Colette: a biography

Colette (1873-1954): a biography
By Natalie Allen

In a studio photograph taken in 1909, Colette sits wrapped in a white cloth atop a wooden table. Legs stretched out, her right hand resting above her forehead, she turns her eyes downwards. Her short thick hair frames her striking angular features, and her figure radiates both a pensive serenity and an intense, explosive vitality. She is a young woman becoming her own.
Colette’s unusual and exhilarating journey began in a small village in the Burgundy region of France. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who would later be known simply as “Colette,” was born in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye to a former Captain father and a strong, modern-minded mother. As a child she spent her hours in gardens and with music, and grew to be an accomplished pianist. In her early years, Colette claims, she never thought of writing. But in 1893, at the age of 20, Colette married Henry Gauthier-Villars, or “Willy,” a notorious Parisian writer and music critic, and suddenly found herself thrown into the literary scene of the French capital. Willy soon discovered his wife’s natural talent and decided to take advantage of it. In 1900, Claudine at School, Colette’s first novel, appeared in Parisian bookstores under Willy’s name. The text, which chronicles the adventures of a provincial schoolgirl with a particular eye for the erotic, became both an immediate scandal and a sensation.
After her divorce in 1906, Colette further shocked bourgeois society by launching a career as a music hall girl. She performed at the Moulin Rouge, danced on stage half naked and in exotic costumes, and traveled throughout France on tour. Colette’s experience as a performer and a divorcée awakened her consciousness to a number of social problems in Belle Epoque France. The poverty, illness, and depression of artists, the hardship but also the liberation of living independently as a woman, would later become major themes in Colette’s writing.
Writing was, of course, Colette’s primary endeavor, and she was as prolific as she was talented. During the course of her lifetime she wrote over (50) novels, in addition to short stories and plays. Her most famous work, Gigi, later took shape in both theatrical and cinematographic form. A journalist as well as an author of fiction, Colette was one of the first women to report on WWI from the front lines, and she also covered some of the greatest legal trials of her era. She rose to the position of literary editor at Le Matin, a major Parisian newspaper, and wrote columns on a wide variety of subjects, from fashion to unemployment and domestic violence. Later in her life, Colette tried her hand in the cosmetics business, opening a beauty salon and her own line of products.
Once a marginalized artist, Colette rose to prominence in some of the most prestigious cultural institutions in France. In 1945 she was elected to the Académie de Goncourt – an organization that had long excluded women from its ranks, and in 1953 became an officer of the Legion of Honor. Colette, a woman who had once said: “death doesn’t interest me, not even my own,” was the first French woman to receive a state funeral.
Today, we know Colette best for her fiction, most of which is strongly autobiographical in nature. Though she was a celebrity and wrote stories that seemed like chronicles of her own life, Colette remained a deeply enigmatic figure. Consciously constructing her image in the public spotlight, she resisted revealing her “true self,” and it is only through the careful juxtaposition of Colette with her characters that we can begin to sketch out her portrait. She was, by any account, a woman of extraordinary vigor and fierce individuality with a strong abhorrence for convention. She loved animals, particularly cats, and the landscape of the (Burgundian) countryside. She had a taste for exercise and physical fitness, but she also rejected growing diet trends and standards of thinness for women; she relished food and reveled in the voluptuousness of her body. Her three consecutive marriages did not preclude her from taking lovers, and she had amorous affairs with both men and women. The most famous of these intrigues, Colette’s romance with Bertrand de Jouvenel, her second husband’s teenage son, was rendered particularly provocative by the fact that Colette’s novel Chéri, written just a few years earlier, had depicted a parallel scenario. The “coincidence” led Colette to cite the Oscar Wilde’s phrase: “what one writes, comes to pass.”
In a photograph taken around 1950, near the end of her life, Colette stares intensely ahead. Arthritic, (deaf), and nearly blind, she wears heavy made-up and wraps her neck in a luxurious scarf. Her expression still exudes its characteristic fire and astute intelligence. Colette was, as biographer Judith Thurman puts it, a “Nietzschean without knowing it.” Her life was one of affirmation and continual rebirth. Her once vigorous body deteriorating, Colette never lost her mental prowess, and continued to be active and productive until her end. It is this relentless, singular passion that continues to inspire us today.

Selected References:
- Colette, Oeuvres Complètes, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1986.
- Flieger, Jerry Aline, Colette and the Fantom Subject of Autobiography, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1992.
- Pichois, Claude and Alain Brunet, Colette, Paris, Editions de Fallois, 1999.
- Thurman, Judith, Secrets of the Flesh: A Llife of Colette, New York, Afred A. Knopf, 1999.
- Many thanks to Professor Elizabeth Ladenson, PhD Columbia, for her help and suggestions.