The Collection: A Novel - Softcover

Diliberto, Gioia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743280660 ISBN 13: 9780743280662

Publisher: Scribner, 2008

Synopsis

Isabelle Varlet, charming and naïve, comes from a long line of seamstresses in a small town in France. A series of unfortunate events and her prodigious sartorial talent carry her to Paris, which in the wake of World War I is electric with new life. When Isabelle takes a job in the atelier of Coco Chanel, the rising star of haute couture, she finds herself in the heart of a glamorous and ruthless world filled with arrogant designers, handsome men, beautiful women, and fashion thieves who prowl Paris hoping to steal designs before they hit the runway.

In Chanel's workshop, Isabelle thrives on the time-honored techniques of couture -- the pains-taking hand stitches, the perfect fall of fabric -- and the sleek, pared-down lines of "Mademoiselle's" revolutionary style. As Isabelle brings an exquisite dress to life for the fall collection -- from its embryonic origins in humble muslin to its finished form in the finest silk -- she navigates the tempestuous moods of Chanel, the cutthroat antics of her fellow workers, and her own search for love.

Just as she did in her critically acclaimed novel I Am Madame X, Gioia Diliberto brings a rich historical moment to life through her vivid and compelling storytelling. Her penetrating research and imagination are gracefully woven together in this poignant story filled with larger-than-life characters embroiled in scandalous tales, passionate love affairs, and extraordinary careers. The Collection is an exuberantly entertaining read.

About this title

About the Author:

Gioia Diliberto has written biographies of Jane Addams, Hadley Hemingway, and Brenda Frazier, as well as the critically acclaimed novel I Am Madame X, based on the life of Virginie Gautreau. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Prologue

Instead of dying, I learned to sew.

I was nine, ill with my first bout of consumption, and the nuns at Saint Foy, the convent school in Agen, where I'd lived for a year, had sent me home with a high fever and a horrific cough, not expecting me to return. For two months I lay in bed while my grandmother cared for me. Despite her ministrations, I grew steadily thinner and weaker, until one day she placed on my quilt a stack of white silk squares and a pincushion spiked with a threaded needle. "Here, dear, let me show you," she said, lifting my limp body from the pillows. Holding me upright, she supported the needle in my fingers and guided it through the silk. Over the next weeks, as she taught me how to baste and overcast, how to turn hems and cut bias strips for binding, and how to patch holes, my fever and cough subsided, and my strength returned. I sewed my initials, IV, in the bottom right-hand corner of each square, and my grandmother tacked them to the walls -- monuments of my survival. Determination was in the stitches and also hope. I still feel the bloom of possibility when I put needle and thread to silk.

Another grandmother would have given a sick girl a new doll or a kitten. But I come from a long line of seamstresses for whom stitching is the same as breathing. My namesake, the first Isabelle Varlet, worked at the court of Louis XVI, and, according to family lore, was imprisoned with Marie Antoinette in the Tuileries. I have a gold locket, dulled with age, that belonged to this Isabelle. Inside is an oil miniature of a lovely young girl whose fine straight hair is the same reddish-gold color as mine.

In those years before the first great war, my grandmother and I lived in a two-story cottage on a hill overlooking the road to Timbaut, a little medieval village a mile outside Agen. Our house had an attic and a wine cellar, shuttered windows, a giant oak in front and a vegetable garden in back. Chickens scratched in the yard, where a little goat tethered to the fence gave us milk each morning. Beyond, lay undulating fields of sunflowers and purple heather starred with marguerites. I lacked only parents.

My father, who made hats at a factory in Agen, suffered a heart attack several months before I was born, the event that cost my mother her life. Neither of my parents had siblings. My grandmother, though, had three sisters with whom she once owned a dressmaking shop. They were old ladies by the time I came along, and I never saw them in anything but heavy black dresses. Every day at four, the aunts came to our house for tea, drenched in black, their faces covered by black veils trailing the floor, and carrying little round hat boxes. When they stepped inside, they removed their veils and pinned black caps to their white hair. I asked them once why they dressed like death, and one of them answered, "So everyone will know we are widows!" It was their proudest accomplishment.

After my recovery, my grandmother, in consultation with the aunts, decided to tutor me at home rather than return me to Saint Foy. Over the course of the next eight years, I suffered repeated relapses and was confined for long periods to bed. My grandmother and the aunts worried and hovered over me; my every cough and sniffle sparked grave concern. Because they feared they could lose me at any time, they indulged my smallest whim, and I grew up convinced that life would give me what I asked of it.

My favorite pastime was drawing fashion sketches, inspired by illustrations in the Parisian magazines my grandmother collected. I occupied hours copying clothes from the glossy pages into my sketchbook and then inventing outfits to wear while playing dress-up. For fabric, I used scraps of serge, wool, bombazine, and cotton twill, remnants from my grandmother's shop that I kept in a large box on top of my wardrobe. Most of the pieces were musty and stained, but the box held a few treasures: a square of lush black velvet, some pink organdy, a triangle of beaded white satin, and a baguette-sized strip of mink. I often spread these gems across my bed to examine them, imagining that some day, when I was older and lived in Paris, I would incorporate them into a grown-up gown.

