RISING FROM THE RANKS

KINDRED SPIRITS

COLETTE, A HISTORY OF EMANCIPATION

It all started with a house and a garden on 8, Rue de l’Hospice, in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, where Sidonie Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 : “All was faery and yet simple among the fauna of my early home…”. It was in the garden lined with flat stones where magnificent bunches of fragrant lilac hung from climbing shrubs, that young Colette was at her happiest. She had already realised that she enjoyed more freedom there. She was allowed to wander at will in the garden, “as a plant in a hedge, as a lizard on its wall”. We can picture her leaning against the trunk of the weeping ash, concealed behind the protective curtain of its cascading branches, or sitting on the sun-warmed flagstones of the terrace. Although she unwillingly agreed to leave her childhood garden at the age of eighteen, it was with the promise of reviving it in the many novels that describe it at different times of her life : My Mother’s House, Claudine and Annie, Sido and many others.

Colette was very young and inexperienced when she married Henry Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy, a Don Juan of the belle époque who was older than her and who subjected the fragile young woman she once was to all the types of servitude imposed by a society which, far from acknowledging the injustices of the patriarchy, continued to encourage them. She was unhappy for a long time and for a long time unable to ward off the evil blighting her life : subservience to a man’s decisions. She submissively worked hard to satisfy all the whims of the husband who kept her prisoner in a cramped Paris room, “where nothing spoke of comfort, of personal choice, of love”. It was then that she wrote, with no sense of malice these lines which reflect so badly on social customs oblivious to the suffering of very young women who were married off in the same way that one might arrange a knick-knack on a shelf :

“There is always a moment in the lives of the very young when death seems as natural and as attractive as life, and I was hesitating.”

Colette spent her dutiful young years in an inhospitable Parisian apartment which took her away from Sido, her beloved mother, and from her native countryside, to which she would later return, full of love for everything that was not human : land, plants and animals. As a novelist dispossessed by a megalomaniac husband adept at marital theft, she stated, when talking about Claudine at School, the first novel published under her husband’s name, Willy, but which she wrote from start to finish : “Though I kept my word and remained strictly silent, I found nothing pleasant or natural about the circumstances of this book”. In view of the novel’s commercial success, Willy insisted that Colette write the sequels. Claudine Married (1902) then Claudine and Annie,(1903). Written from the faux-naïf point of view of the character of Claudine, a young woman hemmed in by conventions which she debunks with witty repartee, Colette created a literary type and became a popular writer in the process. Her formula for this bestseller was :

“A touch of adolescent lasciviousness, racy lesbianism, sadomasochism and false naivety, which makes the whole thing perfect in every respect for fans of saucy young women.”

For all those years, she wore a mask that kept the humiliations, the snubs and the injustices under wraps, until she was able to remove it when she parted from that obsessively tight-fisted, unfaithful man who hijacked her writing.

RISING FROM THE RANKS

In her early thirties, she published Barks and Purrs, daring to show her rage :

“I want to do as I please. I want to play in pantomime and even in comedy. If I find tights uncomfortable and degrading to my body, I want to dance naked. I want to retire to an island if I feel like it, or consort with ladies who live by their charms, as long as they’re gay and amusing, or even melancholy and wise as so many ladies of easy virtue are. […] I want to cherish the one who loves me and give him all that I have in the world : my body which jibs at sharing, my tender heart and my freedom ! I want… I want!…”

In 1906, Colette was determined to be financially independent so that she could go where she wanted and see whom she wanted. She threw herself into the demanding life of a music hall dancer. Aided and abetted by Mathilde de Morny, known as Missy, the first of the dauntless women who took her by the hand and murmured to her: “Come, I will help you find yourself…”, Colette was trained by her teacher and co-star Georges Wague, the leading mime of the period. Together, they toured the length and breadth of France for six years, raking in the money and perfecting the pantomimes inspired by Oriental storylines. Among other shows, Colette performed in La Chair [The Flesh], a play in which she demonstrated supreme physical nimbleness and dared to bare one breast, then two. In the books she wrote about this bohemian life filled with numerous love affairs – with both women and men – seen as successive incarnations of herself, she resurrected the hidden charm of periods and people living outrageous and eccentric lives that eschewed convention. What all her friends had in common during that period was that they all might have exclaimed, like Renée Vivien: “Oh, my dear little Colette, how disgusting this life is!" moving seamlessly from laughter to tears, an emotional reaction typical of the desperate and the discreet. Hence the fusion of caricature and tragic meaning, the sense of gaiety shrouded in darkness that permeates books such as The Vagabond (1910), The Shackle (1913), Music-Hall Sidelights (1913) or The Pure and the Impure (1932).

Colette excelled at writing short passages and one can dip into her books for just a few moments, because they often consist of a patchwork of memories, dotted here and there like so many things seen in the manner of Victor Hugo, but more vivacious in style, although often melancholy. Some of her novels feel unfinished. This is probably because they are primarily collections of impressions, backward glances towards a lost paradise. In La Femme cachée [The Other Woman] (1924), Les Heures longues [The Long Hours] (1917) but particularly My Mother’s House the chapters unfold in a sequence of precise recollections. Like a bee flitting from flower to flower, Colette succeeded in combining sociological observation with poetical writing. The intimate account of the female condition was pressed into service for an examination of the collective and the universal and we are cut to the quick by an array of pithy aphorisms characterised by an ironic tone and a scathing voice which imposes its views in a somewhat oblique fashion. How skilled she was at description, the study of manners, the vignette and the genre scene ! These were all abilities that, as a novelist, she had mastered through her regular journalistic activities since 1910.

