We know her firstly from a thousand and one photographs, each one posed with the care of scenes on a vase : Colette the frizzy-haired avatar of Nature peering from a window of the Palais-Royal in a polka-dot cravatte ; Colette the music hall pin-up in Egyptian drag, with the pose of an Alma-Tadema voloptuary, half-cat, half- snake ; Colette the transvestite Belle Epoque dandy in sailor suit and frock coat, a new George Sand for the industrial age ; Colette the sphinxy cat-lover, the sinister old woman, the sapphic poseur, the commercial beautician and vinagry socialite. If ever a writer has imposed herself through the image, it is Colette. Her photo-album is not only her autobiography, it is the scaffolding of her fame, a fame which has now long deserted the quill-driving class. She is the Greta Garbo of letters.
When Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette died in 1954 at the age of eighty-one, she had come to incarnate not a historical era but an entire nation. An incarnation as formidable as that of any politician, as populist as any writer can be and as flamboyant as national heroines are allowed to be. The only French woman to have been permitted a state funeral, she had, at the end, accumulated around herself a panoply of signature images : the blue lamp of her last home at 9 rue de Beaujolais, a harem of devious and secretive cats, occult rooms of opulent paper-weights and sulphides, a whole decor, in fact, of mystic gardens and secluded boudoirs presided over by those kohled eyes of an Egyptian cat. And as her nation dragged itself out of the shadow of the Nazi Occupation, desperate in its humiliation for some recoverable prestige, the woman who had given the world Gigi and sent her old friend Maurice Chevalier around the globe singing "Zank 'eavens for little girls" in a sun-dappled Bois de Boulogne was the cultural saviour of the hour. Almost alone among serious writers, she had pulled a nostalgic rabbit out of the collective hat.
For many years subsequently Colette and Gigi were inseparable in the Anglo-Saxon imagination. The book, published in 1951, was a gorgeous regression into the Belle Epoque world of metropolitan priviledge which she had explored with greater bitterness in her earlier novels. In the climate of Cold War ideologies and attitudinizing class warfare it seemed an act of outright sentimentalism, if also one whose instant popularity showed the need for a comforting vision of a recent French past whose luxury and sophistication were unassailable.
But above all it sported a libant and amorous innocence of which the French have always been mawkishly proud. A rich and disillusioned young man, a precocious and untamed girl who unknowingly resists an ineluctable fate : a sexual fairy tale complete with wicked aunts and set in a sumptuous decor of Worth bijouterie, polished broughams and macassared hair. Timeless innocence and the exertion of erotic conquest are given an exquisite national form and the Nation, peering at itself longingly in this self-distorting looking-glass, sees itself as restored to its pristine moral virginity. France, always inclined to see herself as glamorously and dynamically embodied in female form, is Gigi...mercurial, canny, ingenue, a little petulant but obstinately pure at heart. A plucky naif adrift in a cruel and unpredictable sea of worldly manipulations.
The soapy anglophone movie, however, with its Cecil Beaton pageantries, preposterously sacchrine musical interludes sung in grotesque accents and the sweet unforced atmosphere of an afternoon's tea-time gossip betrayed Colette's original with some virtuosity. The France of 1900 to which the plot of the novel returns had become a fixed point in the imaginative empire of European nostalgia. The Moulin Pouge, La Goulue and frilly can-cans stood high in the mythology of wistful male frivolity.
The film successfully internationalized the plush bourgeois side of this phantom Paris, and in doing so further distorted the image of Gigi’s creator. For Colette was never the purveyor of ornamentally risqué Parisian love-intrigues which her reputation had kegun to immortalize. Gigi ( ironically perfectly embodied in the waspishly turbulent Katherine Hephurn ) is in Colette's tale the victim of a plot hatched by two older women to bring her to her knees in the sexual arena. She bristles with nubile animal malice and a prescient resent directed against the world of men. At the heart of the writer's vision of male-female love there lies, more than anything else, a ritual but sedulous, blood-drawing warfare. And Gigi, last in a long line of adolescent sexual warriors going cack to the early Claudine, is a combattant struggling for survival in a brutal joust whose stark outcome is either endurable happiness or equally perdurable pain.
Perhaps the most famous scene in the book is one in which Gigi's Aunt Felicia gives her a lesson in cosmetic weaponry and in the correct use of precious stones. It is meant to be a preparation for the sex war. "Never wear baroque pearls", she warns direly, "Not even as hat-pins." Gigi is to avoid emeralds devoid of the elusive tint of aristocratic blue, sapphires that are not from Kashmir, "family jewels", cameos and engraved amethysts. This is not a lecture in taste. Stones are instruments of war. Shy and proud men give them, as do predators, who give the biggest specimens of all. But women give them only to humiliate. "Never wear second-rate jewels," she finally advises. "wait till the really good ones come to you."
