Mademoiselle Chanel Read Free

stranger arrived—an old man in a beret with a cigarette clamped between his teeth. We barely had a moment to hug Alphonse and Lucien farewell before the aunts hustled us into the man’s cart, where he told us to sit in the back, on a pile of hard burlap sacks of flour.“Stay still,” he ordered, and I saw one of the aunts ladle coins from a purse into the man’s hand—a small tapestry purse I recognized as my mother’s.
    The cart jolted forward. Julia gathered Antoinette against her as the man cracked his whip over his bony mule’s back and led us onto the rutted mountain road. We jostled and clung to each other. Whatever was left of my courage withered inside me. Finally, toward dusk, the cart turned onto a dusty path and brought us before a set of stout wooden gates in a high wall.
    I barely saw the stone tower or ring of buildings beyond, so alarmed was I by the sight of a flock of women in black habits and white wimples. As the man unloaded the sacks of flour for them, the nuns brought us inside, separating us in the courtyard. Julia and I were led to one wing, while Antoinette was taken to another, for she was still a child, the nuns said, and must reside with the other children.
    Julia was ashen with fatigue. “We don’t belong here,” I said to her, and one of the nuns accompanying us turned her face to me to murmur, “In a perfect world, no child does. But this is where you are, and in time, you will adjust.”
    She took us into a dormitory where a hundred faces like ours turned to stare at us. I clenched my fists. “It’s only for a short time,” I announced, though nobody asked. “Our papa is coming for us, you’ll see.”
    Julia shushed me. “Gabrielle, stop saying that.”
    I cried when the candles were blown out and the vast room swelled with the snores and sighs of the others, stuffing my head under the pillow so no one could hear. By day, everywhere I turned, I saw only black or white and shades in between, the black of the nuns’ habits, flowing as if they glided on air, and of our uniforms, plain and sturdy. The starched white of linens, piled in cupboards or stretched taut on our narrow cots, glimmering like halos on the nuns’ headdresses; and all the grays, shifting in the light on the flagstone floors and in the monotone voices of those charged to watch over us.
    In those first weeks, I was miserable. I missed my brothers and the upheaval of being tumbled together. I missed Maman. It had been a rough-and-tumble life, but I still missed it.
    “We’re safe,” Julia said one night. “Don’t you see? Nothing bad can happen here.”
    I didn’t want to see. I couldn’t accept it, because if I did it meant Papa was truly never coming back. It meant he had abandoned us.
    “It’s awful,” I said. “I hate it.”
    “No, you don’t.” Julia reached across the space between our cots to squeeze my hand. “Isn’t it better we’re here? What would we do, alone in the world, with no one to care for us?”
    I turned away. “Just try,” I heard her say. “You are the strong one; Maman always said she depended on you. Promise me you will try, Gabrielle. Antoinette and I need you.”
    I loved my sisters and so I did try. In the next weeks, I did my utmost to smile and be attentive, waking before dawn to the clamor of bells to trudge up the steep staircase and over the river-stone pathway into the chapel to hear prime. Then we were taken to the dining room for breakfast, followed by lessons, lunch, and afternoon chores, until we returned again to the chapel for vespers, back to the dining room for dinner, and to bed when it fell dark only to rise at dawn and do it all again. Nothing exciting ever happened, but as time wore on, nothing bad happened, either. No aunts came to scold; no landlords banged on the door to demand the late rent. All of a sudden, for the first time in my life, I knew where I was supposed to be and what was expected of me. I had a routine, unchanging and