Colette The Soldier's Hat (and other stories)

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-915568-70-0
Verlag: Dedalus European Classics
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 5, 176 Seiten

Reihe: Dedalus European Classics

In 1943, despite her own physical disabilities and the stress of living in a Paris under Nazi occupation, Colette, aged 70, published this delightful quartet of tales. In 'The Soldier's Hat', a middle-aged woman blossoms when an unlikely love affair embellishes her hard-working existence - until she makes a fateful mistake. 'The Tender Shoot' sees a fifty-year-old roué trounced when his roving eye falls on a fifteen-year-old country girl. In 'The Green Sealing Wax', the success of a widow's attempt to forge her late husband's will depends on the colour of the sealing wax she uses. 'Armande' is a tale of two bashful lovers. Maxime is unable to declare his passion for Armande, nor can she express her feelings for him, until one day she shakes a door handle too violently... A 'lost' story, 'A Wedding', from the first edition of Colette's final work of fiction, 'Gigi', completes this late flowering of Colette's exceptional talent.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle

Weitere Mitwirkende

Anderson, Graham

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

By March 1943, when Le képi (The Soldier’s Hat) was published, Colette had just turned seventy; her mobility was becoming increasingly impaired by arthritis; and to make her confinement all the more painful, Paris was under Nazi occupation.

The slim young woman of the early 1900s was now fat; the long, plaited rope of hair had turned into a wiry, hennatinted crop; but the small pointed face and the penetrating blue eyes still announced a writer with all her faculties.

In the thirty or more years since reclaiming her rights to the two Minne novellas which would become, in 1909 and under her own name, the novel L’ingénue libertine (The Innocent Libertine), Colette had produced a huge body of work, including amongst some thirty works of fiction La vagabonde, the celebrated Chéri, Le blé en herbe, La fin de chéri, La naissance du jour, Duo and La chatte.

Following her eventual divorce from Willy—Henry Gauthier-Villars, her Svengali-like mentor and tormentor— she had married twice more. Her second husband, Henry de Jouvenel (1876-1935), a diplomat and journalist, had been the editor of Colette’s articles for the newspaper Le Matin. They married in 1912, and a daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, was born in 1913, when Colette was forty. Henry de Jouvenel’s son by his first marriage, Bertrand, born in 1903, began an affair with his stepmother when still a teenager in 1920. The relationship caused a scandal which led to Colette’s second divorce in 1924, but was also the inspiration behind her novel of 1923, Le blé en herbe (The Ripening Seed).

In 1925, Colette was introduced at a friend’s house to Maurice Goudeket, a handsome but reserved man, Jewish, with a French mother and a Dutch father, who worked as a dealer in pearls and had ambitions as a writer. He was 35, she 52. They were lovers for ten years before marrying in 1935, an event occasioned by their being sent by the papers for which they were then writing, La République (Colette) and France Soir (Goudeket) to travel to New York on the maiden voyage of the transatlantic liner Normandie. Maurice Goudeket had half-jokingly remarked that they would not be allowed to share a room in any American hotel, unless, of course, they were to marry. (1) The swiftly arranged and sparsely attended civil ceremony initiated the third and most serene of Colette’s marriages. Goudeket was to prove a lifelong support to her both as protector and promoter of her literary reputation and as carer in her embattled old age.

The Normandie, incidentally, was to have a brief career. With war threatening, the ship took refuge in New York harbour when hostilities became seemingly unavoidable. There, it was interned by the US government on 3rd September 1939. Trapped for two years, the vessel was, after America’s entry into the war, transferred to the US Navy. Whilst undergoing conversion to a troop ship, it caught fire, in February 1942, and capsized. The luckless former holder of the Blue Riband was eventually sent for scrapping in 1946.

The looming war had never made a great distraction from their work for Colette and Maurice. Like Jane Austen with the Napoleonic Wars, Colette’s writing never made any allusion to the politics of the day (not that the unlikely pairing of Austen and Colette can be made in many other respects). When war came, Colette was writing, amongst other things, articles on beauty for the women’s magazine Marie-Claire, whilst simultaneously suffering painful problems with her hips and teeth. She and Maurice fled Paris at the approach of the Germans in May 1940, but after many temporary moves, returned to their apartment in the Palais Royal in September. A volume of novellas, Chambre d’hôtel (Chance Acquaintances), was published by Fayard in December. It was in this same month, that having felt twinges of discomfort in her legs for the past year, Colette submitted to an X-ray, which showed she had rheumatoid arthritis in both hips. By the winter of 1940-41, the German occupiers had seized control of most of France’s newspapers, installing editors sympathetic to their cause. Censorship had come in. In spite of the distaste it inspired, Colette continued to contribute (non-political) articles to a number of papers and magazines under new, Nazi-approved editorship: Le Petit Parisien, a popular daily; Gringoire, a right-wing political and literary weekly which switched from its anti-war stance of the late 1930s to becoming a supporter of the Vichy government after the defeat of France; and La Gerbe, a pro-Nazi weekly.