This long, sinister scene, set in Aunt Alicia's goblin-like lair of Persian rugs, lemon Directoire-era wood with a grain "as transparent as wax" and red Chinese vases, is the story's still center and the only one which the film faithfully renders. In it are two female types that dominate Colette's universe : the brimming adolescent and the decaying courtesan or mondain. The latter is always vampiric, unctuous with an over-ripened sensuality that has its own ruthless logic in a world which has both pampered and disillusioned it. Aunt AIicia, at seventy, is no longer the man-eater who once gobbled up whole fortunes with the voracity of some human mantis. In her Chantilly lace cap and shot taffeta tea-gown she is the perfect aged bourgeoise, but a wicked Aunt nevertheless. Only her old photographs reveal the predator in sylphyd's form, with her heart-shaped mouth and wrist "like a swan's neck." Inspecting her neice's neck as one would a race horse's, she sighs : "With teeth like that I could have swallowed up Paris, and much of the rest of the world into the bargain. As it was, I had a good bite of it."
Alicia de Saint-Efflam connects Gigi the half-savage faun with the larger world of erotic Amazons, the cocottes, or grandes horizontales of the demi-monde, that twilit world which fascinated Colette all her life. The latter gravitates towards it because there, and nowhere else, the laws of sex are paramount. There, the sexuality of men ( unlike the exterior world which they normally inhabit ) is their dominant characteristic. And there women are predaceous, restless forces of nature while their lovers are bored sybarites, listless sensualists for whom the usual masculine energies are unsatisfying. Our century's greatest psychologist of sex in the novel conducts her experiments in closed laboratories constructed on a small scale in which only the essential drives can determine outcomes. Her fables are like exotic aquaria in which flamboyant fighting-fish of opposing sex nip, peck and tear each other's fins. As Cocteau once observed : "When her characters make declarations of love, they deaw blood." In her orchidaceous arenas, gladiators in boa feathers and silk top hats fight it out to the death.
This ferocity of vision was lost from view in France itself, and was perhaps the source of her reputation's temporary decline in the 60s. The inevitable attempt at a coup-de-grace was delivered by the critic Henri Peyre in 1965 in an essay published in a collection with the dainty title Feminine literature in France. It is a case-history in a certain kind of male intellectual distaste for Colette. Admitting the florid skill of her nevertheless "ridiculously overpraised style", he accuses her of being "antediluvian", bourgeois, her "implicit ideals" revelling in tales of arranged marriages and a scrofulous world of "old roues...old courtesans aping the women of the middle class" and "rancidly stuffy" boudoirs and bedrooms. In short, he concludes, a pre-World War I microcosm "adorned and powdered as in some Alexandrian tale retold by Pierre Louys." And worst of all, her males are risible shadows, brainless gigolos incapable, one assumes, of true revolutionary feelings. As the authoress admits in melancholy tones: "I have not come near those men whom others call great. They have not sought me."
What Peyre found repulsive in his subject was precisely the source of her greatness. Her sin, to him, was her failure to conjure a vision of sexual love consonant with progressive ideology. She does not admit the possibility of oontemporary relationships with their demand of "comradeship", unstinting and placid equality and fanatical candour. Her heroines are not soixante-huitards who engage their partners politically and with whom ( as Peyre lyrically describes it ) they merrily discuss "politics, ethics, ideas and aesthetics." There is no red sun of radical enlightenment dawning on her dark and "antediluvian" world, no nascent social-constructivist feminism poised to rescue her headstrong and powerful wome from the vortex of their own making.
Her peasant intuitions drives a grim hole through the fabric of progressivist optimism, whose middle-class buoyancy and wish-fulfillment she destroys with lethal intelligence. Colette's 'world is not the sanitized and harmless one we wish to inhabit with a collection of peaceful ideologies ; it is the real one charged with archaic instincts in which we do, half unaware of its real nature, groping to avoid its fangs and claws. One in which self-deluders are punished, as Colette once notoriously said of feminists, with "the whip and the harem." And one in which everything, from the wearing of Kashmir sapphires to the conducting of marriage negociations, from outings to the Palais de Glace to a first kiss, is governed by the tyrannical rythmns of Nature.
But she had also, of course, a biographic myth, a myth which had placed her from the beginning fair and square on the side of the oppressed, if not in their ranks. For her career had started not just with a book, the Claudine a l'Ecole of 1900, but with a marriage - or rather, a state of much-publicized slavery in the ghost-writers' harem of her husband, the appalling but complex Henri Gauthiers-Villars, alias Monsieur Willy, the corpulent and lecherous cad of Belle Epoque literature.
