Gaston Lachaille
A sugar-fortune heir and family friend, expected to take Gigi as his mistress — who proposes marriage instead.
Somewhere he is not being worked. He says that in the Alvarez flat he can breathe and rest, and he keeps coming back for camomile tea he could perfectly well have at home.
The book
At a glance
- Thirty-three
- Sugar. Known around Paris as the Lachaille boy; his father, whom Gigi's grandmother claims to have known well, is dead
- A gloomy private house on the Parc Monceau. A farm at Bon-Abri sends him poultry
- Tonton — uncle — although he is no relation
- Gentiane des Cévennes, whom he dropped; Maryse Chuquet, who stole letters from him and was prosecuted for it; Countess Pariewsky, who fired a revolver at him when he refused to marry a divorcée; and Liane d'Exelmans
- From the third scene to the closing sentence
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeGaston Lachaille is thirty-three, unmarried, and heir to a sugar fortune large enough that Paris follows his private life in the newspapers. He is the family friend in Gigi's household: for years he has been turning up at the flat, drinking camomile tea in a broken-down armchair, bringing the girl licorice and losing to her at cards. He is also the man her grandmother and great-aunt have in mind for her.
The money has bought him a standard set of things and no visible pleasure in any of them. Motor cars, a bleak private house on the Parc Monceau, a monthly allowance and birthday jewels for his mistress, champagne and baccarat at Deauville in summer and Monte-Carlo in winter. He has bought a yacht and sold it on to a Central European monarch, and financed a new newspaper, and been no more cheerful for either.
The book opens on the end of his affair with Liane d'Exelmans, one of the famous kept women of the day. She waited for her birthday present, a string of thirty-seven pearls with a centre stone the size of his thumb, and then left with a skating instructor from the Palais de Glace. A week later she took laudanum, survived, and made him the subject of every gossip column in Paris. He responded by giving a party.
Over one spring his interest in Gigi changes, and when it does he behaves exactly as a man in his position is expected to behave: he goes to her grandmother and proposes to set the girl up as his mistress on generous terms. That the girl herself might say no is a possibility that has occurred to nobody, including him.
How the book draws them
- The sugarHe is the Lachaille boy, of Lachaille sugar, and Colette is precise about what his extravagance amounts to: nothing beyond the regulation luxuries of a rich bachelor. He drops large cash sums on public subscriptions from time to time, buys and resells a yacht, backs a newspaper. None of it makes any difference to his mood.
- What he looks likeA longish nose, big dark eyes, thick hair cut short and brushed up, a small moustache curled with tongs, and a white, well-kept thumb that he holds up to show the size of a pearl. Looking at himself in the glass he says: « Voilà le faciès d'un homme estampé », which means that his is the face of a man who gets fleeced. Colette says the impression is wrong. His commercial instincts and his rich man's suspicion protect him completely, and nobody has ever managed to take so much as a shirt stud off him.
- How the break-up reached printGil Blas ran it with a joke about a secret bitterness creeping into the sweet product of the sugar beet. He subsidises Gil Blas, and the paper nearly lost the subsidy a few weeks later for printing a wrong guess about who would replace her.
- Thirty-seven pearlsThe pearls were the birthday present his mistress waited for before running off with a skating instructor named Sandomir. She hid so badly that the inn in Normandy turned out to have exactly two rooms, one hers and one his. Gaston's own summary of the affair is that the part he has been given is the cuckold's.
- How he mournsHe gives a night party at his house with dancers from the Opéra, and has the Pré-Catelan restaurant opened for a supper a fortnight before the season starts. The clowns Footit and Chocolat perform. Rita del Erido rides a horse between the supper tables in a divided skirt with white lace flounces, white ostrich plumes foaming round her face, and Paris concludes she is the successor. Twenty-four hours later Paris concludes she is not.
- Why he comes to the flatThe camomile tea at his own house, he complains, always smells of dead chrysanthemums. At the Alvarez flat there is a sagging armchair, a box of licorice pastilles, a gas-stained ceiling and three women who ask him for no pearls, no solitaires and no chinchilla, and who discuss what is scandalous, respectable and out of reach with perfect decorum. He says that there he can breathe and rest.
- Cards with a schoolgirlHe plays piquet with Gigi for stakes of ten kilos of sugar, argues the toss, calls her a big spider and gets called crow-nose in return, and loses his gold propelling pencil to her. He pays his debts in Russia leather: a music roll with a silver-gilt clasp and twenty boxes of licorice. Pulling her hair by the handful, he tells her grandmother that this is his best friend in the world.
- What he eats, and what he wants to eatDinner at Larue with de Dion, Feydeau and one of the Barthou brothers: fillets of sole with mussels, saddle of lamb with truffles. He leaves the Alvarez flat sniffing the air and regretting the reheated cassoulet he has not been asked to stay for. When he hears the goose was too dear that week, he sends one from his farm.
- The dress he criticisesGigi appears in a new blue and white dress and he tells her she looks like a performing monkey, and that the boned collar makes her look like a hen that has swallowed too big a piece of corn. She replies that she has never heard he had any taste in clothes. He goes out without drinking his tea, and is back the next morning in a light suit, cheerful, offering to take her to tea at Versailles.
- The terms he offersGigi will be spoiled as no woman has ever been spoiled. He will guarantee her against every trouble, including himself, by taking out an insurance policy. He is something like her godfather. He will rush nothing, will give her all the time she needs to get used to him, and she will not be dealing with a savage. He says all this to her grandmother with tears in his eyes. Aunt Alicia, hearing it repeated the next morning, complains that every word of it is vague.
- How he takes being refusedHe shouts that he has had enough, slams the door, and drives off bareheaded without his straw hat, in full view of the street. The next afternoon he is back at the door, saying in a light voice that he has only come to collect the hat. He is holding another one.
After Gigi refuses him he leaves in tears and slams the door, and the two older women assume he will be engaged to somebody else, or back with his old mistress, within the day. Instead he turns up the following afternoon with a transparent excuse about a hat, looking ill.
Gigi tells him she would rather be unhappy with him than without him, and offers her cheek the way she always does. He holds the kiss until she goes still in his arms, then turns to her grandmother and asks for the honour of her granddaughter's hand in marriage. It is the last line of the book. Nobody has suggested marriage to him, and Gigi has never asked for it.