The End of an Epoque

In the period preceding the First World War, there appears to have been a widespread unwillingness to face the likelihood of conflict. And the closer the impending catastrophe approached, the more a striking acceleration of luxury and high living could be observed. Paul Morand’s fictional hero Lewis says to Irène, “For myself I come with limited responsibility, and… I accept none out of pessimism.”¹ Irène replies that this is the easy way out, telling Lewis that “we don’t have any worries if we think the world is meaningless.”²

On August 3, 1914, the opulence of the grand style was overnight curtailed. The West launched into a conflict that would leave it irrevocably altered. Germany had declared war on France; the First World War had begun.

On the following day, Britain entered the fray by declaring war on Germany. Twelve days later, Arthur Capel was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Cavalry Division. The contrasting sentiments with Lewis’s declaration above and the fortitude and commitment typifying Arthur’s army service were both echoed in the words he would later write: “Let us get the strong words of Guillaume le Taciturne set firmly in our mind: ‘One does not have to hope in order to undertake, nor does one have to succeed in order to persevere.’”³

By August 24, Arthur had joined the British Expeditionary Force, under orders from General Edmund Allenby (Cavalry Division), which was taking part in the retreat from the Battle of Mons. Mons was the first major action by the British army against the Germans, but while a relatively minor battle in itself, its position meant that it took on considerable significance. Although initially planned as a simple tactical withdrawal, what came to be known as the long retreat lasted two weeks and involved considerable loss of life, as a disciplined German army followed in relentless pursuit.

On September 4, the French commander in chief, Joseph Joffre, recognized a major German tactical error and halted the retreating Franco-British armies at the river Marne, only thirteen miles from Paris. Rallying, they overcame the Germans in the first battle of the Marne. When the German commanding officer, General Helmuth von Moltke, heard that his army might now be destroyed, he suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be relieved of his command. By September 12, it was all over and the Allies had won the battle. This transformation of a virtual rout into a victory became known as the Miracle of the Marne. But the casualties and deaths in an onslaught where more than two million men fought and almost one hundred thousand had died were nothing compared to the maiming, death and destruction that would follow in the events of this war. Meanwhile, this battle set the stage for four years of stalemated trench warfare along the length of the western front.

On enlisting, Arthur had been sent, with another Englishman, to join a small intelligence unit under George de Symons Barrow. Accompanying “the long retreat,” Arthur and his intelligence comrades went back and forth from the front line to their commanding officers, gleaning as much as they could about the relentless Germans advancing behind them. Intelligence work was difficult, often carried out at night and frequently very dangerous, as revealed by the two anecdotes below. George Barrow wrote that while retreating with the army:

The division crossed the Oise at Compiègne [close to Etienne’s château], and occupied high ground… We were assured that all the bridges… had been demolished. I went at night with Capel to make sure that no… Germans had got across in boats by other means.

We were very hungry, and going into a baker’s shop… got a newly baked loaf of bread… I found a room in a workman’s cottage and Capel found one next door. It was 1 a.m. Very tired, I took off my belt, haversack and sword and threw myself fully dressed on the bed. At 4 a.m. the owner… came to my room and said: “The Prussians are in the village…” I replied: “Impossible: all the bridges are broken.” He said, “It’s true, and I’m off ”… I did not believe him, and was desperately in need of sleep… Then I thought, “It’s not good enough to run the risk…” and dragging myself off the bed went to the door. I heard some shots and bangings at doors… at the far end of the street. At the same moment, Capel rushed out. I got my belt and haversack, left my sword — a useless weapon — behind in my hurry and we jumped into the car, which was facing the wrong way. A thick mist had come up from the river and the engine was cold. It seemed like hours before Capel could start it. Then the car had to be turned in the narrow street. Meanwhile, the door bangings drew closer and closer. At last the car was got round the corner, a hundred yards or less away. One or two shots whizzed close over our heads before we were hidden in the mist.⁴