Insofar as Willy is now seen as troll-like patriarchy incarnate, Colette has fallen easily into the mold of martyr. The child bride ( she was betrothed at eighteen ) spiritually abused, forced to write soft lesbian porn for her fraudulent husband "writer" who finally breaks free to both expose him and reclaim her life : it is a melodrama of self-emancipation, and one that went far towards making her a Paris celebrity at the time, as she slid from respectable marriage into scandalous lesbianisrn in the legendary circle of Nathalie Barney.
But the Colette-Willy union, which lasted thirteen years, was never quite the simple abomination it was made out to be. There was more to the legend of the fat cruel Sultan and his waifish slave than met the eye. And Colette's flight from the provinces to Paris in the arms of Willy is the outcome of elements of her own backround which are themselves intrinsic to her nature. For Colette was never just a rootless ancilla for the overbearing Willy. From the first, she was an unsurpassed regurgitator of childhood, and a writer who derived inexhaustible substance from her mother, the fabulous, pagan "Sido". Sido is the lynch-pin to Colette's existence, and it is to Sido and to that childhood that we turn, as Colette did in later life, to unlock the riddles.
Sido was the daughter of one-quarter Black chocolate manufacturer narned Henri-Marie Landoy. She moved to Brussels in her youth and enjoyed its intellectual bohemia in the oompany of her journalist brothers before marrying a Burgundian landowner from the village of Saint-Savour-en-Puisaye in 1857. The marriage was not a success. Womanizing and drunkenly brutal, Jules Robineau-Duclos, whom Sido and the villagers called "The Savage" ( just as she called her own father "The Gorilla" ) assaulted her so violently that in self-defence she disfigured him with a heavy candlestick. After the birth of two children, Achille and Juliette, the Savage died and in 1855 she remarried, to a gentle and ineffectual tax oollector named Jules-Joseph Colette. In the family home in Saint-Saveur, in 1873, the girl who came to be known as “Minet-Cheri" was born.
From the countless recollections which the famous daughter began to write from her fifties on we have perhaps the most complete and completely self glorifying personal archaeology of a childhood ever undertaken in print. The Burgundy of the 1870s was a rawly rural place little touched by the rising industrial culture. Local post-card firms like Thin et Mouchon and Arthur Havoue have left us dozens of images of Saint-Saveur at this time, with its tortuous, bicycle-cluttered streets, its Mouchon hardware store displaying the latest sewing machines, its blankly suspicious peasant faces staring down what they know will be an indifferent witness.
There too is the river Loing choked with melancholy reeds, to which the girl prefered the dozens of stagnant ponds nearby, a fact which French critics gaily ascribe to a preference druidique. Withdrawn and archaic as the Wessex of Tess, the village world in the heart of the Yonne region is the setting for a pagan reverie in which a fervid intimacy with Nature - the intimacy of intense female solitude - is ecstatically claimed. Her third husband, Maurice Goudeket later left an eery portrait of the aging writer in his Pres de Colette, in which he describes her licking poisonous berries, eating leaves and caressing the backs of insects alighted upon the backs of her hands - all in order to savour the intricate surfaces of Nature directly. He goes on :
“...with her nose and forehead covered with yellow pollen, her hair in disorder and full of twigs, a bump here and a scratch there, her face innocent of powder and her neck moist, stumbling along out of breath, she was just like a bacchante after libations.”
The child was mother to the wonan. In Sido, the paean to her mother written in later life, we also see Sido herself as the pantheist progenitor of Colette. A figure uncannily prefiguring the old woman described by Goudeket. Here is Sido in a snow-storm :
“But when the din was at its height, there would be my mother, peering through a big brass-rimmed magnifying glass, lost in wonder as she counted the branched crystals of a handful of snow she had just snatched from the very jaws of the West wind as it flung itself upon our garden.”
Elsewhere, she remembered Sido dancing a mournful nocturnal rite alone in the garden as her eldest daughter Juliette gave birth in an upstairs room.
The cthonic mother who hurled apostrophes at the four point of the compass, who refused to lend her lobelias and dwarf roses to the church for Corpus Christi day and who gleefully conjured up everywhere "unexpected crises, burgeonings, metamorphoses and dramatic miracles" was a proleptic vision of Colette herself as garden-tending fertility icon, a trowelling Venus of Nuremburg impossibly knowledgable of the shape and name of every leaf. "She wanted to have the world to herself," Colette goes on, "deserted, in the form of a little enclosure with a trellis and a sloping roof. She wanted the jungle to be virgin but, even so, inhabited only by swallows, cats and bees, and the huge spider balancing atop his wheel of lace silvered by the night."