In the August of my tenth year, my grandmother would not let me outside due to a typhoid epidemic that had swept through our region with a wave of severe heat. I couldn't swim in the lake or go to the village to join the other children for games under the thatched roof of the old stone marché. I couldn't even go to church. One morning, I pulled out my fabric remnants and began piecing them together, carefully stitching them into a child-sized dress.

Beyond my window, the fields burned, and the sky was white and empty. Cows herded themselves under trees and dogs hid below porches. The whole world seemed to stop moving, and every day was like every other. All I had for company were my grandmother, the aunts, and Jacques Beloit, whose parents owned the patisserie in Agen and who lived up the road. Jacques was a year younger than me, a small, serious boy who often arrived at teatime with treats from his parents' shop.

On the day I squandered my fabric treasures, my grandmother and the aunts went to a funeral for one of their elderly cousins. At four o'clock I heard the door open and close and voices in the front of the house. One of them was Jacques' squeaky soprano. I thought I heard him say something about lemon tarts, a favorite of mine, so I slipped into my gown.

It had a long skirt of gray cotton that I'd taken from an old dress of my grandmother's. I used the black velvet for a bodice and the pink organdy for puffy sleeves. The triangle of white satin fit nicely into the neckline, and the strip of mink made a perfect collar.

I twirled into the parlor. Jacques was sitting on an armchair near the fireplace, munching a lemon tart and swinging his skinny white legs with the scabby knees that looked like burnt toast. He was still too young for long pants, but his wetted-down black hair, severely parted on the right, and his thick spectacles gave him the air of a little man.

I ignored him and glided over to the sofa where the aunts were perched like three blackbirds. The twins, Aunts Hélène and Marie, wore ordinary mourning, but Aunt Virginie, the eldest and wealthiest sister, sat between them in her flashiest black satin gown with the broad weepers' cuffs. Jet chandeliers hung from her ears to her collarbones; ropes of jet glittered around her neck. "It is 1868, and I am lady-in-waiting to Empress Eugénie," I announced in a grand tone.

The aunts were busy arguing, and they didn't notice me. Aunt Hélène rattled her teacup and glared at Aunt Virginie. "You needn't have piled on the mourning," she said. "Cousin Caterine was a silly little nobody."

"You just want an excuse to wear your jet earrings and necklaces," added Aunt Marie.

Aunt Virginie sat erect and unsmiling and looked down her nose at her sisters. "I can wear my jet jewelry whenever I want," she said. "I am always in high mourning for my Henri."

Henri, her husband, had been dead for decades. A prosperous doctor, he built the spacious stone house where she lived now with Aunts Hélène and Marie. Their husbands, mere barbers, also had been dead for years.

"You shouldn't drag them out for Caterine then," hissed Aunt Hélène. "It makes us look bad."

"It's not my fault your husbands couldn't afford to buy good jewelry," said Aunt Virginie.

I pirouetted dramatically. "I'm going to a ball tonight, and this is what I'll wear."

They ignored me still. "My carriage will be here soon. If you want to see my dress, you have to look now!"

Finally, the aunts laid down their teacups and considered me. No one said anything for the longest time. Then Aunt Virginie spoke. "Isabelle, ma chère, you must have been having a nightmare when you thought that up. It is not at all becoming."

"Not at all becoming," echoed Jacques. "Why don't you wear your burgundy velvet? You look pretty in that."

"What do you know about dresses?" I said, glaring at him. Then, turning my gaze to the aunts, "I copied this gown from Les Élégances Parisiennes. I can show you the picture."

"I don't care where you copied it from," said Aunt Virginie. "It's a mess."

Just then my grandmother entered the parlor carrying a fresh pot of tea. She was a small, fine-boned woman with kind hazel eyes and a pink, finely lined face. Her cottony hair was arranged in a neat chignon, and she wore a blue flowered apron over her unadorned black dress. Her husband had been a carpenter, and he couldn't afford fancy jewelry either. "I think it's lovely, Isabelle," she said. "You have a real flair with your needle."

Aunt Virginie shot her an exasperated look. "Don't lie to the child, Berthe. Do you want her to learn about elegance or not?"

"She has plenty of time to learn about elegance. She's not in Paris yet," said my grandmother.

"I've been to Paris!" cried Jacques.

I whipped around. "I don't care!"

Jacques swallowed the last bite of his lemon tart and pushed his glasses in place with a small sticky hand. "Maybe you can come with us the next time."

"Maybe you can go home," I said coldly.

"Isabelle! That's no way to talk," said my grandmother. "I want you to apologize to Jacques."

He looked at me with a hurt expression and waited. But I couldn't apologize.

I fled to my bedroom on the second floor. It was furnished simply with blue cotton curtains, a desk, a chair, a small bookcase, and a wood bureau painted white. Over the iron bed, a Victorian artist's idea of Jesus, handsome and blue-eyed with flowing brown hair, gazed heavenward, and, above it, a plaster crucifix. I said my prayers here every night, watched by my grandmother.

I took my best doll from the bureau and sat with her on the bed. She was made by Jumeau, the most prestigious doll company in France, so I called her Mademoiselle Jumeau. She had large blue ey...

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0743280660
• ISBN 13: 9780743280662
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304