Before the great retreat finally came to an end, near Paris, Arthur and Barrow experienced another narrow escape when setting off one night in Arthur’s car to discover the proximity of the enemy. As they drove out of a wood, to their horror a German brigade crossed the road only three hundred yards ahead of them and joined up with several regiments in the fields. Incredulous at not being spotted, Arthur backed stealthily into the wood and turned the car around. Barrow wrote:

I had my eyes fixed on the enemy during the process of reversing and turning and was equally astonished and relieved that not a single German looked in our direction. At last we got around and away to safety. Had we been half a minute earlier or the German brigade half a minute later, we must have met and Capel and I would have seen no more of the war.⁵

In fact, Arthur and Barrow would both live to see a good deal more of this war.

Behind the lines, forced as the revelers at Deauville had been to face this thing that so many of them had assiduously avoided, people panicked and left the resort. On the fourteenth day of that momentous August, normally the height of the season, Elisabeth de Gramont described how The Normandy, the hotel where Gabrielle and Arthur had stayed, was half closed and The Royal was going to become a hospital. Luxury shops were closing, rental agencies were empty and foreigners were disappearing: “Cars are requisitioned, the price of petrol is going up, and horse-drawn cars demand a hundred francs to go up the hill… Some prudent people… are hiding little bags of gold in their corsets… others are buying petrol.”⁶

When Paris had almost been cut off by the encircling German army, Joseph Joffre was unable to ensure the safety of the capital and advised the government to retreat to Bordeaux. At that point, up to a third of Paris fled too, and Deauville was once again packed with people as the haut monde flocked to the safety of the hotels and their villas. A number of country properties had been occupied or destroyed in the wake of the advancing German army. One of these was Etienne Balsan’s château, Royallieu, occupied by German staff officers. Retaken during the Battle of the Marne, the Royallieu barracks was then converted into a frontline hospital.

Before Arthur left for the front, he had instructed Gabrielle to remain in Deauville; his instinct was that she should keep her boutique open. Meanwhile, luxury, extravagance, conspicuous consumption of any kind suddenly didn’t seem appropriate, and practicality became the order of the day. A number of the socialites remaining in Deauville volunteered at the hospital, and a pared-down, unostentatious wardrobe became a practical necessity. Yet while many of the socialites claimed they had “lost everything,” they also spent that strange summer living a life as luxurious as the great resort was able to provide. Unaware that this season was the last of an époque, intimations of change nonetheless led many a wealthy woman to Gabrielle’s door to equip herself with those unfussy clothes she had originally designed with sport and leisure in mind.

And in spite of shortages of material, Gabrielle continued using her initiative and quickly reaped the rewards: her salon was always busy. Mustering her growing number of assistants, she had them sew and sew, and later said, “I was in the right place, an opportunity beckoned. I took it… What was needed was simplicity, comfort, neatness: unwittingly I offered all of that.”⁷ Elisabeth de Gramont, whose stylish unconventionality made her one of Gabrielle’s early devotees, remembered the tremendous activity in the boutique and the new somberness of women’s wardrobes. Gabrielle recalled the races, just before the war, and said she hadn’t realized that

I was witnessing the death of luxury, the passing of the nineteenth century; the end of an era. An age of magnificence but of decadence, the last reflection of a baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-embellishment had stifled the body’s architecture… woman was no more than a pretext for riches, for lace, for sable for chinchilla, for materials that were too precious.⁸

She decried the Belle Epoque tendency to transform women into “monuments of belated and flamboyant art,” and deplored the trains of insipid pastel dresses dragging in the dust. Referring to the decadence of those years, she remembered how there was so much wealth that it had become “as ordinary as poverty.” And that little had changed since the 1870s, “with its frenzy of easy money, of habits of straying from one style to another, of romantically taking its inspiration from every country and all periods, for it lacked a way of expressing itself honestly.”⁹

One of those Gabrielle had in mind here was Paul Poiret. His hugely simplified designs had signaled a fundamental redirection of women’s clothing, so that now it was cut along straight lines and constructed from rectangles of fabric. Nonetheless, there were significant aspects of Poiret’s work that Gabrielle would resolutely eschew. First, Poiret looked with nostalgia to the past. Second, he was seduced by the romance of the exotic, at that moment involving the fantasy of Russia, central to the vogue for all things oriental. Gabrielle recognized that what both these strands of thought — the exotic and indulgence in the past — were doing was hiding from aspects of the present. While Poiret had embraced his radical times and believed he was intent upon liberating women, in his costume “fantasies,” they still played out a version of the old stereotype: woman subjugated and presented as more ideal than real. His harem pants were a perfect case in point.

