The Chanel Sisters by Judithe Little

Author:Judithe Little
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graydon House Books
Published: 2020-10-22T15:23:33+00:00

FORTY-ONE

Those first few weeks since I’d come to Paris, as Gabrielle and I worked on the hats, we’d sing the old caf’conc songs from Moulins at the top of our lungs. The femme de ménage who came with the apartment would look up from waxing the floor as if we were crazy, which only made us sing louder. As part of our performance, we often wore kitchen pots or bowls on our heads to test out the shapes for possible new hat styles. If Gabrielle decided she liked one, I’d use it as a form to mold buckram, dampening it, then securing it tightly with a string until it dried. The hat form makers had recently gone on strike. She was lucky to have me.

Gabrielle also loved to talk about Boy.

“Boy says idleness weighs on intelligent women, and that’s why it’s important I have something to do,” Gabrielle told me as we cut ribbons and fluffed feathers in the dining room.

I’d never heard my sister refer to herself as intelligent before. Usually, an “intelligent” woman was considered a bas bleu, a bluestocking, frumpy, unattractive. “I thought men don’t like intelligent women.”

“Boy does. The strangest thing is he listens to me, Ninette, as if he thinks I have something to say.”

I’d heard he was a playboy. He traveled often to manage his shipping business and was said to be a man who had mistresses in every port. But Gabrielle seemed to like the challenge. I knew her thinking. Why would any woman want to be with a man no one else wanted?

“When I first saw him,” she continued, “I knew. I knew I would love him, and he’d love me. He doesn’t think of me as a pet, like Etienne. Etienne cares only about horses. But Boy is an intellectual. He cares about so many things. He studies mathematics and art and Hinduism. He believes in humanism and making the world a better place. And I embarrass him because all I know is Decourcelle. He wants to teach me, to show me things. He gives me books to read by philosophers like Nietzsche and Voltaire and poets like Baudelaire.”

My sister didn’t take direction from anyone, but it appeared Boy Capel was the one person she’d listen to. Boy was making her into Something Better. I’d only seen him that one time at the hippodrome in Vichy, and I was eager to meet him. When he came by the garçonnière, and I did, I saw right away: Gabrielle, who worshipped elegance above all else, had found the male epitome. Boy was smooth, handsome, a perfect dresser, with manners, kindness, a man who gave the impression of having important things to do but time to listen as well.

I too wanted to be Something Better. But when Gabrielle lent me one of Boy’s books on something called Free Masons, I couldn’t read more than half a page. It was so dull.

Luckily I had Celestine, an artist Gabrielle Dorziat had taken under her wing and brought along on her visits to the Boulevard Malesherbes.

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