Sorel’s dinner party would be long forgotten if it hadn’t been recorded by that urbane future novelist the diplomat Paul Morand, who made it his business to attend the numerous Parisian social events during those strange war years. Sorel’s unorthodox guest list included Morand’s boss, Philippe Berthelot, one of the highest-ranking French diplomats; a fashionable artist, the immensely rich and mad Spanish painter José Maria Sert; Sert’s twice-divorced and most unconventional mistress, the Slav patroness and artist’s muse Misia Edwards; the literary gadfly and artist Jean Cocteau; a playboy businessman, Arthur Capel; and his mistress, Gabrielle, a lower-class couturier.

While Morand’s snobberies had him imply he wasn’t at the dinner and refer to Sorel’s unconventional social mix as “preposterous,” he also noted with interest Gabrielle’s presence. Her achievement of a most unusual thing—the advancement of a couturier from “mere” dress-designer status to the drawing rooms of the Parisian elite—fascinated the novelist in Morand. And while he noted that Gabrielle was the least socially significant person at that dinner, he referred to her as “Coco Chanel, who is definitely becoming quite a personage.”

The second matter of note about that evening at Cécile Sorel’s recorded by Morand was that both Cécile and Gabrielle had done an outrageous thing: they had cut off their hair. “In the last few days it has become the fashion for women to wear their hair short. They’re all doing it, Madame Letellier [a mistress to the late Edward VII] and Coco Chanel in the lead, then Madeleine de Foucault, Jeanne de Salverte, etc.”¹

Jean Cocteau told Morand that “this fashion was launched for charitable purposes—that all the cut hair is put together . . . and sold for the benefit of the wounded.” One can only say that this reveals nothing more than how far removed Cocteau was from what these women were thinking. (This we will come to in a later chapter.)

Misia Edwards is traditionally credited as the person who cultivated Gabrielle, the person who expanded her horizons beyond sportsmen and business. This, however, underestimates Gabrielle herself and the position she had already come to inhabit as the mistress of a cultivated man. First, with so little known about Arthur until now, it has been impossible to appreciate the full extent of his influence upon Gabrielle. Second, as Gabrielle would obscure so much detail of this period in her life, a source used repeatedly for information on her meetings with figures of any cultural note is Misia Edwards’s memoir.³ Misia Edwards was an extraordinary woman of remarkable cultural influence, but she was also a breathtakingly self-absorbed one, and her late-life memoir was written as much as anything with a view to signaling her own part in the development and advancement of numerous twentieth-century artists’ careers.

While Misia was completely sincere in her belief that Gabrielle’s role in their times was a highly significant one, she also believed that without her, Misia, the world would not have recognized Gabrielle’s gifts, society would not have welcomed her and she would not have become involved with the artists who were making those feverishly creative times. Misia wrote, “One could say that it is easy to help a beautiful diamond to shine. Still, it was my privilege to help it emerge from its rough state, and—in my heart—to be the first person dazzled by its brilliance.”⁴

Although Misia was not the first to introduce Gabrielle to any kind of culture, what she was the first to do was introduce her to the core of the Parisian avant-garde. Having said that, these artists were inverted snobs of a high order, and even an introduction by the famed Misia Edwards—muse and patron to so many of them—would not have been enough to gain Gabrielle admittance to their circles. Her own personality and originality would almost certainly have led her to them anyway. Unlike Misia, who was invaluable as a muse and patron, Gabrielle had the character of an artist. Her acceptance within the spectrum of the avant-garde came about, above all, because she was recognized as a kindred spirit.

Recalling that evening, in 1916, when she first met Gabrielle, Misia would say:

Misia’s description is borne out in Morand’s novel Lewis et Irène—where Irène bears such a resemblance to Gabrielle—when Morand describes the singular character of his heroine:

When Arthur’s political profile was in the ascendant with the men prosecuting the war, his encouragement and financial backing also continued being a source of stimulation to Gabrielle. But they were also often apart. Arthur was unable to remain faithful, and Gabrielle was becoming more self-reliant.

Arthur was, like so many, apprehensive about the conflict causing the disintegration of social cohesion, and at this point he felt driven to begin his second book. One of the central planks of this work was the new position of women, and he heralded women’s changed lives, rejoicing that their inferiority had been only an “illusion of the other sex.” His own mistress was acquiring a name as a working woman, and with her growing “equality,” she was the perfect example of just what Arthur was espousing.

Taking into consideration Gabrielle’s later confidences to Morand about her relationship with Arthur, Morand’s description of Lewis sometimes being unsettled by his mistress Irène’s drive and self-reliance seems understandable :

For all Arthur’s energetic open-mindedness and forward thinking, believing a thing and acting upon it with any consistency are all too often different. And living with a New Woman was no doubt far harder than writing about one. In practice, Gabrielle’s equality may sometimes have been too challenging.