In the realm of clothing at least, Gabrielle was no longer interested in fantasy. Embracing what she saw as the reality of her times, she not only gave women practical, stylish clothes but also made them fashionable. And at the end of that hectically busy summer at Deauville, the first of the war, Gabrielle had earned the huge sum of two hundred thousand gold francs. (In today’s currency, this is worth approximately ₤560,000.)

When he could, Arthur rushed back from the front to maintain his business interests and visit Gabrielle and his friends. But life was entirely altered. The majority of his contemporaries were paring down their lives and feeling diminished by the war. To begin with, aside from old men and boys, much of the male population had been packed off to fight. Paris felt unrecognizable:

Rid of its bad ferments, [it] had become popular, fraternal again: we were humble little things at the mercy of events: the stock exchange was closed, theaters were shut, the Parliament was away, luxury cars were in Bordeaux… the streets of Paris have become great village streets again, where one communicates from door to door.¹⁰

But Gabrielle’s and Arthur’s entrepreneurial spirit — some would call it opportunism — made what they had to offer very salable, and their response to their times united them still further. While Gabrielle sold her simple, stylish and appropriately sober clothes, Arthur used his fleet of ships to become one of France’s major providers of coal, then one of the most crucial resources in the running of a country and a war.

By the end of November 1914, Arthur was based in Flanders with his fellow officers at the Château de la Motte au Bois. Its châtelaine, the Baroness Clémentine de la Grange, noted how appropriate Arthur’s first billet, with two lady milliners, had been, saying that it was “not for the first time… that millinery has played a part in his life.” As a close friend of the baroness’s nephew, another intelligence officer, Odon de Lubersac, Arthur was invited to stay at the château.

Shortly before Christmas, Arthur’s commander, General Allenby, offered to have her driven to visit her other son at Reims. She later recorded:

I started in Captain Capel’s car, driven by a Parisian ex-jeweller, his chauffeur. Captain Capel and Lieutenant Pinto asked permission to accompany me to Paris. When passing through the village of Croisettes… I stopped a few minutes to see my nephew, Renauld. As I went back to the car I saw a crowd round it. Boy Capel was already seated by the chauffeur, smoking his pipe, with an expression on his face that aroused my suspicions. Lieutenant Pinto and I, before getting into the car, tried to fathom the reason for the villagers’ curiosity. At last we discovered on the back of the car, which was thick with dust, that the wretched Boy had written with his finger, “Honeymoon!” I was the joke of the village!

Capel, though of a most solemn and serious appearance, cannot resist a joke, good or bad. ¹¹

Meanwhile, along with many of the Deauville beau monde, Gabrielle returned to the capital with Antoinette, leaving a saleswoman in charge of the salon. While the war hadn’t reached the rapid conclusion that had been predicted, people realized that, for the moment, Paris wasn’t going to be overrun.

In the meantime, Adrienne had returned to Vichy, apprehensive for the safety of her lover, Maurice de Nexon, now fighting at the front; many had already lost loved ones. Two more deaths, while probably leaving Gabrielle relatively unmoved, nonetheless bore a significant connection to her past. Her grandparents had come to their final rest: Adrienne’s mother, Angélina, had died a year earlier, and now Adrienne had her father, Henri-Adrien, buried beside her at Vichy.

