Colette The Innocent Libertine

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-915568-69-4
Verlag: Dedalus European Classics
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

Reihe: Dedalus European Classics

In this novel of two parts - originally two separate novellas - we see the heroine Minne at two stages in her life. The cherished teenager, only child of a devoted mother, has a secret life: she wishes to belong to one of the street gangs who roam the outer boulevards of Paris. Her desire for excitement, power and love, drives the innocent into a dangerous adventure. Years later, as a married woman, she remains dissatisfied. She takes lovers, none of whom can make her a 'whole woman'. Only when her marital crisis reaches an extreme pitch does she find the answer, in an unexpected place. The Innocent Libertine was among the earliest works to be published by Colette under her own name.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in rural Burgundy in 1873. At twenty, she married Henry Gauthier-Villars, known as 'Willy', a critic, journalist and self-promoting man of letters, fourteen years older than herself. Soon immersed in his Parisian literary world, she wrote for him the sensational and highly successful Claudine series of novels. But the pair separated in 1906 and were divorced in 1910. She subsequently married twice more. Her writing career continued in spite of much turmoil, including spells as a dancer, mime artist and actor. Among her most renowned works are La vagabonde (1910), Chéri (1920), Le blé en herbe (1923), La naissance du jour (1928) and Gigi (1944). Her literary fame was matched by admiration for her strong-minded, independent and often controversial lifestyle. Although crippled by arthritis in her last decade, she nevertheless remained active throughout the war years in Nazi-occupied Paris, having become by now the grande dame of French literature. She was elected president of the Académie Goncourt in 1949 and appointed Grand Officier in the Légion d'honneur in 1953. On her death in August 1954, she became the first woman in France to be honoured by a state funeral.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Colette, Sidone-Gabrielle

Weitere Mitwirkende

Anderson, Graham

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Colette’s beginnings as a writer have become so well known that they are as much a story in themselves as the novels and tales she would go on to produce. As recently as 2018, Keira Knightley took the leading role in Wash Westmoreland’s film Colette, a film which centres on the years of her marriage to Henry Gauthier-Villars.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873, in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, a village in the Yonne department in the northern, less well-heeled part of Burgundy. She married Gauthier-Villars—‘Willy’—in 1893, at first assisting in secretarial tasks within his complicated network of literary activities. Fourteen years her senior, Willy wrote serious music criticism for the Echo de Paris and published non-fiction titles on subjects such as photography, but this was only a minor part of his output. He used many aliases, and under the names of Maugis, Jim Smiley, Boris Zichine and others, there appeared a steady stream of “lascivious comic almanacs and articles.” (1) Much of the material Willy published was ghost-written, by a string of hack writers, friends and acquaintances, not an uncommon practice in the Paris of the day, where the appetite for sensational fiction needed constant feeding. Colette illustrates this drudge-work in her story Le képi (The Soldier’s Hat), 1943. The protagonist of the title story is a middle-aged woman who makes her living by churning out cheap novels for serialisation in the papers, on exotic subjects such as Ancient Rome, for a sou per line.

In the late 1890s, Colette began to write, at her husband’s suggestion, stories based on her own life, featuring a spirited girl from a country village who rises to become a fixture in the salons of Paris. These are the famous ‘Claudine’ novels: Claudine à l’école (Claudine at School), Claudine à Paris (Claudine in Paris), Claudine en ménage (Claudine Married) and Claudine s’en va (Claudine Takes Off). Willy at first ignored Claudine à l’école, then later rediscovering the notebooks containing the manuscript, realised it had exceptional qualities. The four Claudine books that followed, from 1900 to 1903, enjoyed enormous success. They were published however, under Willy’s own name, as head of the Gauthier-Villars vast and many-tentacled writing empire (or “the shop”, as Colette used to call it). These works contained considerable input from Willy, in the form of editorial suggestions, accentuation of certain themes, demands for more risqué material, textual additions of his own.

In 1904, Colette published Minne, a novella featuring another rebellious schoolgirl, whose fantasies in this case come to nothing. The following year, Minne having proved a successful (though slighter) follow-up to the Claudine series, a sequel appeared, Le mariage de Minne, a book whose title was later changed to Les égarements de Minne (which could be translated as The Aberrations of Minne, or Minne Goes Off the Rails). These two volumes, again under Willy’s name, disappeared into the ceaseless churn of the “shop’s” output and were little heard of again.

