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Dmitri Pavlovich

The Lost Years | Things That I Should Be and Which I Am Not | A Rich Man’s Game | Captive Mistress | Refashioning Paris | The Rite of Spring | The End of an Epoque | Master of Her Art | The War Bans the Bizarre | Remember That You’re a Woman |


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  1. E-mail: ok@sputnik.kiev.ua, i_s@sputnik.kiev.ua, dmitriy@sputnik.kiev.ua

 

 

On February 9, 1921, not long after Stravinsky had left Paris with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, a young man recorded an evening with Gabrielle at the singer Marthe Davelli’s, with whom Gabrielle and Arthur had picnicked on the beach at Saint-Jean-de-Luz in 1915. Our diarist said of Gabrielle that he “hadn’t seen her for ten years.” Commenting that she “didn’t say a word about Boy Capel,” he said she was a most agreeable companion and was almost unchanged in looks. Gabrielle drove him home, “and we suddenly found ourselves on an amazingly friendly footing.”1

The diarist was Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, grandson of Tsar Alexander II and cousin of Tsar Nicholas II. No previous biographer of Gabrielle has had access to Dmitri Pavlovich’s diaries. But with them, we have been able not only to revise important aspects of their ensuing relationship but also to trace the course of a famed yet mysterious trip they made together not long after their meeting.

At thirty, Dmitri Pavlovich had already experienced a life of great upheaval. His mother had died at his birth and his father’s remarriage, eleven years later, had led to his banishment, so Dmitri and his sister, Marie, were placed with their aunt and uncle. Grand Duke Sergei loved his young charges, but the relationship became strained as they grew older. When this uncle was assassinated by an anarchist’s bomb in 1905, Dmitri was sent to a military academy; he was fourteen. The men he loved — his educational supervisor, his father and the tsar — through personality or circumstance, were all to thwart Dmitri’s need for a man he could unreservedly admire. As an intelligent young patriot, he combined traditionalism with what he saw as open-mindedness. Although wishing to serve his country in some significant way, Dmitri also felt inadequate to the task because of a lack of self-assurance.

In 1916, he was one of those involved in the conspiracy to murder the “holy man” Grigori Rasputin, whose hold over the tsarina had become deplorable. After hours of black farce, the assassins rolled Rasputin up in a curtain, tied it with rope and then dumped him in the river Neva through a hole in the ice. When discovered, Rasputin had survived poisoning and gunshot wounds, finally to die by drowning. Dmitri’s efforts at improving the situation in his country were largely frustrated. Camouflaging his shyness and any depth of character behind his good looks and the persona of a charming playboy, he always found it difficult to be taken seriously.

Rasputin’s murder led to Dmitri’s exile to an army unit on the Persian front. Thus, when most of the Russian royal family — including his father, brother and aunt — was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918, Dmitri was one of those few who escaped the slaughter. Throughout his life, great privilege had served him ill in his loss of every figure of significance, save his sister, Grand Duchess Marie. A life already filled with such loss may have inhibited Dmitri in the formation of close attachments aside from his sister.

Making his way to Britain from Tehran at the end of the war, Dmitri was permitted to take up residence. Here he studied in preparation for his possible future role as tsar. He also continued socializing, with a noted predilection for actresses and ballerinas. Dmitri’s sister described his life before the revolution:

He had had a large fortune with very few responsibilities… unusually good looks coupled with great charm, and he also had been the recognized favorite of the Tsar… there was no young prince in Europe more socially conspicuous than he was, both in his own country and abroad. He walked a golden path… His destiny was almost too dazzling.2

Dmitri’s breathtakingly privileged and yet isolated upbringing had left him badly equipped to make the changes necessary for a successful new life in the West. Like most of his fellow Russian aristocrats, in the revolution Dmitri had lost not only virtually his entire wealth, but he had also lost caste, to a devastating degree.

Marie described the aristocratic émigrés’ social lives: “the atmosphere that settled down around us had almost nothing to do with the people or the interests of the country we were living in; we led an existence apart.”3 All had lost family, and narrowly avoided death. And while they had usually been reduced to near-poverty, they didn’t speak of their losses or “the harrowing tales of our escape from Russia. Everyone tried to make the best of his present situation… We managed even to be gay in a detached, inconsequential sort of way.”4

While Dmitri appeared to have adjusted to his new life, it was as if the energy involved in escaping (and losing) one’s country had left him, like many fellow émigrés, so emotionally reduced that he was unable, really, to begin his life again. Although many were still young, they had effectively withdrawn, living an impoverished version of their old lives. A few even allowed their transformation into celebrity pastiches of their previous selves: modeling clothes for couturiers or film acting, their noble blood touted as the draw. Only recently, Dmitri Pavlovich had turned down a lucrative film contract with Hollywood.