In her post–Second World War conversations with Paul Morand, she would quote Arthur’s advice to her: “Remember that you’re a woman,” and would add, “All too often I forgot that.”⁸ Arthur’s plea was that Gabrielle be less driven and less cerebral. And Morand has his heroine, Irène, say to Lewis, “Giving up working? You saw, I tried, I cannot remain idle . . . I am an island . . . something simple, isolated, where you cannot live . . . Can we go on living like this? It will tear us apart.”⁹ Although concealing any vulnerability she might feel, Gabrielle had also blossomed and was luxuriating in her new power. Arthur’s words urging her to remember she was a woman would, therefore, have little effect upon her progress. Arthur’s own progress, however, was now to take an unexpected turn. His affairs with other women did not usually unsettle his emotions, but he was about to become absorbed by someone who never forgot for a moment that she was a woman.

The children of the traditional upper classes would be the last to grow up in the old world. And many of the generation now being slaughtered in the war appreciated, however incoherently, that great change was in the air. To give a minor example, Lord Ribblesdale’s privileged daughter, Diana Wyndham, was a volunteer ambulance driver, close to the front lines of battle.

Diana was a tall, slim, blue-eyed girl whose delicate candor was matched by what someone who knew her well described recently as “a kind of naiveté. She was a very sweet person; most feminine until her dying day.”¹⁰ Great loss had revealed early Diana’s self-possession. Her mother had died when Diana was thirteen, then she was widowed in the first month of the war—only seventeen months after her marriage to the Honerable Percy Wyndham—and, by 1915, she had also lost both her brothers.

So unlike Gabrielle, this young woman, with her uncomplicated femininity, brought out the gallant in Arthur Capel, and he had soon visited her near the front. Any discomfort Arthur felt at Gabrielle’s increasing success and independence must have made the delightful young Englishwoman appear all the more seductive.

Arthur’s attraction to Diana Wyndham has characteristically been portrayed as one generated by social ambition alone: his “new” money in union with tradition. The one thing Arthur, or his mistress Gabrielle, could never achieve was Diana Wyndham’s noble heritage. But in Arthur’s long-hidden and recently discovered letters to Diana¹¹ we see that both his sincerity of feeling and his transparency about his doubts are considerably more subtle than pure ambition. In that period of great flux, Arthur longed, like so many others, for some kind of certainty. However obscurely, he saw it in the rootedness Diana and her well-established family appeared to represent.

If, by chance, Diana hadn’t heard of Arthur Capel before they met, she would soon have got wind of his long-standing affair with the ultrafashion-able Coco Chanel. Arthur didn’t hide from Diana that, at thirty-five, he sometimes felt himself world-weary. Yet while he confessed to her that she had reawakened his dormant heart and he no longer wished to stray, a strand of lingering doubt is evident in these letters. He writes:

And then, almost in spite of himself, Arthur displays that note of ambivalence : “Perhaps this is only a mood & will get stale, perhaps it won’t.”¹³ Other letters reveal not only Arthur’s but also Diana’s doubts, and were to become typical of their affair. Above all, for months, Arthur was endlessly torn between Diana and Gabrielle.

He knew Gabrielle was one of the most unusual women he would ever meet. But moving in the most urbane of French circles, Arthur was captivated by Diana’s simplicity. And she, while herself moving easily in London society, where her friends were among the most polished in England, felt more comfortable on an English country estate than mixing with the archsophisticates of Paris. She was wary of the great differences between her own life and Arthur’s, ¹⁴ and her uncertainty was confirmed by friends’ telling her that Arthur was sometimes seen with Gabrielle when she, Diana, was not in Paris. If our knowledge of Gabrielle’s feelings during this period is limited, we do know that Arthur and Diana’s mutual doubts led them several times to call off their liaison. In one particularly poignant letter, he tells her:

While Arthur had returned to Gabrielle and clearly felt unable to renege on whatever promises he had made her, this sad episode was not to be the conclusion of his affair with Diana, and they would return yet again to their seesawing indecision. In the letter perhaps most revealing of Arthur’s philosophy, he wrote:

And while Arthur wished that what he suspected was the “illusion” of his and Diana’s love would be real, Gabrielle was to say to Paul Morand that she’d been having so much fun she had “forgotten about love.” Yet by the time she came to her senses and halted her incessant round of activity for a moment, her intuition told her that something was very wrong. Arthur, meanwhile, rushing from meetings with the military and politicians in France then on to their counterparts in London, made no mention (any more than he normally would have) of his assignations and letters to Gabrielle’s English competitor.

