From Gabrielle to "Coco": The Café Singer

Moulins, a garrison town on the Allier River, offered opportunities that Aubazine could not. The town hosted the 10th Light Horse Regiment, bringing an influx of young officers from good families. There were shops, cafés, and a social life that, while provincial, was cosmopolitan compared to the isolation of the orphanage. Gabrielle, now eighteen, was placed as a charity case with the religious institution's boarding school, but she was also found work as a seamstress's assistant in a shop on rue de l'Horloge.

The shop, À Sainte Marie, catered to the wives and daughters of Moulins' bourgeoisie. Here, Gabrielle first encountered the elaborate fashions of the Belle Époque—the corseted waists, the elaborate trimmings, the vast hats laden with feathers and flowers. She observed how these wealthy women moved (or failed to move) in their restrictive clothing, how they used fashion to display status, how they submitted to discomfort in the name of propriety. These observations would later fuel her revolutionary approach to women's clothing.

But it was after shop hours that Gabrielle began her transformation. She had discovered the café-concerts, informal venues where amateur performers could sing popular songs for tips and drinks. The atmosphere was convivial, slightly risqué, and utterly different from anything in her previous experience. Young officers from the garrison frequented these establishments, seeking entertainment and female company.

Gabrielle began performing at La Rotonde, a café-concert frequented by cavalry officers. Her repertoire was limited—she knew only a few songs—but she performed them with a compelling mixture of innocence and knowing charm. Her signature songs were "Ko Ko Ri Ko" (Cock-a-doodle-doo) and "Qui qu'a vu Coco dans l'Trocadéro?" (Who's seen Coco at the Trocadero?). The officers, charmed by her youth and vivacity, began calling her "Coco," a name that would replace Gabrielle in all but legal documents.

It's important to understand the social context of the café-concert. While not explicitly brothels, these venues occupied a moral gray zone. The women who performed there were understood to be available for relationships with the men who frequented them. For a young woman of Gabrielle's background, with no family, no dowry, and no social connections, the café-concert offered one of the few paths to a better life—if she could navigate its dangers successfully.

Among the officers who frequented La Rotonde was Étienne Balsan, a wealthy heir to a textile fortune. At twenty-three, Balsan was everything Gabrielle was not: rich, carefree, and utterly secure in his social position. He bred horses at his estate, Royallieu, near Compiègne, and lived the life of a pleasure-seeking bachelor. When he met Gabrielle in 1905, he was immediately attracted to her unusual combination of vulnerability and strength, innocence and ambition.