This isolated world bifurcated spiritually into two opposed camps. On the one hand, the telepathically connected world of women, animals and Nature; on the other, the alienated and thoroughly bewildered world of men : the Corilla, the Savage, and lastly the Quixotic father, whose principle achievement as an officer in the French army was to have had his leg amputated at the Battle of Marignan. Jules-Joseph, in fact, is the very model of Absurd Male so prominent in the fiction.
This would-be writer used to prepare in advance all the materials necessary for the writing of books, sealing wax, costly nibs, elaborate ink-pots and - a touch worthy of a Machado de Assis character like Ouincas Borba - volumes of fine paper tooled with the titles he was going to write : “My Campaigns", "Marshal MacMahon seen by one of his officers", "Elegant Algebra," etc. After his death it was found that there was not a single word written in any of them, an inefficiency carried over into the family's finances.
The Colette family system, potentially so neurotic, enveloped the whole of her childhood, a childhood superabundant in both detail and symbol. It only began to teeter into disaster with her sexual maturity. As she became marriagable, it collapsed completely, her potential dowry evaporated, and a fourth Absurd Male appeared as the saving knight.
The 35-year old Willy, son of the august academic publisher Albert Gauthier-Villars, who was later to publish both Marie Curie and Einstein and who was a friend of Colette's father, descended upon Saint-Saveur, a kind of porn-loving Pygmalion, suave, metropolitan and eruditely libertine. She married him in 1893, after a genuine infatuation which Colette scholars find extremely difficult to swallow and which is usually put down to the hormonal exoticism of adolescence. The marriage photograph straws a stern, unhappy and obviously ambivalent village affair trooping amid bare, clipped trees. A funeral.
Aside from that of Sartre-de Beauvoir, the Willy-Colette union is the French intelligensia's most notoriously sadistic. In her late memoir Mes apprentissages, published in 1936 five years after the unnoticed death of Willy, she claimed the right of the victor to write the history. Willy emerges badly.
Physically repulsive, paunchy and slick, a consummate con-man, his enormous fame in fin-de-siecle Paris derived from a music column in the Echo de Paris whose points of view were borrowed from an obscure and exploited musicologist named Pierre de Breville. He made money by using chains of ghost writers to fabricate pieces that bore his name. This factory system, not unusual in 1900s Paris, was then extended to his wife. The Claudine notebooks, her first written accounts of her childhood, which Willy later destroyed, were turned into the hugely successful Claudine novels, published under his name.
Willy, the man who lived in bachelor squalor amid heaped illegal German post-cards, created a commercial soft-porn sensation overnight not only by locking his wife in a room for four hours a day but also by creating around her an industrial media machine of astonishing sophistication.
In the first place, there were the novels themselves, titillating romps set initially in a provincial village school in which homosexual headmistresses, schoolgirls in heat and school inspectors dance a merry-go-rouncd of gay and sophomoric promiscuity. The first Claudine book, Claudine a l'ecole , actually ends during a village fete with the headmistress and the inspector in bed together, surprised by one of the voyeur-girls, like the snorting climax to a British "Carry On At School" film.
The effect in 1900 was exhilarating. The Claudine series became the kind of contrebande which English pornography smugglers squeezed into false humps in order to get them by Edwardian customs inspections, giving even greater flesh to the Blue Paris of gentlemanly legend. A place as morally foul and stewlike as eighteenth century Istanbul.
Then there was Claudine herself. Sasha Guitry described her as ''...depraved, charming and universal," a true early version of Lolita. She was also the first literary character, along with her contemporary Peter Pan, to be the theme of a mass production of accessories. Within months there were Claudine hats, Claudine hair-cuts, Claudine ice-creams, Claudine cigarettes, skin lotions ancl photographic plates. Within two years the juggernaut had moved to the stage at the Bouffe-Parisiens, with Claudine incarnated by Willy's lover, the Algerian cabaret vedette Polaire, and later by Colette herself. In a photograph of her youth, we see Colette almost deliberately manufactured as an embryonic Claudine slouching in a hammock in her sailor-suit, two enormous pythonesque braids draping a languorous adolescent's body. Willy the impressarial pornographer had only applied industrial method to the inner material of Colette herself. For Colette was to re-invent Claudine throughout her life.