Meanwhile, in 1919, he had arrived in Paris from England, where he had pursued the beautiful forty-two-year-old American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, ex-wife of the Duke of Marlborough. Consuelo Vanderbilt described Dmitri as “an exceptionally handsome man, fair and sleek with long blue eyes in a narrow face, he had fine features, and the stealthy walk of a wild animal, moving with the same balanced grace.”5 But Consuelo quickly thought better of this briefest of liaisons and made a happy marriage to Jacques Balsan. Balsan was the famed aviator elder brother of Etienne, Gabrielle’s lover from Royallieu days.

For many years, it has been said that Gabrielle met Dmitri Pavlovich through Marthe Davelli, at Biarritz, in 1920. Thanks to Dmitri’s diaries,6 we now know that while Gabrielle and Dimitri did indeed meet throught Marthe Davelli, it was in 1921 and in Paris, not Biarritz; and Marthe Davelli’s 1921 dinner was not their first meeting. As Dmitri’s diary records, they had met ten years earlier, in 1911. No doubt this was on one of Dimitri’s periodic visits to his father, Grand Duke Paul, living at Saint-Cloud outside Paris.

Dmitri’s lineage, his gracious manner and fine looks had given him an immediate entrée to the haut monde, and at twenty, in 1911, he was already known for his sympathetic and carefree personality. He and Gabrielle would have met through Arthur’s connections. As a fine horseman — Dmitri represented Russia in the 1912 Olympics — he may also have ridden to polo with Arthur and Etienne when in France.

The most significant aspect of Dmitri’s diaries, however, is its revision of Gabrielle’s relationship with him. What little has been known derives from the older Gabrielle’s fairly jaundiced comments to Paul Morand and others, implying that it was no more than her allowing this handsome young nobleman to bed her. Gabrielle’s comments have successfully concealed from us what Dmitri’s diary reveals: how vulnerable she was at the beginning of their affair.

The day after their meeting at Marthe Davelli’s dinner, Dmitri bumped into Gabrielle and Marthe once again, with what he called “all the old crowd.”7 Following “an amazingly boring dinner” at the Ritz, Dmitri spied Gabrielle dining there, and invited her back to his apartment, where “she remained until four a.m.”8 The next morning, Dmitri’s tennis suffered as a result, then the couple lunched together again. Seeing them together on several occasions, the gossips set to work putting around word of their trysts.

Misia and Diaghilev “adored gossip and had talents for intrigue that were to blossom alarmingly.”9 Misia had rapidly discovered the identity of Gabrielle’s new lover and fired off a spiteful telegram to Diaghilev and Stravinsky in Spain. “Coco is a little shop girl who prefers Grand Dukes to artists,” it read, and Diaghilev famously sent it back by return to Gabrielle, saying that under no circumstances should she now appear in Spain, because Stravinsky wanted to kill her. Gabrielle was incensed at Misia’s telegram, refused to believe her protestations of innocence, and didn’t speak to her for weeks. This episode signaled, definitively, the end of Gabrielle and Stravinsky’s affair.

Gabrielle’s chance meeting with the young duke was thus the unexpected route by which she stepped back from Stravinsky’s emotional fervor. Their affair had been stimulating and life affirming for her, but it had also become something of a burden. Gabrielle’s well-concealed yet underlying state of mourning left her unable, or unwilling, to be involved at Stravinsky’s level of intensity. His jealous rage at her rejection must have been compounded by the knowledge that he had not only been thrown over for a younger fellow Russian, but also by a member of the royal family.

Meanwhile, Gabrielle and Dmitri continued their daily assignations until a week later, when he “stopped by the Ritz to say goodbye,” en route for a few weeks’ stay with friends in Copenhagen. Sir Charles and Lady Lucia Marling had been the ambassadorial couple in Tehran who had looked after Dmitri there in exile. Sir Charles was now British ambassador to Denmark.