In literature, she wrote about everything and many of her texts transcend the genres they are supposed to belong to. In love, she not only had relationships with women – and not just any women : the most creative and most liberated of them all! – which was still unusual and scandalous at the time, but also with a man much younger than her. She married Henry de Jouvenel in 1912 : after she had unexpectedly become a baroness and a mother, she was surprised, towards the end of her pregnancy, at her new body which caused her to “the air of a rat that drags a stolen egg”. However, after giving birth at the age of forty to Colette, a little girl whom she quickly handed to a wet nurse, she didn’t screw on the cap of her fountain pen, as she so descriptively put it in The Evening Star. Quite the reverse : as well as being a mother, she was also a performer, a writer and, even, for a time, the mistress of her stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, whom she had initiated sexually. In 1923, Colette published Green Wheat, in which she described love through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old boy. She showed superlative mastery of dialogue in Cheri (1920) and The Last of Cheri (1926). The fact that she liked transcribing conversations showed how much she enjoyed the spoken word, its profanities and slang. Some of Colette’s novels have the feel of séances or other occult ceremonies, since they showcase the old-fashioned modes of speech of the characters she brought back to life: the music hall performers of belle époque Paris and the eventful 1920s, including the noted mime Brague (inspired by Georges Wague) – showing off his skills – with his cheeky, jovial dialect, the cabaret singers, the late-night restauranteurs, the idle Parisian upper classes in love with the idea of love, the anxious lovers, the opium smokers, the beloved, much-missed relatives…

Colette was brilliantly able to portray the beauty and poetry of contradictory feelings : the longing for human warmth when a sad memory pierces the heart with terrible loneliness, the overwhelming surge of joy, unexpected, superficial and fleeting, at a festive party in the Paris music halls, despite the inevitable loneliness that returns and clings like ivy to stalwart souls. Last but not least, she also exposed the narcissistic failings of the human race, without excluding herself, and, with childlike insolence, she constantly mocked the behaviour of womanisers full of their own importance in novels like Retreat from Love, The Vagabond or The Shackle. And she did this while seeking enlightenment, particularly in humour and everyday witticisms :

“You look a bit green, my girl,” she once said to me. “Don't forget that there is always a moment in a man's life, even if he's a miser, when he opens his hand wide...”
“The moment of passion ?”
“No. The moment when you twist his wrist.”

KINDRED SPIRITS

The lives of Colette and Gabrielle Chanel intersected at the point when they both decided to take charge of their own lives and never again give up their artistic independence. Black and white photographs before their emancipation show identical demure figures with neatly braided hair, dressed in loose-fitting gowns. After the war, their napes are bare and their faces framed by a crown of round curls, which no longer stops them from moving freely, having fun or being athletic. Rumour has it that, on the threshold of the 20th century, Gabrielle Chanel performed at the Rotonde de Moulins singing Qui qu’a vu Coco dans l’Trocadéro? [Who's that who saw Coco at the Trocadero?], an old song which gave her the playful French nickname that she came to be known by. There was also their mutual love of café-concert : both of them would rather have courted danger than lead a dull, conventional life and they shared certain rules of behaviour which continually shaped a common set of ideals. They both had an athletic, liberated relationship with their physical selves and kept in shape by looking after and respecting their body. While Colette writes : “In my case, my body does the thinking”, Gabrielle Chanel says : “I gave back women's bodies their freedom”. Their frequent visits to areas of natural beauty – the Burgundy countryside and Brittany for Colette, the Norman, Basque or Mediterranean coastlines for Gabrielle Chanel – meant getting rid of the starched pleats of women’s clothing in favour of the hang and comfort of soft fabrics. The two women frequented the same artistic circles and became friends in the 1920s. In April 1930, Colette wrote a portrait of Gabrielle Chanel for Bravo magazine : she emphasised the absolute sovereignty of the couturière at work, the rigour of her gestures, the authority of the savoir-faire that fascinated her and aroused her respect : she admired the “fiery humility of a body faced with its favourite task!”. If the sinuous depths and jagged peaks of the French language was Colette’s preferred material, Gabrielle Chanel’s love of materials was directed towards the fabrics she shaped by working, as Colette wrote it, “with her ten fingers, with her nails, with the edge of her hands, with her palms, with pins and scissors, directly on the garment, which is a long-folded white vapour, splashed with cut crystal”. Colette was a regular guest at Chanel's on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and at her Provençal house, La Pausa. In 1930, Chanel bought Colette her villa La Gerbière, near Paris. In 1932, although snowed under with the journalistic commitments that monopolised her time, Colette opened a beauty salon on Rue de Miromesnil, in Paris, declaring, in her late sixties, that she planned to start over at an age when others were stopping. Late in life, she was the first woman to preside over the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Lastly, both women were nonconformist in their approach to love and neither were the type to kiss and tell : hard on themselves, merciless towards others, love was their true religion. Their standout talent, which they both successfully perfected right to the end, was a sense of wonder : it filled their work, which overflowed with a love of life.