Colette-Willy, in fact, was an inevitable symbiosis, not a soap opera of male-female tyranny. Willy's mass production factory, with its thousands of signed photographs, media events and its intimate liason with the metropolitan fabricators of scandal, invented not just the Claudine phenomenont of Colette herself. He provided for her a revolutionary kind of fame, one based exclusively on the media. The books did not need the recommendations they got from high-literary critics like Rachilde on the Mercure ( a friend of the ubiquitous Willy anyway ). They relied on the 1900 equivalents of shows like "Life-styles of the Rich and Famous" and "Hard Copy." "Colette" was invented like any TV star, given poses, personae, scandals and redemptions. And just as Claudine had given rise to tooth-brushes and coiffures, so Colette's beauty products of the 30s were designed to fill stores everywhere from Biarritz to Calais. Colette remained all her life a perfervid media animal constantly looking for breaks.
After their separation she wrote to him "I owe you everything...without you I am nothing." The photographic record of their miserable but productive union always shows the same scenes : Willy's cocked eye-brow and handlebar moustaches, his cold, heavy-ridded gaze of a small saurian ; the heavily over-decorated Victorian interiors in which the ill-matched bourgeois couple sit, he concentrating on his food, she gazing off forlornly into space in indescribable boredom. Saint Willy, he calls himself, patron des Claudines.. The reptile Willy who bitterly grieves the dead mistress who had given him his only child. The cold-blooded wag who sits in ladies' compartments on trains and calls himself the Marquise de Belboeuf ( a butch lesbian who later became Colette's lover ). The malignant cultural broker who out of spite oould sabotage the career of an Eric Satie. He is the Dracula of the Colette myth, but he is an intellectual cannibal with excellently useful connections in the vital salon of Arman de Caivallet and of Jeanne Muhlfeld, broker of reputations, where, as Cocteau said, the chess-game of immortality was played.
Out of this eccentric maelstrom emerged the mature, animistic and elegant Colette : with Dialogues des betes, her first signed work, in 1904, with Minne and L'Egarement de Minne ( united in one volume as L’Ingenue libertine, The Innocent Libertine, in 1909 ) and with La Vagabonde in 1910, which was nominated for the Prix Goncourt.
The Innocent Libertine is not generally considered to be a masterpiece or even a good novel. But it is her first roman d'analyse applied to the subject of male-female warfare. Its insinuating, sensually accurate rendering of sexual surrender culminates in a scene of nightmarish beauty as her heroine, Minne, experiences her first orgasm in a paroxysm of savage energy, her head thrashing about "like a child with meningitis."
The story is merely an odyssey of the nervous system to reach this point.
It opens with Minne, another fifteen year old Claudine, being read a newspaper report by her mother. Out on the Peripherique rival gangs are committing murders over a sixteen year old prostitute named Desfontaines "Copper-Rnob". The secluded, what would now be called BCBG girl in her monied appartment has found the alter-ego she needs in order to extracite herself from the claustrophia of a probably hysterical life as a wife-and-mother impeccably separated from the brutal and vivid reflexes of the body.
Her journey out of virginity and into the body, therefore, must take her on a roller-coaster of c1ass treason, as she wanders through the slums looking for the nubile bodies of proletarian ephebes. But her destiny, of course, doesn't lie in these hormone and eye-driven divigations ; it lies with a boy of her own class, her cousin Antoine, the true antagonist deriving from her own world. As soon as this relation begins to congeal into the erotic speculation preceding marriage, it reverts to the primitive duelling of animals, a cycle of torment, wounding and mistrust. Looking into a mirror, and thinking of the feral Copper-Knob, utters her intimate desideratum for herself : "I am sinister." The narrator later amplifies : "...the cruel little queen who hands out poison and knives to an entire imaginary people."
"The Innocent Libertine," especially in its last pages, is a curiously beautiful book because Minne's ultimate surrender to Antoine has been shown to be the climax of an obscure and subconscious wandering over which has had no control, and which results from a chemically treacherous clash of animal drive and cultural form ( Antoine, too, turns at the climactic moment from a nice middle-class boy into a "harsh, voloptuous mask of Pan" ). The endlessly tortuous game-playing and manipulative infidelities are demonstrated to obey an unswerving logic determined by the curve of female self-knowledge. A Dionysian discharge suddenly carries that knowledge into its apogee but beyond culture, which can ever be its repository. And this upward spiral into pleasure is made luminous to us through a style akin to Stendhal's voluptas psychologica, a psychological voloptuosity which has only rare counterparts in the Anglo-American novel, and which follows the phosphorescent oddities of sexual mood with the lightness and swiftness of a Japanese "master of the brush" painting crickets and flies.
