Views of Colette

A legendary and scandalous figure of the Belle Époque (the Edwardian era), "the greatest French prose writer of the 20th century", translated and read throughout the world, Colette of a thousand facets, Colette the woman in love, a "free and shackled" woman, enjoyed popular success and the recognition of her peers during her lifetime. Fifty years after her death in 1954, she continues to fascinate through her life and her work, the depth and modernity of which are constantly being rediscovered.

Francine Dugast, Professor Emeritus at the University of Rennes-2 [1]

From publication of her first book - Claudine à l’école [Claudine at School] - Colette experienced success, scandal and misunderstanding. In writing the diary of this insolent and defiant teenager, first at a country school in Burgundy then in Parisian circles, she undoubtedly drew on her own memories, yet this is not straightforward autobiography.

She was to correct the first picture of her childhood in La Maison de Claudine [Claudine’s House] (1922). Sidonie Gabrielle Colette was bornin 1873 in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye (Yonne). Here she recalls happy early years, united parents, a cultivated family circle and above all, an outstanding mother. The little girl and her brothers ran wild in countryside and woods made magical by memory.

In Mes apprentissages [My Apprenticeship] (1936), Colette portrayed her marriage for love at the age of twenty, to a leading figure in Parisian society, as a violent break. Certainly, the journalist and writer, Henry Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy, fourteen years her senior, was not without talent and he introduced his young wife to the world of letters and the arts, where she met, notably, Marcel Proust, Claude Debussy and Marguerite Moreno, who was to become a friend. But he was constantly unfaithful to her, forced her to write and deprived her of the credit for her work. It was not until 1904 that she was able to put her own name to Les Dialogues de bêtes (Animal Dialogues).

Colette gradually freed herself and, after many ups and downs, divorced in 1910. For a while she found refuge with the Marquise Mathilde de Morny, known as Missy; but above all she earned her own living, on stage as a mime artist, dancer and actress, which had its scandals, and she led the unsettled and precarious life common to music hall artists. The novel, La Vagabonde [The Vagabond], reflects this constructive but testing and lonely phase of her life.

From this time on Colette worked in some very different fields. Already a novelist, she became a very active journalist and was to remain so; it was as much a passion as a means of ensuring her financial independence. Theatrical shows, legal cases, the doings of society, her columns are models of their kind.

She found emotional stability with Henry de Jouvenel, Editor-in-Chief of Le Matin and a promising political figure, whom she married in 1912. The birth of their daughter barely disrupted her activities and her private life remained harmonious for a while. But the First World War broke out and her husband was called up. Colette did more reporting (some of her articles are in the collection, Les Heures longues [The Long Hours]), but she returned to the music-hall in Mitsou - a bitter-sweet love story - and in 1917, in Rome, made contact with the world of cinema, which she saw as having a great future. It remained an abiding interest.

After 1918, burdened with responsibilities in the press and in publishing, in brief pieces she painted a picture of the light-heartedness and confusion of the 1920s and published novels of which she was justifiably proud: Chéri [Cheri], Le Blé en herbe(Young Shoots) and La Fin de Chéri [The Last of Cheri]. The first of these, about the loves of a very young man and a mature woman, was premonitory, as the writer herself said: Henry and she became estranged and she became involved with the very young Bertrand de Jouvenel, her stepson. This relationship ended in 1925, when Maurice Goudeket came on the scene; he was to be Colette’s companion to the end of her life.

She was not spared by financial problems. "Money is hard to earn." as she wrote to one of her friends. She even opened a beauty salon in 1931 - which she soon closed. In this whirlwind of activities, she published a remarkable and very complex essay, Le Pur et l’Impur [The Pure and the Impure] the following year. She wrote for the cinema (some of her novels have been adapted for the screen), for women’s magazines and she recorded radio programmes. But she was gradually paralysed by arthritis, which caused her intense suffering.

On 3 September 1939, on the declaration of war, she wrote: "I would never have believed that the human race would come to this point yet again." After an exodus of a few weeks she returned to Paris and remained there until the Liberation. Maurice Goudeket, a Jew, was arrested and she managed, with great difficulty, to get him released. Her accounts of the war (Journal à rebours [Back to Front Diary], Paris de ma fenêtre[Paris from my Window]), and her moving and colourful letters tell of the difficulties of daily life. She removed herself from the horror of the time in relatively light-hearted short stories, Gigi especially, in which she again turned to the demimonde of the Belle Époque.