After this pleasant trip, Dmitri went to Berlin. There he met with ex-tsarist officers and aristocrats who hailed him as the tsar-in-waiting of a new imperial Russia. Dmitri was rather ambivalent about accepting this role, and claimed that he was taken aback at his reception. He was evidently not a particularly adept tactician, for on returning to Paris he was left berating himself for having cooperated in any way — the Russian press in France and Britain were lambasting him for having put himself forward as pretender to the throne.

One of Dmitri’s relatives, Grand Duchess Victoria, even traveled to the French capital to inform him that it was her husband, Cyril, who was the rightful tsar, and that Dmitri should be “shot as a traitor for having presumed to play such a role.”10 Dmitri was appalled at the vehemence of this faction within the Parisian Russian community, so from this point on he did indeed give up any pretensions to the Russian throne. The episode left him very low, and it was in this state of emotional exhaustion that he met Gabrielle once again.

Always reluctant to reveal his feelings, Dmitri appears to have found it easier to confide in women than in men. He confessed some of his strains to Gabrielle and said that until things calmed down, the best thing would be for him to take a trip to London. His diary records that “as a result of ardent persuasion” from Gabrielle, however, he decided instead to go to “Menton [in the south of France] or Monte Carlo and bask with her in the sun.”11 Gabrielle insisted “so sweetly and touchingly” that she would be making the trip because it would be good for Dmitri. Although he was not entirely without finances, it sat badly with the young man’s conscience that Gabrielle would be the one largely funding this holiday. In the end, however, he allowed himself to be persuaded.

Gabrielle decided she would buy a new car for their expedition. And one is reminded of how her considerable wealth could now guide her decisions. She went with Dmitri to one of the city’s most select car showrooms and after a very brief inspection bought a Rolls-Royce convertible, a Silver Cloud. With Dmitri delighting in how “splendidly” the car drove, they took a trial run to Rouen, stayed the night and returned the next day. They parted but, later that day, Dmitri called in at the Ritz to see Gabrielle and was embarrassed when people thought his face was red because he was drunk. In fact, he was sunburned from the drive in the open-topped car. Dmitri was not impervious to gossip or the fact that a compatriot, who had got wind of his plans, tried to dissuade him from leaving with Gabrielle for the Riviera.

Nevertheless, in a somewhat defiant mood, they secretly set off. This clandestine atmosphere set the tone for the following three weeks. It also dictated the lovers’ initial plan to stay at Menton, where it was unlikely they would meet anyone they knew. As it turned out, the hotel fell well below their expectations; Gabrielle had “horrible nightmares’ and they made for the Riviera Palace at Monte Carlo, one of the most luxurious hotels on the Riviera. Gabrielle’s personal maid and Dmitri’s valet now arrived. The kindly giant Piotr had been Dmitri’s servant for years, serving him devotedly throughout his insecure childhood and youth and then following him into exile in Persia.

Gabrielle and Dmitri soon settled into a routine; where Gabrielle rose late, Dmitri played morning golf, and they joined each other for lunch and then took scenic tours in the open-topped Rolls. En route they often discovered some little church or ancient village, such as the tiny and beautiful Coar-aze, high up in the hills above Nice. At first they ate in their suite of rooms, but growing less wary of being spotted, they graduated to the hotel dining room and then to a couple of restaurants. Gabrielle and Dmitri were both discerning about food, and one of their favorite restaurants was the eminently fashionable Ciro’s, situated in the only part of Monte Carlo as yet regarded as sufficiently fashionable for society. This quarter was within a hundred yards or so of the central Galerie Charles III and the casino, where Gabrielle and Dmitri could be found most evenings; Dmitri was an inveterate gambler, winning — and losing — largessums.

He described how Gabrielle did “everything she could” to draw him out, anxious in case this tranquil life should bore him. To the contrary, the calm rhythms of their routine combined with Gabrielle’s “rare goodness’ soothed Dmitri and revived his state of mind. Although admitting to himself that their relationship was “as strange as can be,” he delighted in Gabrielle’s cheerful companionship, appreciating her “good spirits’ and “surprising sweetness.” And during several weeks in each other’s company, Gabrielle helped Dmitri pull himself together with such success that he wrote, “It would have been impossible to choose a better friend for that moment in time than dearest Coco.”