Minne, like all Colette's adolescent girls - precursors perhaps of that schoolgirl first seen by the narrator of Nabokov's "The Enchanter" one day in the Tuileries in 1939 and who later metamorphosed into the most famous sylphyd of them all - is the perpetrator of guerilla war. Her betrayals and sadisms are punished by professional surveillance hired by her jealous husband, which she then evades with war-like vengeance. But this is not the warfare of oonventional marriage ( as Jules Renard, a contemporary, wrote in his diary, "Every marriage maintains itself by means of a grain of hatred." )
It is the groping collision of hostile principles, the woman evading the little black box into which men have put her, but then, having destroyed the prison, going back to its builder for a different consummation. The "duel of male and female," as Colette liked to put it, ends up in stasis - a term which originally refered to the stalemated warfare inside a Greek city-state. Minne, somewhat rarely for a Colette heroine, finds the happiness that deadlock can paradoxically unlock.
What gives this exploration of spiritual antagonism its carnal force is not only Colette's unremitting1y physical and immanent prose ; it is also her belief in a kind of Ovidian metamorphosis connecting the animal and human worlds. Of her most famous male character, Cheri, in the 1920 novel of that name, she wrote that he was an animal spirit trying to be re-born as a human. She famously described herself, during the latter part of her unhappy marriage to Willy, as "the caged squirrel", though Sylvain Bonmariage had a less flattering take on her : "She is a cat in heat for whom life is a succession of roof-tops." And in "Dialogues des betes" she had injected into French literature some of its most vital anthropomorphic characters since La Fontaine : Kiki-la-Doucette the cat and Toby-chien the terrier, who bicker and tussle like a married couple.
In one of her strangest novels, "La Chatte" of 1933, the Minne-Antoine couple is re-invented as Main-Camille, a union of dreamy male and robust female mediated by a shared cat, Saha, which he has hrought into the marrige. Jealously crazed by his affection for Saha, Camille throws the cat out of a window, forcing the shocked Antoine to retreat once more into the secretive and inert realm of organic things which he secretly craves, becoming as he does so a kind of spooky feline himself. Colette, as Peyre charged, loved the intrigues of bourgeois marriage-making, with its venal family politics and its crass divisions of financial spoils. But, like E.M. Forster, she also believed that life is not unbearable because it is a struggle but because it is a romance, the romance in her case merely being rooted via a gardener's shrewd eye in the cannibal love-making of animals. For unlike Forster - that other devotee of middle-class nuptials - she did not come from suburbia.
Just as the vertical exploration of the feminine psyche reached the apex of its fashionability between approximately 1890 and 1914 in Ibsen, Lawrence, Zweig and Woolf, so too did anthropomorphism and the study of human-animal correspondences. Kipling's "Jungle Book", Jules Renard's "Histoires naturelles", Apollinaire's "Le Bestiare" and Remy de Courmont's brilliant and whimsically charming "Physique de l' amour" ( translated by Ezra Pound as "The Natural Philosophy of Love" ) - all were heavily in the air. Gourmont was an early admirer of Colette's and, like the deistic nature writer Francis who wrote the preface for "Dialogues des bêtes", a kindred spirit. His exquisitely written encyclopedia of animal sex, which revels in imagery as dense as hers, tells us that "...the sexual inventions of humanity are nearly all anterior or even exterior to man. There is not one whose model, even perfected, is not offered him by the animals."
Gourmont describes complex patterns of parasitism bet;veen the sexes. Take the bonellie sea-worm, for example, whose female is one thousand times bigger than the male. The male is a "miniscule filament" who lives in her oesophagus and who descends like a mote of dust into her oviducts, so puny that he was long confused with true parasites. Elsewhere, delving into the sex-lives of "the bold female scaraboea, adroit chalicodomes, cold wise lycoses and proud, terrible mantes", he provides a perfect picture of a Colette male, especially the doomed beautiful boys like Cheri : "In the insect world the male is the frail, elegant sex, gentle and sober, with no employment save to please and to love. To the female the heavy work of digging, of masonry, and the danger of the hunt and of war."
And copulation is everywhere sparring. Hermaphrodite snails whip out needle sharp stilettoes with which they simultaneously transfix each other. The terrible female green grasshopper chews and swallows the genital ampulla, then her quivering digestible mate. As does the Alpine analote, a veritable "cannibal Marguerite de Bourgogne." The wretched male ephippigere has a spermatophore half his whole body size, which the female eats as hors d'oeuvre before proceding to the rest of him. "This male flesh," Gourmont comments drily, "is doubtless comforting to the mother to be."