Meanwhile, the Willy/Colette marriage was beginning to come apart. Willy, a famous self-promoter, seemed to Colette, after a dozen years or more, too much the master of her fate, love him though she did; he was also serially unfaithful. A separation took place (its details agonising to both parties) in 1906, a year in which Colette “published” nothing. She had spent large parts of the summer in the country house bought by Willy in more affluent times at Les Monts-Bouccons in the Jura, not far from Besançon. This is where Colette, in the myth that grew up around her, was locked away by her husband and forced to produce the pages he would turn into the salacious novels that sold so well. In fact, Colette enjoyed the writing, and came to adore the country setting of the house, a former farmhouse purchased at the beginning of the Claudine years and sold in 1908 to help pay Willy’s mounting debts. While Willy came and went, always busy with his affairs in Paris, Colette wrote, walked, rode her horse, exercised on her gymnastic equipment and came to appreciate more fully her worth as a writer and her need to act as an independent woman.

Two significant developments around the time of the separation were Colette’s association with “Missy” and her new ambitions as a stage performer. Once back in Paris, Colette abandoned the home she shared with Willy and moved into Missy’s luxurious apartment in rue Georges-Ville. Missy was a grande dame—Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belboeuf—ten years older than Colette. They had met in 1905, and sharing an interest in the stage, had begun to take lessons in mime and acting. Much abused in her early life, Missy now led a notoriously free one as an immaculately clad gentleman, the male impersonation being as much the deliberate creation of a private alter ego as any expression of militant lesbianism. Colette and Missy would remain loyal friends, if gradually more distant, until the latter’s death by suicide in 1944. In taking up amateur, and then professional stage work, Colette was rejecting the life of the Paris literary salons, satisfying her restless spirit in a typically challenging way, and intending to become the mistress of her own fortunes: only partly in the financial sense, for her situation remained precarious. Willy’s lavish spending had left the couple almost penniless at the time the house at Les Monts-Bouccon had to be sold. Although Willy was supportive (and even encouraging) of Colette’s new directions, there was nevertheless the matter of the séparation des biens to be agreed. Since Willy held the copyright of the early Claudine and Minne novels, Colette earned nothing from them. She was scandalised when, in February 1909, she discovered that he had already sold, in autumn 1907, the rights to the publishers Vallette and Ollendorff for a combined sum of 7,400 francs. The comparatively friendly spirit of their separation received a blow from which it never recovered. The divorce was finally completed in the following year, 1910.

The year 1910 has a double significance for Colette. She published La vagabonde (The Vagabond), a novel based on her own experiences and describing the life of a touring player, with its uncertain financial rewards and physical hardships. Although many of her stage performances had been in adaptations of her own works, in particular the Claudine books (it was the actress Polaire,* mentioned by Antoine in The Innocent Libertine, who had first created the role and thereby made her own name), the new novel marked a change in trajectory for her literary career. La vagabonde can be taken as the first of her mature, full-length works, and confirms her as a writer of originality and power. Her signature is on the cover: Colette Willy, a name she retained until 1923 when she adopted the simple, single name Colette.

To return to the period 1904–1905 and the publication of the two Minne novellas, an unclassifiable piece, Dialogues de bêtes appeared in March 1904, credited to Colette Willy. In it, Colette’s two pets, Toby the French bulldog and Kiki-la-Doucette, her cat, “exchange piquant confidences” and “probably because it was too quirky and poetic to be profitable”, Willy let her sign it. Although “it is, in places, insufferably coy”, it also has “a joyful, poetic vigour” (2) The dialogues set off the duel (and in Colette herself the dual personality) between Toby, the obedient licker of his overbearing master’s hand and Kiki, the supposed “good” pet who is in fact full of vanity and cruelty. Three more dialogues were added to the original four, making a new volume, Sept dialogues de bêtes, published in 1905.

Two years later, in 1907, the Mercure de France published the fifth and last Claudine novel, La retraite sentimentale (The Retreat from Love). Written over the troubled summer of 1906, the novel is set in a house approximating to Les Monts-Bouccon. “Bedroom scenes and salacious fireside chats” (with Claudine’s guest Annie) “occupy most of the novel”, writes Judith Thurman. (3) Claudine, in the end, turns away in disgust from Annie’s reminiscences and focuses her attention on her surroundings, her house, her animals, nature, as if Colette herself were dismissing from her life all the impurities that had hitherto coloured it. The dismissal is perhaps more wishful thinking than a realistic prognostication of the future.

Finally, in 1908, came Les vrilles de la vigne (The Tendrils of the Vine), a collection of twenty short pieces which have something of the flavour of prose poems. One is addressed to Missy, another describes the fate of a nightingale who finds, at dawn, its feet ensnared in the tendrils of the vine which have advanced during the night. Its vow to keep awake by singing all night is an image for Colette’s feelings about her marital plight. Others reflect on the unbridgeable gap that has opened between her simple upbringing in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye and the complicated life she now struggles with. Willy is known to have read and advised on the manuscript, which also contains much “candid and intimate eroticism” (4) and earns the comment in the margin, in Willy’s hand: “Keep going, you charming little horror!” (5)

These three works, Dialogues de bêtes, La retraite sentimentale and Les vrilles de la vigne, were all published with the signature Colette...