Dmitri wrote that he was not in love with Gabrielle and that they never discussed anything to do with their future, but he became devoted to her, and was touched by her loving treatment of him. In this way, his diary entries act as a powerful correction to the typical portrayal of this relationship, where Dmitri is the lovesick young nobleman mooning around Gabrielle, the predatory Amazon.

Dmitri’s diary for this period displays a noticeable preoccupation with “discovery” by his peers. And while concerned lest Gabrielle, whom he found “surprisingly observant,” should be troubled by this preoccupation, he consoled himself with the thought that she felt the same way. Despite the greater likelihood of Dmitri’s reputation being compromised more than Gabrielle’s, there was also nothing new in a grand duke’s spending time with his lover. Above all, Dmitri’s reluctance to be spotted with Gabrielle stems from his concern not to be seen as a kept man. Gabrielle’s wealth was now common knowledge, but so was the impoverishment of Russian royalty. The greater mystery is why Gabrielle herself should have feared gossip and “the gaze of acquaintances.”

Gabrielle’s newfound wealth was in part predicated upon the creation of a reputation as a public figure. But while she would never let gossip have any effect upon her affairs, her coyness about being seen with Dmitri may have been related to having her very recent lover, Stravinsky, find out more details of her new liaison. Another explanation for Gabrielle’s apprehension about being spotted with Dmitri could well have been related to her new status. She had become a figure whose life was lived — increasingly, like Dmitri’s — under regular public scrutiny. The last months had left her emotionally exhausted, and the interlude on the Riviera was a moment in which she tried, temporarily, to recapture a life that was private.

When Arthur Capel had told Gabrielle of his plans to marry, it had both reduced her emotionally while also obliging her to move out of his apartment and live alone. Since then, however, she had been schooling herself in the ways of the modern woman, one best described as emancipated. Under the circumstances in which Gabrielle found herself with Dmitri, she was luxuriating in the ability to dictate her own life, enjoying a kind of autonomy that the vast majority of contemporary women couldn’t possibly have contemplated. While remaining an outsider, Gabrielle was now able, if she chose, to live with the freedom of the haut monde, yet without some of its burdens. She had achieved the autonomy of the successful courtesans but with one crucial difference: Gabrielle was now financing herself from work unrelated to whoever was her present lover. She had achieved her goal: she was now genuinely independent.

 

Notwithstanding the vein of sadness coursing through Gabrielle’s life, her natural optimism and vitality were, in the end, unquenchable. Not only did these qualities come to the fore in this interlude with Dmitri Pavlovich but, for the first time, one also notices something else. However vulnerable she might feel and whatever the sensitivity with which she behaved, Gabrielle also had the upper hand. This is not to say that in the past she had simply been a passive female, subject to male whims. Gabrielle’s story in relation to men was never as simple as that. Indeed, when she chose to reveal her charm and charisma, many a man was seduced by it. With all her force of character, Gabrielle remained a very feminine woman who did not, in theory, want to rule any man.

Whatever Dmitri and Gabrielle’s private concerns, their leisurely weeks on the Riviera had been a refuge of order and tranquility for Dmitri and a balm to Gabrielle’s much-troubled spirit. Their holiday had passed off without mishap with the exception of one dramatic event as they drove back to Paris.

When the time came to leave the south, they decided to break up their journey en route to Paris by stopping along the way. With the Rolls-Royce retuned, they planned to drive along the Riviera, turn inland after Marseille and then follow the old road on up to Paris. Dmitri was keeping an eye on the calendar because he wanted to be in the capital in time for his beloved sister’s birthday. Up early on April 27, the travelers were met by unpleasant weather: it was cold and wet, and as they left Monte Carlo, the road was very slippery. Taking the “low road” to Nice and Cannes, Dmitri drove slowly and with great care.

As a result of what he called a “wretched misunderstanding,” they found themselves driving right past the place where Arthur had been killed a year and a half earlier. Dmitri described seeing a cross marking the spot where the accident had taken place. (It has only recently become known that this was erected by Gabrielle.) Dmitri was mortified at this most unfortunate incident, and recorded its dreadful effect upon Gabrielle. She became very quiet, “frightfully melancholy,” and they drove on through the driving rain in complete silence. Meanwhile, as a driver of some experience, Dmitri couldn’t help but find the apparent cause of Arthur’s accident mysterious, noting to himself that not only was the road at that point completely level, there were no ditches alongside it either. Although Dmitri and Gabrielle tried to push the misery of this episode aside, it hung heavily upon them for the rest of the day. On reaching Marseille, they retired for the night very early.