After the war, two essays recapping the experiences of a lifetime and the elements of wisdom L’Etoile Vesper [The Evening Star] and Le Fanal bleu [The Blue Light]), and a few collections of writings were published. The number of film adaptations increased, those of Gigi a huge success, and the film version of Blé en herbe caused a scandal: such teenage love affairs were still subversive.

But Colette, behind her window in the Palais-Royal in Paris, had become a glorious idol, celebrated by critics, studied by scholars, honoured by her peers. Elected to the Academy in Belgium, member of the judging panel for the Prix Goncourt, she was hailed by the greatest writers of that half-century - André Gide, Paul Valéry, Jean Cocteau, François Mauriac, Paul Claudel - and by younger writers - Louis Aragon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It was de Beauvoir who referred to her as the "formidable Mother Goddess". Her work has been translated throughout the world. The French Republic officially honoured its muse with decorations, ceremonies and a private meeting with the president. A large crowd of unknown admirers gathered for her state funeral in August 1954.

For Colette genuinely struck a chord with the general public, probably because of her far from ordinary life, her work as a journalist and her skill at using the media. She is associated not only with some of the both irritating and attractive clichés of the Belle Époque, but also with the fair but simplistic images that academic reading of her work has set in stone: nature, animals, the figure of Sido, childhood - with its wonders, its occasional perversion and above all its savagery - children, for Colette, are always "unfathomable". But her success is also explained by more complex resonances.

Critics today deliberately stress the paradoxes of Colette. First, her own mysteriousness: despite so many portraits, photographs and confidences in her correspondence, she conceals herself as a "hidden woman" (the title of a short story) and rejects attempts to find her "quite alive" in her books.

Outside convention, she depicts a great many deviations from the norm, while extolling the necessity of setting one’s own rules: a wisdom based on an appetite for life in all its forms and an unrepentant curiosity, and also on clear self-knowledge and self-control, "abstention" of which Sido provides an example: "She knew that one possesses in abstention, and only in abstention." Colette made her mother a mythical figure, the embodiment of a demanding morality alien to any prejudice, communicating with the world, inviting and collecting "rumours, whispers and omens that ran to her, loyally, from the eight points of the compass".

The special place she grants to nature lessens the significance of human history and Colette mistrusts all collective commitment. She deliberately restricts her testimony to daily life during both world wars. In her fiction, Chéri’s suicide is linked to the fatal nausea that the spectacle of the period after the First World War arouses in him. Despite a certain taste for the period around 1900, Colette lifts the masks and denounces the precariousness of the fate of the most vulnerable and particularly the condition of women.

Without ever being associated with the feminist movements, she was indignant at the subservience of women, usually jobless, exploited and with no possible status other than that of a married woman or a kept woman. She often presents lesbianism as a refuge against men. Her own life and the careers of her heroines extol women’s own responsibility for constructing their own destiny, not without some suspicion with regard to their persistent taste for shackles.

She repeatedly depicts the enmity between men and women, which she thought incurable, while evoking, in La Naissance du jour [Break of Day], whose title is significant, the prospect of an amicable peace - "man, my friend (...)". Love is at the heart of her work, but these are often "unseasonable" loves, in her terms: mismatched ages, untimely passions, social divisions, fundamental disagreements, and so on. Perhaps the public was sensitive to this ambiguous note, often very different from the conventional novel as from the tragedy.

We are "enchanted", said the writer Jean-Marie Le Clézio when talking about Colette. All these paradoxes exist only because of the author’s skill. Like Marcel Proust, Valéry Larbaud, Jean Cocteau and Pierre-Jean Jouve, Colette helped to bring new vigour to storytelling. She constructed her novels on the shifting subjectivity of the characters in search of identity, internal monologues, fleeting sensations, moments blown up into crises, the incomprehensible "Me" of autobiography. Erotic pleasure is described with boldness and propriety: Le Pur et l’Impur [The Pure and the Impure] is a lyrical account of its infinite meanderings.

The poetic effect of her writing (from 1908, Les Vrilles de la vigne [The Tendrils of the Vine] contains some real prose poems) results from a rare musicality and the interplay of always unexpected images that surround the reader with connections that call on all the senses simultaneously. Her daughter, Bel-Gazou, becomes exemplary through "the superiority of her senses which can taste a scent on the tongue, feel a colour and see the line - fine as a hair, delicate as a blade of grass - of an imaginary song".

Colette’s writing is a constant surprise, using language and seeing the world in new ways. Today’s reader may find in the fusion of words, sensations, the human being and nature the source of an emotion that is much more than aesthetic pleasure: this writing, which allowed Colette to constantly reconstruct herself, offers the person who reads it a symmetrical experience.