The French president, Raymond Poincaré, had asked Georges Clemenceau, who was then seventy-six, to take over as prime minister in November 1917. Irritable and recklessly brave, Clemenceau had already been prime minister between 1906 and 1909. While disliked by the Right and the Left, he insisted upon unity above all. Temporarily surmounting political differences, he succeeded, as no one else had, in reenthusing his compatriots with the will to fight and win the war. ¹⁷ Upon Clemenceau’s appointment, Arthur immediately sought an audience with him, offering to place his fleet at the service of the French government and to supply the country with coal. Clemenceau accepted Arthur’s offer, their friendship blossomed and Arthur was increasingly called upon to liaise at a high level between the British and the French. Having already gained considerable respect as liaison officer to General Allenby’s Cavalry Corps, alongside Edward Spears he now became (formally) one of the two most important officers liaising between the French and the British governments.

As the floor show got under way, without warning, Bertha Capel and her fellow guests were shocked out of their state of self-absorption by the sudden thump of an explosion that blew in windows and rocked the buildings nearby.

Paris was under fire from one of the huge long-range German cannons (nicknamed Big Bertha), the like of which had never been seen before. Shells followed one another every twenty minutes. A friend of Bertha’s at Gabrielle’s show remembered that at the first cannon shot, “the little emaciated models continued their walk, impassive.” “It is a rather extraordinary thing,” she [Bertha] says, “to watch the show of a mellow spring collection, during which the rhythm of the bombings sets the pace for the models presentation.”¹⁸ The cannons launched their shells on the city from as far away as seventy-five miles. Arriving without warning, the German bombardment could continue for several days at a time. On a particularly successful day, as many as twenty shells might reach Paris. From March to August 1918, they were responsible for the deaths of more than two hundred people and injuries to hundreds more. Their prime objective, however, was psychological. The aim was to weaken Parisian morale.

Meanwhile, the British ambassador, Lord Derby, irritably confided to his diary:

Several of the women then staying at the Ritz came over to Chanel on the rue Cambon—situated just across the way from the hotel’s rear entrance—in search of something appropriate to wear should the shelling take place at night. Taking sudden shelter down in the Ritz’s cellars, what could Gabrielle substitute for their delicate nightgowns? The enterprising Gabrielle brought up and offered the rich refugees a consignment of men’s scarlet pajamas. The dashing young couturier decreed that these were not only acceptable, they were also stylish. She was soon reproducing them in coarse pale silk, and her more bold clients were delighted. “It was very chic, very daring and very new, as pajamas would only really become popular three or four years later, on the Lido at Venice.”²⁰

By the summer of 1918, the Germans had concluded that their only remaining chance of victory was to defeat the Allies before the overwhelming resources of the United States forces could be deployed against them. Meanwhile, Old Tiger, as Clemenceau was now known, traveled from one headquarters at the front to another, haranguing the generals and endearing himself to the troops by hobbling down into trench after trench to rouse and inspire them. He threw out the French commander in chief, Philippe Pétain, and replaced him with Ferdinand Foch. Paris was now bombarded from the air; the distant cannons continued hurling shells into the city, and once more the fighting had almost reached the capital. Again there was an exodus. Those who could went by car, while the rest squeezed onto crowded trains and any other transport they could find.

And while Arthur and Diana vacillated about their feelings for each other, Gabrielle was at the mercy of their uncertainty. Arthur may have gone for periods without seeing Gabrielle, but he found it impossible to give her up.

Between the strenuously hard work and the heartache, Arthur somehow made good progress on his new book. Here, complaining of a neglect of the art of maternity, and the prevalent system of marriages of convenience, he asked, when mothers married off their daughters for wealth, “What becomes of love and virtue in these barters of gold and beauty?” He believed that the natural result of this prison for women was that they turned to adultery, and “discretion replaces virtue.”²¹ Arthur believed that “this conception of marriage is a crime; a dreadful crime against the woman . . . Intelligence, beauty and virtue are the most precious gifts of a race. They all depend on motherhood.” ²² The war was turning Arthur’s thoughts toward the regeneration of society, and thus he was being led to a new estimation of motherhood. And he must, at least partly, have had Diana in mind when he went on to say that “the English aristocracy . . . does not give a dowry to its daughters and leaves it to love to unite its children . . . the future role of women consists of making a Utopia a reality by giving birth to a generation that will be capable of thriving in it.”²³

She had never been an ordinary mistress, for whom the hackneyed old explanations would have to suffice. And while her growing success seemed only to increase her allure, one commentator, imagining that this bold “queen of fashion” must have “some corners of vulgarity where one could detect the common extraction,” found that “yet she is a charming and graceful being. Neither pushing nor servile . . . a cultured and subtle mind.”²⁴ Had the very thing attracting Arthur to Gabrielle in the first place—her difference—become too challenging for him to manage?

In making herself financially independent, even wealthy, Gabrielle had apparently made herself free—and also exposed herself to hurt. And we recall again Arthur’s prophesy to her—“You’re proud, you’ll suffer”—and his realization that thinking he’d given her a plaything, he had in fact given her freedom.²⁵