The strength of Gabrielle’s reaction, on seeing once again the place where Arthur had died, reveals how little she had recovered from his loss. As few of us are prepared to expend more than a minimal amount of imagination on the thoughts and feelings of others, taking what they offer us pretty much at face value, almost everyone had chosen to be convinced by Gabrielle’s pose. Her real feelings were hidden behind that great vitality. Long ago, in her miserable childhood, her intelligence and defiance had taught her the habit of self-protection, of revealing herself to almost no one.

Bearing this guardedness in mind, while most had believed her relationship with Arthur was rather insecure, among their inner circle there was an implicit understanding that their union was a profound one. Captivated by Gabrielle’s allure, her knowingness, her intelligence and gaiety, Arthur had also been struck by her seriousness and her sheer breathtaking force, qualities all leavened by her great femininity. But it was that very force, which was making her so successful, that had led to Arthur’s loss of courage and rejection of her. He made, he believed, a simpler choice: Diana — and came to regret it.

Was that the ultimate cause of Arthur’s accident, as he had driven along the Cannes road toward a Christmas with his sister? There was no satisfactory resolution to his dilemma: staying with Diana or going to Gabrielle. Had Arthur’s tiredness at the end of that long journey south been the last factor heightening his overwrought state of mind, so that he brought about his own death? The possibility of his suicide must have occurred to Gabrielle that day when she had sat, weeping, beside the wreck of her dead lover’s car.

 

The following day, Gabrielle and Dmitri left old Marseille behind them. Marveling at Aix-en-Provence, Avignon and Orange, they drove on, reaching Lyon for the night. Next morning, they altered their proposed route, making a long detour to Vichy. The subsequent entries in Dmitri’s diary show that while he was unaware of it, there was actually nothing random about this next leg of their journey. Gabrielle was giving the impression of leaving things to chance; in reality, she had made a plan.

As they left Lyon, the sun shone, and they drove with the Silver Cloud’s roof rolled down. After lunch, they abandoned the major road and drove out “across country.” With the Rolls impressively negotiating the winding road through high and remote terrain, Dmitri noted their frequent stops to admire the drama of the Auvergne landscape, where the peaks are often snow covered. On reaching Vichy, he was less impressed, finding it flat and unattractive. The weather had turned, and the resort was mournful in its dearth of tourists. Thanks to the low season, they met no one there they knew, for which Dmitri was grateful. On a desultory walk around the town, little could he have known that his companion had a clear agenda: she was secretly reliving her youth. As far as we know, Gabrielle hadn’t returned to Vichy since her failed bid for the stage more than fifteen years earlier. How her life had changed.

The next day, she suggested a trip to Thiers, the center of the French cutlery trade since the fifteenth century. She must have had to sell this detour to Dmitri with some enthusiasm, for Thiers is almost twenty-five miles in the opposite direction from their final destination, Paris. But Gabrielle was now in earnest; she was intent on traveling through the terrain of her childhood.

While Dmitri innocently noted Thiers’s reputation, Gabrielle was reliving her memories of her father’s buying his scissors and knives there for resale throughout the Midi. Dmitri recorded that after a bad meal they “made a little excursion around the area.”12 First navigating the tortuous mountainous roads through the chestnut and pine forests in their “little excursion,” Gabrielle must next have suggested they follow the river Dore just six miles farther south to Courpière, her mother’s birthplace.

How strange it must have been to see the place where Gabrielle’s mother had left her and her siblings in search of her renegade husband, the place where Gabrielle had played those lonely childhood games in the churchyard. Gabrielle gave away nothing to Dmitri about the significance of this remote Auvergne backwater, but her thoughts must have been brimful of the past. Driving in one of the world’s most luxurious cars and supporting herself as one of the world’s most avant-garde designers, she was the personification of female modernity. She was being sought out by the Parisian elite, could name among her friends some of the most famous artists, writers and musicians of the day, and now her traveling companion was a grand duke. Did Gabrielle feel triumphant, remembering those Courpière relations who had said she was useless, and who had pitied “poor Jeanne” for following that no-good Albert Chanel around? Jeanne, the woman her daughter defended with the comment: “Hadn’t she at least married the man she loved?”

