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at a church charity drive. She never forgot the rage that consumed her. It taught her an early lesson about the distinction between avarice and autonomy.
    “I have never been interested in money,” she said of the incident, “but I was concerned with independence.” 5
    It’s easy to understand why her admirers were spellbound by Coco’s tale of a lonely Auvergne childhood. Hers was a classic story of triumph over adversity.
    And almost every word of it was untrue.
    Coco Chanel lied about it all. She lied about her aunts, who never existed. She lied about her father, who never went to America. She even lied about her age and hired someone to doctor her birth records at the city hall at Samaur. She was born in 1883—not 1893.
    Some of the details of Coco’s fictional childhood were torn directly from the pages of Pierre Decourcelle’s romance novels. She borrowed other story lines from her friends, who either didn’t notice or didn’t care that she was appropriating their memories. Certainly she never pretended to be even remotely forthright about her roots. When a close companion proposed that she consult a psychotherapist, Coco laughed off the suggestion. “I—who never told the truth to my priest?” 6
    Chanel’s early life—or the little that is known about it—was even lonelier than she chose to remember in public. Her mother succumbed to pneumonia when Coco was twelve years old—not six, as she claimed—and her father abandoned the family shortly thereafter, though not for adventures in America. Coco’s brothers were sent off to a work farm; she and her two sisters went to live at a church-run orphanage at Auberzine, a grim, densely wooded backcountry town that lay on high terrain above the Corrèze River.
    The orphanage was a converted twelfth-century monastery bounded by towering stone walls that kept out the sun. Coco and the other girls wore identical black skirts and white blouses, lived in unadorned rooms with black-painted doors and whitewashed walls, and spent six days a week learning practical homemaking skills like sewing and needlepoint. What little academic work they accomplished was taught by rote: the kings and departments of France, the alphabet, the multiplication tables.
    In later years, Coco never acknowledged this part of her life. In nineteenth-century France, poverty and orphanhood were marks ofshame. Anything —anything— was better than admitting she had been penniless and unwanted. Even a made-up story about two spinster aunts.
    As it stood, her only solace came during school vacations, when the Chanel sisters went to stay with relatives in a small town just outside the provincial capital of Moulins, where her grandparents still lived. Her female relatives taught Coco how to sew with more skill and flourish than the nuns at the orphanage were able to demonstrate. It was probably during these cherished escapes that she discovered Pierre Decourcelle’s novels, whose plotlines and characters she blended effortlessly into her own life story.
    When Coco turned eighteen, she left the orphanage. “Nobody can live with low horizons,” she later said. “A narrow outlook will choke you. All I had when I left my Auvergne”—she stuck tenaciously to her story about the spinster aunts—“was a summer dress in glossy, wiry black woolen fabric with cotton wrap and for winter a suit in Scottish tweed and a sheepskin, but my mind was full of fabulations.” 7
    After a brief stay at the Notre Dame boarding school in Moulins, where she was admitted as a charity case, Coco took a job as shopgirl with a local milliner. On weekends, she picked up extra money by working for a tailor. It was there on a slow Sunday morning that a rich playboy walked in and asked for a last-minute alteration on his riding suit. He changed Coco’s life.
    Whoever invented the term prodigal son might well have had Etienne Balsan in mind. The youngest heir of a wealthy textile baron, he spent his teenage years at a