Introduction Summary and Analysis

Here Charles-Roux takes the reader back to Gabrielle Chanel's childhood home of Ponteils in the Cevennes. Chanel's family was poor from generations back, having made their living gathering chestnuts from the groves throughout the Cevennes. Her great-grandfather was the first to give up day labor and put his wife's small dowry to use, renting a hall that would become the family bistro of Ponteils. The plagues that swept into the area in 1850, however, would mean the collapse of the provincial village, and sent Chanel's grandfather to work as an itinerant peddler. His son would father Chanel and marry her mother three years later. Here Charles-Roux discusses the ways in which the decline of rural communities following the plague disrupted family life and so shaped the world in which Chanel would spend her childhood.

The style of the era in Saumur, the...