Gabrielle had not only traveled way beyond that humiliation, she had also outgrown the mindset burdening her with those judgments. And while, from her origins, she drew her stubborn and forthright tenacity, for the rest, Gabrielle Chanel had long since outgrown her roots. Ironically, it was that inherited capacity for endurance that had permitted her to make the leap from a fantasized self-transformation to one sustained by reality and hard work. These were the two opposing yet complementary aspects of Gabrielle’s nature. Like any artist of caliber, she possessed an outlandish imagination, which had allowed her to reinvent first herself and then the wardrobes of the female population; she also possessed the essential counterpart of a vivid imagination: practicality.

Gabrielle would say, “People say I’m an Auvergnat. There’s nothing of the Auvergnat in me. Nothing, nothing! My mother was one. In that part of the world… I was thoroughly unhappy… I fed on sorrow and horror, and regularly thought of dying.”13 How Gabrielle had hated her childhood. Meanwhile, on that very day, May 2, 1921, while she chose her secret return to the distant places of her childhood, on the other side of the world, one of her closest childhood companions reached a mournful conclusion.

 

From Canada, Gabrielle’s sister Antoinette had continued sending despairing letters to Gabrielle and Adrienne, and they had continued urging her to persevere. But Antoinette was entirely unsuited to her new life. In response, Gabrielle had recently dispatched a young Argentinian with a letter of recommendation to Antoinette’s father-in-law. The reasons are lost with the letter, but he may have been an emissary sent to discover the extent of Antoinette’s plight. Antoinette found the young man entertaining, and within days of his departure for Buenos Aires, she had fled her in-laws’ household, leaving everything behind her.

Whatever precipitated her departure, once Antoinette arrived in Buenos Aires, her movements are a mystery. All we know is that any hopes she might have had of beginning again were disappointed, because, on May 2, she gave up the struggle and took her own life. This was almost certainly with an overdose of drugs. Until the recent discovery of Antoinette’s death certificate,14 the story has usually been told that she had already died, a year earlier, in 1920, a casualty of the postwar Spanish flu epidemic.15 Gabrielle and Adrienne possibly never knew the real cause of Antoinette’s death. On the other hand, they might have fabricated the Spanish flu story so as to conceal her despairing end and avoid the stigma of another family suicide.

Gabrielle’s response to her sister’s suicide is nowhere recorded. But Antoinette had been part of Gabrielle and Adrienne’s undertaking to transform their lives, and she had worked hard for her older sister. She had benefited, but in reality, Antoinette had only taken on the trappings of their new lives. She hadn’t possessed Adrienne’s prudence, which would finally lead to her marriage to the man she loved. Nor did Antoinette have the inspired, rule-breaking originality of her sister Gabrielle. In the end, poor Antoinette lacked their tenacity and force of personality. She neither succeeded in marrying “above herself” nor in making herself into a truly New Woman, dependent upon no one but herself. Perhaps there was no connection, but for many years Gabrielle didn’t present a wedding dress at the end of her show, a tradition all the couture houses followed.

Gabrielle saw Adrienne, and occasionally her brothers, who periodically called on her in rue Cambon. She regularly sent one of them a check, and looked after André, her dead sister Julia-Berthe’s son, mostly away at boarding school. Aside from this, Gabrielle now had very little to do with her extended family. With Antoinette’s death, one more connection with her childhood was lost, and she was a little more alone. Years later, in referring to her relations, Gabrielle would say that no one in her family grew old: “I don’t know how I escaped the slaughter.”16

 

As Gabrielle made her secret journey through her past with Dmitri, their sojourn was concluding. Dmitri would write that Gabrielle was “sad that tomorrow our trip comes to an end.” With many miles ahead of them, on the final morning they were up early and drove through rain, then thick snow, until eventually halting for coffee to warm up. Setting off again, Dmitri wrote that “the highway was covered in snow, and the countryside looked Russian. It was rather sad and moving.”17 The weary travelers finally reached Paris, where Dmitri would again ask his diary why it was they had made that detour around Vichy.

Laughing off rumors of marriage to Gabrielle during his “adventure,” Dmitri was less sanguine about the rumor put around in their absence that she was keeping him. He did nonetheless go and see her the following evening. Moved by her inability to conceal “her sadness that our excursion had come to an end,” Dmitri didn’t leave her suite until two the next morning. The following afternoon, “She had cheered up but was nonetheless very touching.”18

 

 


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