In those months following the initiation of hostilities, with Gabrielle’s greater financial autonomy she took on the responsibility for her little nephew, André Palasse, whose mother, Julia-Berthe, had committed suicide so gruesomely. Gabrielle would always feel a particular tenderness for André, and while spending Christmas with Arthur, she decided to send the boy away to school in England. At Arthur’s suggestion, Gabrielle chose his old prep school, Beaumont, so as to teach André English and to begin equipping him with the manners and the bearing of a gentleman.

Following another six months of war, with vast numbers of casualties, there was still no progress along the western front. It has often been suggested that it was the appalling experience of trench warfare that forced the various armies to move almost overnight into the age of technological warfare. By 1915, planes were flying reconnaissance, and flamethrowers, hand grenades and the terrifying poison gas were regularly being used. What Gabrielle called the “age of iron” had well and truly begun.

Early in the summer of 1915, on a brief respite from the front, Arthur took Gabrielle for a few days to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, just south of Biarritz and close to the Spanish border. Originally a fishing port, Saint-Jean-de-Luz had been transformed into a seaside retreat for the wealthy. For those satiated with the large-scale glamour of the more substantial luxury playground Biarritz, there was the culturally more select Saint-Jean-de-Luz. It received an eclectic mix of artistic, aristocratic and literary visitors. Here, embracing a moment of ordinary tranquility in extraordinary times, Gabrielle and Arthur were to be found one day picnicking on the beach with friends.

Gabrielle wore her hair caught back in a headband and a dark bathing costume. Unrecognizable as a swimsuit today, it looks more than anything like a touchingly modest above-the-knee dress. In 1915, however, there was no question: a young woman wearing one of these outfits was rather risqué. Sea bathing had become an important pastime for the French upper classes in the first decade or so of the century, but it was still only intrepid women who took part in this activity.

There are very few images of Gabrielle and Arthur together, but in a handful of recently discovered photographs from that day on the beach, we catch a glimpse of their convivial picnic on the sand. In one, they are with the heir to a sugar-refining fortune, Constant Say. In another, a young woman, lying with her face upturned to the sun, is Constant Say’s mistress, the rising-star opera singer Marthe Davelli. Davelli’s artistic success, and the depth of her lover’s purse, meant that a holiday villa was being built for her nearby. In 1915, suntanned skin was the lot of the poor, forced to work in the sun, and sunbathing was regarded as outrageous. Although it is often stated that Gabrielle was the first woman to make a suntan fashionable, in these photographs, we see that her friend Marthe Davelli had already taken to it with enthusiasm. Another of the picnickers is the aging novelist and playwright Pierre Decourcelle, whose suggestive novels Gabrielle had been caught reading in her days at the Aubazine convent.

Early the following year, when Arthur was again back in Paris from the front, the society painter Jacques-Emile Blanche recorded meeting Gabrielle and Arthur at a dinner party. The guests composed an exalted cast, and Gabrielle’s presence is revealing of society’s awareness of her increased status in changing times. She wasn’t simply the striking mistress of the dazzling Boy Capel but was also acquiring her own reputation as a trendsetting woman of means.

Among those at the dinner were Philippe Berthelot, the suave director of political affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the political essayist Henri-Adrien Massis; the smolderingly beautiful comtesse Anna de Noailles, thought by many (first among whom was herself) to be the reigning poet queen of the literary salons; Abbé Mugnier, diarist, indefatigable socializer and profoundly unjudgmental confessor to the haut monde; and the opium-smoking lesbian princess Violette Murat, who loved nothing better than a night out in the downbeat cafés and nightclubs of Montparnasse and Montmartre. Violette Murat was already one of Gabrielle’s clients. While there was to be more than a whiff of snobbery about a dressmaker in society circles for some time to come, Gabrielle emanated character and quietly held her own. Indeed, she would come to count as friends several of those present on that evening.

During the war, the resort of Biarritz remained one of the favored destinations of European royalty. And for all those whom war prevented from reaching the resort, there were just as many who were happy to replace them. They came from across the social spectrum, including black marketeers and those newly rich from speculation, and from countries that were neutral. They were unflagging in their desire to escape from thoughts of war, and Biarritz’s elegant attractions soothed their lurking fears.

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