Biography | Coco Chanel — Six Years Behind the Cistercian Walls at Aubazine

People later heard a story of aunts and a comfortable Auvergne childhood.

The register is colder.

Jeanne Devolle died in Brive-la-Gaillarde in 1895, when Gabrielle was twelve.

Albert Chanel left the boys to farms and delivered the three girls to the orphanage that the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary ran inside the former Cistercian abbey at Aubazine, in Corrèze.

The house had been an abbey since the twelfth century.

After the Revolution it stood empty. From 1860 the nuns used the cloister as a boarding orphanage.

Gabrielle stayed about six years, until she was sent on to a Catholic institution at Moulins around 1900.

She learned plain sewing here, the ordinary curriculum of a household school for girls with no dowry.

The black-and-white of the habits, the beige of the stone, and the interlaced geometry in the abbey glass have all been claimed as the seed of her later palette and of the doubled C.

Those claims are local and late. They are not in a document she signed.

What can be stood in is simpler: a strict timetable, a stone cloister, and a girl who left with a needle and a habit of inventing a cleaner past.

The abbey is still there, on Place Léon Canard.

Nuns of another order give tours. The orphanage rooms are not staged as a Chanel museum.

The pin is the abbey church and cloister, not a reconstructed dormitory.

Photo: GO69, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons