Free Ugly Beauty by Ruth Brandon

was not until 1922 that their only child, a daughter, Liliane, was born.
Schueller was by then forty-one, and Berthe cannot have been a great deal
younger. They had been married fourteen years; she did not become pregnant
again. There are hints that this was not for want of trying. In the plan for an
ideal world he set out in 1939, he insisted that women should marry young and
conceive early, since after the age of twenty-five “children are conceived and
born only with the greatest difficulty.” 13
    The war interrupted the hair-dye business, along
with everything else. Schueller was overage, and at first the army refused to
take him. Later it agreed to admit him as a chemist, but he turned that down and
was eventually inducted into the 31st Artillery at Le Mans, leaving L’Oréal in
the hands of his wife. At the front he acted as a liaison officer, with
spectacular success. The citations for his various decorations describe him as
careless of personal danger, quick to grasp what was relevant, and precise in
conveying necessary detail. 14 He was mentioned
in dispatches at Verdun, the Aisne, the Chemin des Dames; in all, there were
five citations. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in the trenches, and by the
time he was demobilized, in 1919, he was a lieutenant of artillery and had been
awarded the Croix de Guerre with several palms. He enjoyed the army’s
adventurous life, and its lessons in organization were useful to him later in
business.
    He returned to find that Berthe had done an
excellent job of managing the business. L’Oréal was flourishing, and the rue du
Louvre apartment was now far too small. They moved once again, just around the
corner, to rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, taking an entire floor at an annual rental
of 16,000 francs—four times what they had previously been paying—and soon needed
an additional floor for offices. Before long, revenue was running at 300,000
francs a month, and a large proportion of that was profit.
    I t all
seemed too easy, and Schueller began to get bored. He diverted himself by
embarking upon a voyage of industrial exploration, progressing from industry to
industry as one led to another.
    The first move arose through his prewar activities
at Coiffure de Paris . In search of advertising, he
had met some manufacturers of celluloid combs. The war, with its demand for
nitrocellulose explosives, meant a large development of their chemical division.
They asked Schueller if he might be interested in helping them expand it, and
how much money he would want for doing so. He explained that money was not his
principal concern—he was already making plenty of that. What did interest him
was how big they expected the business to become. They would be happy, they
replied, with a million francs a year profits. By the end of the first year, the
profits stood at 4 million francs, of which Schueller was entitled to
one-quarter. Five years later, he had become the company’s principal
shareholder.
    At the same time he started a new company, Plavic
Film, which took control of the Lumière film-manufacturing company of Lyon (run
by Auguste Lumière, one of the two brothers who in 1895 had made the first true
motion picture). Plavic manufactured movie and still photographic film. He
bought into another company that made Bakelite, and yet another making cellulose
acetate and artificial silk.
    At this point, huge orders for celluloid began to
arrive from Russia. Schueller had recently renewed acquaintance with Jacques
Sadoul, his boyhood friend from the Lycée Condorcet. Capitaine Sadoul had been
sent to Moscow in 1917 as part of a French military mission intended to make
sure Russia remained on the Allied side. Excited by what he saw, he declared
himself a Communist and declined to return to France. Having worked in various
capacities for the Bolsheviks, he now returned to find that he had been accused
of treason and sentenced to death in absentia , and
took shelter with Schueller while