There is a scene in "The Innocent Libertine" in which Minne and Antoine watch two snails copulate on a garden wall, a sight with which Colette, as the daughter of a part-time snail breeder, must have been intimately familiar. It arouses in them a fascinated unease, a shock of recognition. The long, slimey, arduously tentative embrace, the tense adhesion sometimes lasting hours. In some gastropods, the male, equipped with a sly little Cupid's bow, fires a spermicidal arrow called the "telum amoris", or arrow of love, into the female's integuments - love by hyperdermic injection. In many, the embrace is followed by pursuit, capture and cannibal feast.
Like Preying Mantises, orb-weaving spider and cerapotonic midges, the amorous snail proves the truth of de Gourmont's gloomy observation that it is better to be an extreme feminist than a moderate one, since Nature affords no example of any equality of the sexes. There, love is agon between predator and victim.
And yet, for Colette animals are not just a distantly ancestral version of humans, nor blindly bellicose war-horses of evolution. They are also windows into a contiguous spiritual universe, an alternative world of feeling. Animals are actually at the heart of her method of measuring the problems of personality. Rilke, the writer closest to her on this score, has left the record of an intuition identical to hers in his many poems treating of animals. His eighth Duino Elegy, which deals with the psychic world of both children and animals, expresses Colette's affinity with both :
“If the animal moving towards us so securely in a different direction had our kind of consoiousness, it would wrench us around and drag us along its path. But it feels its life as boundless, unfathomable, and without regard to its own oondition : pure, like its outward gaze. And where we see the future, it sees all timeand itself within all time, forever healed.
Deep in the animal's face is visible a "pure unsuperintended element" which Rilke in a beautiful phrase called "Nirgends ohne Nicht", the "nowhere without the no." In a letter of 1924, he elaborated :
“These, indeed, these oonfidants of the Whole, the animals, who are most at home in a broader segment of oonsciousness, most readily oonduct us, once again across, and are near to the medial condition.”
The animal gaze that "calmly looks us through and through"...it is exactly what one sees in those innumerable photographs of Colette with her cats, her eyes witchily mirroring theirs, momentarily non-human and fixed on a point which humans, it sees, cannot meet.
In her two greatest novels, "Cheri" and "The Last of Cheri" ( 1926 ), Colette creates a pandemian prose which matches not only her "hermaphroditic brain" constantly flickering between male and female, but also her primitive intuitions of animality. The world of these novels is indeed like a forest, a forest of narotic colors and scents through which move ghostly animal spirits tragically incarnated as moderns. Like the strange "windigo" spirits of Pacific Indians, they roam as lost souls through a world where they do not truly belong, biting flesh like animals.
Cheri charts the doomed affair between a 49-year old courtesan, Lea, de Lonvalle, and the 20-year old son of one of her rivals, the repentant and "jug-shaped" Madame Peloux - a "chubby little blond Eros" turned sour. Lea and this boy, "Cheri", are a couple who can never normalize themselves in society by virtue of her occupation and their widely separated ages. They are, therefore, abandoned to themselves, and to an erotic mother-son pathology. Like two symbiotic organisms, they cannot let go of each other and the failed intimacy which they set in motion leads inexorably, in the second Cheri novel, to the boy’s pathetic suicide.
Without question, Cheri is Colette's most mysterious and commanding male character. He has no intellect, is one of the "brainless gigolos." But his power comes from elsewhere. Colette claimed for him "an illiterate splendour." Like the Tadzio of Death in Venice, he is an animate kouros, a Greek youth of glyptic beauty. Enigmatically phlegmatic and passive, he is as chiselled as a Phidias statue, a powerhouse of cruel, formal glamour. We see him first in the novel's very opening scene, a spoilt child trying to grab her pearls, as gorgeously coloured as a butterfly :
"In front of the pink curtains barred by the sun he danced, black as a dainty devil on a grill. But as he drew near the bed he became white again in silk pyjamas doe-skin mules."
His glamour is concentrated in his eye-lashes, eye-lashes that are lovingly described over and over. Late in the novel his friend Desmond watches him as he sleeps and admires his beauty : "Especially his lashes, his lashes are - he stared at Cheri's lashes, lustrous and thick, and at the shadow they shed over the brown-black and blue-white of his eye." These baby-sofy, raven-blue lashes "revelled out into two winged points" suggest his moral essence - "...mutinous but amenable, insufficiently chained and yet incapable of being free."
Cheri is more or less forced to marry the young and extremely naive Edmée, a disastrous mix-match which forces him back into the arms of his mother figure. There are subtle arguments between them as to the colour scheme of the house they buy on the Boulevard d'Inkermann, Cheri insisting on strong, deep colours that will hark back to the womb-like Pompeian decor of Lea, whose rooms are "mysterious and tinged like the insides of water-melons " and Edmée struggling to maintain a little oasis somewhere of virginal white, even if it is only a marble bust. The house's decor is thus yet another sexual battleground, with hostile oolours struggling for dominance, and Edmée's doomed innocence has to recoil before Cheri's barbaric onslaught of pumpkin-yellow cushions.
