Should anyone ever ask me that daft magazine question about who you’d invite to your dream dinner-party (‘anyone in the world, alive or dead’) my answer would be short: Mademoiselle Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, on her own, with only an ashtray between us. And maybe an ace simultaneous translator, lest my pidgin French bore her to volcanic rage. She was easily bored and, though she was a lifelong anglophile, she never liked women much.

Fantasy dinners aside, this enchanting, tiny book is the closest anyone can get to a face-to-face with Coco. It’s written in her voice (‘that voice that gushed forth from her mouth like lava’) and in her words (‘those words that crackled like dried vines’), and though it’s full of lies, omissions and contradictions, there’s enough raw truth in it to reflect the extraordinary woman who was Chanel, even though glimpsed shard by shard in a broken mirror.

In the winter of 1946, Chanel was brooding in her ten-year Swiss exile, ‘unemployed and with nothing to do for the first time in her life’. Her dazzling reputation as the greatest Frenchwoman of the age was in shreds: having lived in the Ritz with a high-ranking Nazi officer during the Occupation, she escaped the ‘épuration’ meted out to collabos horizontales only after an intervention by Winston Churchill. She was 63; her golden age — the 1920s and 30s, when she glittered among Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Cocteau, Visconti, Jean Renoir and Paul Iribe, and her lovers included Grand Duke Dmitri of Russia and the richest man in Europe, the Duke of Westminster — was seemingly over.

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