Forward Summary and Analysis

The first chapter offers a brief overview of the life of Gabrielle Chanel, allowing the reader to understand the world from which she came and thereby recognize the remarkable evolution by which she came to be the woman whose fame is still revered today.

Chanel was born in 1883 to a single woman in France, having been fathered by a poor traveling peddler. It is a beginning biographer Edmonde Charles-Roux takes care to explain she would strive her whole life to conceal. Having been abandoned by her father in the first week following her mother's death, all while she was still very young, Chanel was taken in by a provincial orphanage, and after that, a convent. For a girl of no means these were mercies, but Chanel had to escape. At eighteen, she ran away to work for a small shopkeeper in...