Colette

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Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

Born

28 January 1873
Yonne, France

Died

3 August 1954 (aged 81)

Paris, France

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Occupation

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Colette

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Signature

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Colette (French: [k.lt]) (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, 28 January 1873 3 August 1954) was a French
novelist nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Her best known work, the
novella, Gigi (1944), was the basis for the film and Lerner and Loewe stage production of the same
name. She was also a mime, an actress and a journalist.
[1]

Contents
[hide]

1 Family and background

2 Early career (1893-1912)

3 Established author, 1912-1954

4 Legacy

5 Notable works

6 See also

7 References

7.1 Citations

7.2 Bibliography

7.3 Further reading

8 External links

Family and background[edit]

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born on 28 January, 1873, to war hero and tax collector Jules-Joseph
Colette and his wife Adle Eugnie Sidonie ("Sido"), ne Landoy, in the village of Saint-Sauveur-enPuisaye, Burgundy Region. The family was initially well off, but by the time she was of school age
poor financial management had substantially reduced her father's income and she attended a public
school from the ages of 6 to 17 - this was, nevertheless, a fairly extensive education for a girl of the
period.
[2][3]

Early career (1893-1912)[edit]

In 1893 she married Henry Gauthier-Villars (18591931), a well-known author and publisher, and
her first four novelsthe four Claudine stories, Claudine l'cole (1900), Claudine
Paris (1901), Claudine en menage(1902), and Claudine s'en va (1903)appeared under his name.
They chart the coming of age of their heroine, Claudine, from an unconventional fifteen year old in a
Burgundian village to the literary salons of turn-of-the-century Paris. (The four are published in
English as Claudine at School, Claudine in Paris, Claudine Married, and Claudine and Annie). The
story they tell is semi-autobiographical, but not entirelymost strikingly, Claudine, unlike Colette, is
motherless.
[4][5]

Willy, fourteen years older than his wife and one of the most notorious libertines in Paris, introduced
Colette into avant-garde intellectual and artistic circles while betraying her sexually and encouraging
her in lesbianaffairs. It was he who chose the titillating subject-matter of the Claudine novels, "the
secondary myth of Sappho...the girls' school or convent ruled by a seductive female
teacher"(Ladimer, p.53). Nevertheless, Colette later said that she would never have become a writer
if not for Willy.
[6][7]

Colette and Willy separated in 1906, although it was not until 1910 that the divorce became final.
She had no access to the sizable earnings of the Claudine books - the copyright belonged to Willy and until 1912 she followed a stage career in music halls across France, sometimes playing
Claudine in sketches from her own novels, earning barely enough to survive and often hungry and
unwell. This period of her life is recalled in La Vagabonde (1910), which deals with women's
independence in a male society - a theme to which she would regularly return in future works. During
these years she embarked on a series of relationships with other women, notably with Mathilde de
Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf ("Missy"), with whom she sometimes shared the stage. On January 3,
1907, an onstage kiss between Missy and Colette in a pantomime entitled Rve d'gypte caused a
near-riot, and as a result they were no longer able to live together openly, although their relationship
continued for another five years.
[8][9][10]

Established author, 1912-1954[edit]

Colette, painted ca. 1896 byJacques Humbert

In 1912 Colette married Henri de Jouvenel, the editor of Le Matin. A daughter, Colette de Jouvenel,
nick-named Bel-Gazou, was born in 1913. During the war she devoted herself to journalism, but
marriage allowed her to devote her time to writing, and in 1920 she published Chri, the work that
established her reputation. The novel tells of an aging demimondaine (courtesan), La, who gives
her young lover, Chri, to a woman half her age. The theme of acceptance of the inevitable is one
that is common in her writing.
[8][11][12]

The marriage to Jouvenel ended in divorce in 1924, partly due to Jouvenel's infidenities and partly to
Colette's own affair with her sixteen year old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel. In 1925 she met
Maurice Goudeket, who became her final husband (the couple stayed together until her death).
[8][11]

Already an established writer (The Vagabond had received three votes for the prestigious Prix
Goncourt), the decades of the 1920s and 1930s were Colette's most productive and innovative
period. Set mostly in Burgundy or Paris during the Belle poque, her work treated married life,
sexuality, and the problems of a woman's struggle for independence. It was frequently quasiautobiographical: Chri (1920) and Le Bl en herbe (1923) both deal with love between an aging
woman and a very young man, a situation reflecting her relationship with Bertrand de Jouvenel and
even Goudeket, who was sixteen years her junior. La Naissance du Jour (1928) is her explicit
criticism of the conventional lives of women, expressed in a meditation on age and the renunciation
of love through the character of her mother, Sido.
[13]

[11][8]

[14]

By this period Colette was frequently acclaimed as France's greatest woman writer. "It ... has no plot,
and yet tells of three lives all that should be known", wrote Janet Flanner of Sido. "Once again, and
at greater length than usual, she has been hailed for her genius, humanities and perfect prose by
those literary journals which years ago ... lifted nothing at all in her direction except the finger of
scorn."
[15]

Colette was 67 years old at the fall of France, and remained in Paris, in her apartment in the Palais
Royal, throughout the Occupation. Her husband Maurice Goudeket, a Jew, was arrested by the
Germans in December 1941, and although he was released again through the intervention of the
French wife of the German ambassador, Colette lived through the rest of the war years with the
anxiety of a possible second arrest.
In the postwar years Goudeket took care of Colette as she became increasingly crippled by arthritis,
supervising the preparation of her collected works, or Oeuvres completes(1948-1950).
In her last years she became a famous public figure, and on her death on August 3, 1954, she was
given a state funeral, the first French woman of letters to be granted this honour, before being
interred in Pre-Lachaise cemetery.
[16][17]

Legacy[edit]

Colette's tomb in Pre Lachaise Cemetery.

Colette was elected to the Belgian Royal Academy (1935), the Acadmie Goncourt (1945, and
President in 1949), and a Chevalier (1920) and Grand Officer (1953) of the Lgion d'honneur.

[12]

During the German occupation of France, Colette aided her Jewish friends, including hiding her
husband in her attic all through the war. When she died in Paris on 3 August 1954, she was the first
woman given a state funeral in France, although she was refused Roman Catholic rites because of
her divorces. Colette is interred in Pre Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash paid tribute to the writer in the song, "The Summer I Read
Colette", on her 1996 album 10 Song Demo.
Truman Capote wrote a short story about her (1970) called "The White Rose".