But over both of them towers the stupendous, fleshy, sybaritic Lea, a "perfect vampire" who has "never had to soil her lips on a wrinkled body." She is the culmination of the courtesans who litter Colette's pages, and the essence of female power as she conceives it.
In the period of the Third Republic, and in particular the years between 1870 and 1914, courtesans were a society unto themselves : perhaps the first classless capitalist women in history. Blanche d'Antigny, La Paiva, Cléo de Mérode, La Belle Otero - the grandes horizontales maintained a sub-culture which circulated billions of francs in international shares. There is a bitchy scene in Cheri where Lea and Madame Peloux oompare their investment portfolios in order to spy on each other's careers. Lea thrusts by describing the killing she has just made on Oil Prefered shares ; Charlotte Peloux counters by reporting a wise investment in Pressed Bricks Common. The courtesan is not a male slave, but a financial iconoclast cutting her own swathe through the world with vulgar panache.
She has even left her own distintive architecture in Paris, like the Paiva palace on the Champs- Elysées, now the Travellers' Club, famous for its solid onyx stairwell. Lea belongs to this class, uprooted and marooned by their own scandalous freedom.
Her tea-parties with Charlotte and their declining cronies are witty vignettes of the courtesan Old Guard descending into absurdity and narrowing their vampirism down purely to money and assets. But Lea, unlike them, has a fatal and tender weakness - the sad animal Cheri, who can only see past her age in the tumult of sex. She is doomed to a kind of gradual, crepuscular suffering which eats away at her until old age paralyzes the affair.
Colette seems to have thought that female sexulity polarized around two little-explored and intractably mysterious moments in a woman's life : the first love and the last. Why are these two moments so filled with inexplicable gravity? Because they are turning points of renunciation, renunciations that bear more heavily on women than on men. Colette's aging women face that moment so subtly described by Stefan Zweig in his story "The Burning Secret", in which a middle-aged Jewish woman sitting in the restaurant of a lonely spa sees a beautiful young officer on the far side of the room ; feeling her own desire for him, and knowing that she will not turn away from him, she also knows that a climatic moment of her life will be reached with him, the last love-making which will simultaneously be the renunciation of sex. Colette's adolescents face the same terrible moment with respect to the renunciation of innocence. In both cases, loss of innocence and experience is brought about by the hostile and desired agency of men. Wanting to escape men, wanting them : the adult woman splits into a nostalgia for the first renunciation and a bitter yearning for the last.
These moments carry a spiritual weight that happiness and sex do not, because the latter are dependent on men, and therefore ephemeral. Colette's own dabbling in lesbian amours did not save her from this, and does not save any of her fictive women. Love is a passing opportunity which is never really taken.
Lea is certainly a vampire, just like that same Paiva who kept her dead husband mummified in a German castle. But within her is enacted, in lightning-swift moods, the drama of dissolution and re-birth that marks the cruel climax of the erotic odyssey. As Bataille says, it is "a quest not unallied to death." As Colette puts it "...an abyss from which love emerges, pale, taciturn and full of nostalgia for death."
Lea herself reverts back to same ancient earth element, her hands now covered, as she looks at them towards the end of the novel, with minute parallelograms like those which a drought carves, after the rains, on banks of clay. In The Last of Cheri Cheri visits her years later after the War and finds a "jolly old gendarme", a sexless matriarch whose only advice to him is "You should have your urine analyzed."
The brilliant surface of amorous war has been shattered like a crust of ice. Cheri slinks off resolved to kill himself, and as he goes down her stairs he feels the steps underneath his feet dissolve "like the bridge of sleep between two dreams.''
This moment is the climax of Colette's own exploration of love in the novels. It is one which - despite all the accessible vividness and wit of Colette's style - we now have some difficulty in fathoming. For Colette's sexual world is harshly at odds with our own, or rather the world that our ideologies decree. Her characters are not sexual neurotics, which makes them bizarre to us. Their antogonisms are not political, which make them handsomely archaic. Sexual love in this universe is evocative of the rythms of life and death, an intuition which we deny with fanatical optimism. But her characters are not banally alienated by optimism , and the mewing resents which it engenders. They stand aloof like solitary animals enduring more enigmatic sufferings. They are like the figures of stained-glass windows - dimly recognizable, grown strangely improbable, but more vivid than the decipherers below.
