There might not have been enough love to go round, but there was something good in her aunts’ scrubbed purity; and later, when she met Emilienne d’Alençon and other courtesans, Chanel was reminded of what was also good in them. ‘I liked Emilienne d’Alençon a lot. She smelled clean.’

  Thus cleanliness went hand in hand with goodness (if not godliness), and also bestowed a curious kind of status on women, as well as summoning up the past for Chanel. She told Claude Delay that ‘the sense of smell is the only one that is still instinctive. It lives on nostalgia, the subconscious.’ And yet nostalgia was not sufficient reason to continue to wear a particular scent; it was important to choose one’s own, rather than have it chosen; it was a statement of individuality and of independence. ‘Women wear the perfumes they’re given as presents,’ she said to Delay. ‘You ought to wear your own, the one you like. If I leave a jacket behind somewhere, they know it’s mine. When I was young, the first thing I’d have done if I had any money was buy some perfume. I’d been given Floris’s Sweet Peas – I thought it was lovely, country girl that I was. Then I realised it didn’t suit me.’

  Many years later, in Ernest Beaux’s laboratory, Chanel sniffed out what did suit her, and declared it to be ‘a perfume such as has never before been made – a woman’s perfume with a woman’s scent’. N°5 was, in some ways, revolutionary, in its blend of the natural and synthetic, thanks to Beaux’s discovery of the importance of aldehydes in enhancing and stabilising ingredients such as jasmine, a key component in Chanel N°5, along with ylang-ylang, neroli, May rose, sandalwood and Bourbon vetiver. Perfumes had traditionally consisted of a single yet heavy floral note, but Beaux came up with the scent that Chanel sought, in her quest to define herself as a designer committed to modernity; a formula that she described a ‘a bouquet of abstract flowers’. And she also added another element to Beaux’s expert chemistry: an understanding of the alchemy of desire. The evening after she had chosen the sample of N°5 in Beaux’s laboratory, Chanel took a vial of the scent to the most fashionable restaurant in Cannes. As she dined with Beaux and a few friends, she surreptitiously sprayed the women who passed their table with the new perfume. ‘You’ve got to be able to lead them by the nose,’ she told Delay, many years later, having done so with her original customers for N°5, spraying it in her boutiques in Deauville, Biarritz and Paris, and proffering little samples before production was underway, underplaying her commercial ambitions, but nevertheless suggesting to her best clients that they were in on the secret long before anyone else.

  By the mid-Thirties, when Chanel befriended Bettina Ballard (then a young American editor working in the Paris office of Vogue), she related the tale of N°5 without mentioning Ernest Beaux, despite the fact that he had become technical director of Les Parfums Chanel in 1924. ‘She concocted Chanel N°5 when she was trying to recover in the south of France in the Twenties from the accidental death of Boy Capel,’ wrote Ballard.

  ‘A maker of flower essences at Grasse let her make her own mixture to divert her. When she tested her fifth attempt, she picked up the plain bottle in which she had m
ixed it, wrote a number 5 in her own hand, and said, “Now I will sell this,” and she did, all over the world. It was the perfume that started what the couturiers call their “insurance”; that is, money that they make from lending their famous couture names to a perfume that they don’t have to change every season the way they do their clothes.’

  In fact, Chanel was not the first couturière to sell scent (her old rival, Paul Poiret, had launched Les Parfums de Rosine a decade before her, naming it after his daughter), but she was the first to lay claim to it. And her claims were legendary: that she could smell the hands that picked the flowers she was given; that she could recognise the unique scent of the forest of Compiègne from a single branch of pine, years after she had ridden there with Etienne Balsan. And she could smell dirt, she said, even in the most glamorous of salons, and was repelled by it. ‘I was appalled,’ she told Morand, recalling her first visit to Misia’s apartment, filled with spun glass and sequins. ‘It smelt of filth downstairs; there was no surface upon which you could use a duster or apply any polish …’

  But Misia had a different version of events, in which she was a catalyst for Chanel’s first perfume, if not quite a muse (and dirt had nothing to do with its germination). According to an unpublished chapter in Misia’s memoir, ‘Coco always had a genius for discovering the essence of something gigantic in the most minuscule idea suggested to her. If the grain of sand you offered her had some interesting quality, she could turn it into gold. I should like to give an example that is almost miraculous.’

  Misia’s stony – a fairy tale within a fairy tale – began with her claim to have met Lucien Daudet, secretary to the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III. Daudet was wearing the empress’s scent, Violettes Imperiales, and seemed like a man possessed. ‘He had been diligently going through the papers of the beautiful Eugénie, to whom he was devoted, body and soul. He seemed literally embalmed in the perfume of the woman whose grace illuminated the Second Empire. “Just imagine, Misia,” he said, “I discovered an astonishing beauty formula among the letters of our dear great empress. The faith she had in it is my best guarantee of its effectiveness. But you’d better read this document and tell me as a friend, since we’re alone, if it wouldn’t be possible to sell this lost formula to some cosmetics house – without revealing the name of the illustrious person who used it to keep her beauty alive.” With these words he handed me a sheet of paper …’