colette, again

ok, so today is the birthday of colette, my favorite author.......the following is from the writer's almanac via minnesota public radio's web site..............It's the birthday of (Sidonie Gabrielle) Colette, born in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, France (1873). At the age of 20, she married an older man, a writer and critic who employed a number of ghostwriters. He convinced Colette to write down stories about her childhood and embellish them with juicy details. When she did, he published them in his name as Claudine at School (1900), the first novel in the Claudine series, about an outspoken, clever young woman who discovers a love affair between a headmistress and a young female teacher. Colette's early writing was forced labor: her husband locked her in a room until she had produced enough pages for the day, and he kept the royalties. After fleeing her husband in 1906, Colette became a Parisian music-hall performer famous for baring one breast while dancing. At the Moulin Rouge, she caused even more controversy when she took a woman into a passionate embrace. The show caused a riot. The curtain had to be brought down early, and Colette became the talk of the town.

Colette began to write at least one book a year, producing more than 80 volumes, including Ch?ri (1920), My Mother's House (1922) and Sido (1930). Proust admired her, and wrote to her to say that her novella Mitsou (1930), about a music-hall artist who falls in love with an officer on leave, had moved him to tears. She kept up to two dozen cats in her house, and her novel La Chatte (The Cat, 1933) deals with a kind of love triangle between a man, a woman and a cat. In 1944, at the age of 72, she published Gigi, about a spontaneous young girl who is trained by courtesans in "the honorable habits of women without honor." It was adapted for the theater in 1951, with a young Audrey Hepburn in the title role, and later made into a movie.

When she died in 1954 Colette was denied a Catholic funeral, but thousands attended the state funeral provided by the French government?the first for a woman. A plaque on her house in Paris reads, "Here lived, here died Colette, whose work is a window wide open on life."

Colette said, 'sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

And she said, "The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike," and "What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner."


In the short story chance aquaintances, colette recalls a vacation trip that she took to a rented mountain 'villa' along with her cat, that ended up with a stay of several weeks at a spa..........there is a touching paragraph that i will type in long-hand..............'the striped cat was called Peronella at first, then Prrou. You'll find the two names in my earlier novels; but these names fall to shreds on her like second-rate clothing. She became an unclassifiable, private-edition cat, and as is universally known- cats with strong personalities need no names. She was called "Come Here", she was called "where have you got to?".......and "lets be off...." not to mention fancy names, invented at moments of enthusiasm or tenderness, such as "light of the mountainside', or 'o striped to the utmost of stripeability' ....'birdcat'...and so on. No one made much of a fuss of her, not even me...She was never called on by reporters, and she granted no interviews. We lived together. When i had to leave her behind with my mother during a long absence, the striped cat took it into her head to die, and she died. If i mention her in this tale now and again, it is not because I want to give her any special promenance in it, but because she was a part of my life........' I have read and reread this piece numerous times, and it always brings me to the brink of tears...how Colette can describe her life and aquaintances in such a poignant manner....even down to her cat.....which she probably missed more than many/any of her husbands.......