Chapter 30 #2
Turning her phone off, she took out her laptop and opened the manuscript file.
She read over her notes and started writing, forcing her mind to focus, as she’d done so often in the past, forcing it past the churning feelings, the whirling thoughts, pushing past all that into the refuge, the haven that writing represented for her.
It had never failed her in the past and it didn’t now.
In that space—where all that existed was the story she was crafting, the world she was conjuring, the characters she was evoking—there was not peace exactly, but a sense of easeful curiosity about life, people, the world.
Emotion recollected in tranquillity, someone had once said about writing.
But, for her, it wasn’t emotional tranquillity but rather the otherness of the creative state that allowed her to calm down enough to feel in control.
It was a place removed from the confusions of daily life, an escape, yet also full of clarity, discovery and delight.
When Elisabeth Fontaine, then still known as Elisabeth Marsan, first walked into Tissus Tellier, that Ali Baba cave filled to the top of its many floors with fine fabrics of all sorts, we are not exactly sure.
It was certainly before she became famous, before she even opened her workshop.
But it is tempting to think that it was there that she bought the fabric for the dress that was to be described in her official biography as the one that changed everything: the dress she was wearing on the summer morning when she turned up at the smart Right Bank boutique where she was then working as a sales assistant, after having arrived a few months before from Biarritz.
The sales assistants had to wear a uniform provided by the boutique, one version for summer and one for winter.
They were kept at the store to be changed into on arrival and washed regularly by the shop’s own laundry service.
In her official biography, the story is told of how that day, Elisabeth, who normally came dressed in the rather ordinary clothes she had brought to Paris, appeared in a cotton voile frock that was so immediately striking in its beautiful simplicity that it was noticed not only by her fellow saleswomen but also the manager.
Knowing the small wage that Elisabeth was paid, the manager immediately assumed that she must have been given such a fine dress as a present by some well-to-do man and was now ‘flaunting’ it and her loose morals in front of the whole shop.
The story goes on to say that Elisabeth listened to this tirade with her customary discreet patience, but when the manager drew breath, she said, ‘It’s a Fontaine design, Madame, and Fontaine is me,’ and then as proof she drew out the sketch for the dress from her bag and handed it to her.
And the rest, as they say, is history. The manager’s disbelief turned to excitement, the owner summoned to see, the wealthy and influential client invited to take a look …
The official biography is silent on where that cotton voile was bought, but what we do know is that Annie Houssaye, the knowledgeable, private woman who was in time to become a trusted adviser and friend to the young designer, was already working at Tissus Tellier, not yet as second in command, but as a senior sales assistant.
And it is pleasing to imagine that it might have been she who served Elisabeth on that day.
At the time, Annie was living not in her own flat in the quiet Montparnasse street where she would be later, but in a pension a few doors away from the fabric shop.
She was then twenty-five and had been working for nine years, the first four in her native Toulouse, where she had been apprenticed as an assistant seamstress for a successful local dressmaker.
Annie didn’t mind the hard work and long hours and she was a fair seamstress, but it was fabric itself, not sewing, that was her real love and she devoted herself to learning as much as she could about it.
Her employer, to her credit, recognised the girl’s instinctive understanding of the raw material of her trade and put Annie’s name forward to the owner of one of the town’s best fabric shops.
From then on, Annie knew that what she wanted was not to run up dresses, or design them, nor to embroider or stitch or create, but to work among the silks and velvets, the cottons and wools, all the fine fabrics that she loved, and to give advice on what fabric might work with a design.
But she knew that if she wanted to truly reach her full potential, she would have to leave Toulouse and go—like Elisabeth, like so many others—to Paris, the heart of fashion itself.
A year later, there she was, calling in cold to Tissus Tellier, armed with references from her previous employer in Toulouse, which meant little to the formidable store manager who was accustomed to seeing naive provincial hopefuls turn up looking for work.
But he felt there was something different about this quiet, observant young woman and he gave her a week’s trial, which soon turned into an offer of permanent employment.
She had to overcome many challenges along the way, especially after the original manager left and a new one came in who was a hard taskmaster, but she persevered, and five years later, when Elisabeth would first set foot in the fabric store, Annie had moved up the ladder from junior to senior sales assistant, and was seen as absolutely indispensable.
Unlike Alice and Mariette, Annie didn’t care about the many distractions that Paris offered; she wasn’t keen on parties, and she had no interest in getting married or having an affair.
She had grown used to the city and no longer felt homesick as she had at the beginning, but she didn’t go beyond a certain radius around her work and her lodgings.
Her whole life was centred on the fabric store.
It wasn’t just a job to her, it was a calling.
And that made her truly happy and fulfilled, even if in the eyes of most other people, including her youngest sister, Mariette, she cut a rather lonely figure.
But not to Elisabeth Fontaine, who recognised a kindred passion when she saw one.