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posh boarding school in England, where he developed all the affectations associated with the Edwardian gentry, including a lifelong adoration of horse breeding. Balsan’s parents died when he was eighteen, leaving him a vast fortune and little incentive to work. Instead, he raced Thoroughbreds. All day. All week. All the time.
    Etienne bought a sprawling twelfth-century castle called Royallieu, where he kept dozens of horses and staged lavish parties and outings for his old friends from the cavalry, many of whom spent weeks on end at the pleasure and hospitality of their rich, twenty-four-year-old host.
    As if his retreat from the family business weren’t adequate cause for offense, Etienne scandalized his older brothers by keeping a well-known courtesan, Emilienne d’Alençon, at his grand chalet.
    The crowd of men and women that Etienne gathered around him at Royallieu was unusual—sons of wealthy industrialists who shirked their family callings in favor of fast horses and expensive wine; famous Parisian courtesans; daughters of the rising bourgeoisie who rejected their parents’ manners and morals; Oxbridge graduates who fled England and empire for the more permissive atmosphere of prewar France.
    They all gravitated to Etienne. And Coco fit in with ease. She was twenty-one years old when she went to live at Royallieu, though she would later claim to have been sixteen. Tall, long necked, and angular, with dark olive skin and pitch black eyes that shone flecks of gold when the light touched her face at just the right angle, Coco was no ordinary beauty. But she was striking in her own fashion. If it bothered her that Etienne already had a mistress, she never complained. In turn, Emilienne welcomed Coco to the fray and helped her make the leap from a childhood of minimal comfort to the lifestyle of the landed elite.
    Coco was unaccustomed to the art of high living, but she was a discerning student. On one of her first trips to Paris with Etienne, from their lavish suite at the Hotel Ritz, Coco discreetly ordered several dozen oysters to the room. She had never so much as tasted one but knew she would have to develop a liking for—or at least a tolerance of—the cold, slimy delicacy that was featured so prominently at many of the Royallieu dinner parties.
    “I invited the chambermaid to share them with me.” 8 Coco laughed. “She didn’t want any. I told her: ‘make an effort. You’re young, you’re pretty, one day perhaps you’ll have to eat oysters.’ ”
    Coco’s role at Royallieu defied classification. Along with Emilienne, she was one of Etienne’s resident mistresses. This much was certain. But she was less a coquette than a resident personality, and she soon became part of the maverick culture that Balsan endeavored to establish at his refuge for wayward gentlemen. “She would lie in bed until noon, drinking coffee and milk and reading cheap novels,”he recalled. 9 But she was ready in a flash to join the men in the most unfeminine of amusements.
    Leaving the bustles and crinolines and lace and feathers to Emilienne, Coco opted instead for jodhpurs, men’s collars and ties, pigtails, and bowler hats. She raced Thoroughbreds with the boys, attended the races decked out boldly in masculine attire, trudged through the mud in her high riding boots, and galloped astride her horse without the slightest care when the mire and manure splattered and caked on her pants.
    She even studied breeding and training with the jockeys.
    “I just didn’t know anything,” she once admitted. 10 “I understood in the broadest sense, but I had to teach myself. The boys with whom I was living didn’t want me to change. They played with me, and had a great time. They had found a person who was straightforward. They were wealthy men who had no idea who this girl was who came into their lives.”
    It was fun for a while, but Coco knew there was a limit to how long she could act as part-time mistress to Etienne Balsan and