Like most of the French population, especially those in occupied Paris, Colette felt there was nothing she could actively do, and she still had her living to make. She had recognised in herself a certain passivity, (2), a tendency to allow the outside world to be what it would, while her inner life and her work continued within their narrower horizons. All this changed when Maurice Goudeket was arrested by the Gestapo in a sweep intended to round up prominent Jewish Parisians. While Maurice was removed from their apartment, calmly enough and with bag packed, Colette began a frantic campaign to have him freed. The prisoners were held in a detention camp in Compiègne, where the conditions were spartan but not hostile. After seven weeks of agitated comings and goings, Colette succeeded in obtaining Maurice’s release, at the prompting it seems of the French wife of the German ambassador. The few months of calm that followed were once again disturbed when the German command issued directions that French Jews would be obliged to wear a yellow star. And not long after, in July of 1942, there began the mass deportation of French Jews to the concentration camps. Feeling his continued presence was a danger to them both, Maurice escaped to friends in Saint-Tropez, in the free zone, where he stayed for several months. At the end of the year the Germans responded to the Allied landings in North Africa by moving into and taking control of the so-called ‘free France’ of the Vichy government, and Maurice was forced to flee again. This time, after some perilous moments, he returned to Paris, where for the next eighteen months he avoided the danger of another pre-dawn raid by absenting himself at night-time to a servant’s quarters and emerging only after nine in the morning. (3) Whether this ruse was sophisticated enough to work, or whether he was simply lucky, there was no further trouble before Paris was liberated in August 1944.

Throughout all these difficult times, Colette continued to work. Her physical incapacity was becoming increasingly burdensome—she bought herself a motorised wheelchair in June 1942—but she would go on to write some of her most compelling stories and novellas. She had already published her only novel of the war years (and her last), Julie de Carneilhan, in December 1941. It has come under question for its unsympathetic portrayal of what is taken to be Henry de Jouvenel, and of the riches of his first and (after Colette) third wives, both of them Jewish. The novel was admired by many and despised by some. In the France of Alfred Dreyfus, the ugly face of antisemitism was barely concealed at all; under the Nazi occupation of 1940, sympathisers willingly raised it again. For Colette, as perhaps for large sections of the population, antisemitism was not so much active, or insistent, but as Colette’s friend Renée Hamon once remarked, “native”. (4)

*

Despite the personal difficulties of its author and the pressures of sustaining a career in wartime, Le képi, a collection of two novellas and two short stories, is the book that contains the best of Colette’s notably more relaxed and pure fiction in these later years. In it, she exhibits, more than in any other similar volume, a wide variety of techniques, an easy beauty and directness of language, and a rare empathy for the innocent foolishness of people in love.

The title story relates, in glimpses, the late-flowering love affair of a middle-aged friend of the narrator. Marco— her meaningless pen-name reflects her obscurity as a ghost writer—toils to earn a living as a purveyor of cheap sensational literature for newspaper serialisation. A jokey response to a lonely-hearts advertisement leads to the sudden blaze of an unexpected affair, for which the twenty-five-year-old Colette becomes her mentor. In the background, the men in Colette’s life—these are real people, Willy, her husband at the time, and Paul Masson, her friend—fire off cynical and misogynistic remarks. The incident that dooms this affair is full of pathos. All this is seen through the prism of the narrator’s own busy and complicated life, a device both distancing and intimate.

Le tendron (The Budding Shoot), has the more classical and straightforward device of the protagonist, Albin Chaveriat, telling his story uninterrupted to his hostess, our narrator. Here, the voice is entirely that of Chaveriat, a man of advanced years recounting the adventure which cured him, long ago, of his predilection for young girls. The tone is dignified and humorous, a confession not so much remorseful as wry. We are drawn, if not to condone, then to sympathise with behaviour which would be scandalous, and possibly criminal today, but which would, a century ago, have been considered merely unwise. Even at the time though, Colette would have been aware she was treading on thin ice. It is her lightness of touch, her vivid rendering of the country setting, that invest the story...