Dirty Girl Things
Monday, June 25, 2007
Number Seventy-One
Succès de scandale!
Colette
“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.” ---Colette
“I love my past. I love my present. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve had, and I’m not sad because I have it no longer.” ---Colette
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From Histoires de Parfums . . . .
The only girlish thing about Gabby was her knee-length braids and big brown eyes. Around their village, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and her gang of girl toughies ruled the school. They had secrets, schemes and territories. Eager to prove themselves every bit a smart and tough as the boys their age, the carried themselves like more like a big city street gang than the peasant girls from the French countryside that they really were. They even called each other by their surnames, like their fathers did, which is how Gabby came to be known as Colette.
Precocious and headstrong, Colette was a wild child of nature who never grew tame. Analyse Colette and you’ll find an interesting dichotomy. She is undoubtedly one of France’s greatest woman thinkers. She wrote plainly about the tacit intricacies of love and relations in turn of the century France. Yet for such a cerebral writer, she was physical in all her pursuits. Victorian culture dictated that women laced themselves up tightly in corsets and passed their time sitting on wingback chairs whilst sipping tea. Colette wore a corset and drank plenty of tea but she also designed and built a gymnasium at her back yard and worked out vigorously every day.
Colette’s notorious first husband Willy plucked his precocious teen bride from the Burgundy countryside and transplanted her into Parisian society. Instead of being startled by the change, Colette thrived. A beautiful young bride who could be outspoken and elegant as the situation merited, she was quickly accepted among the Parisian intelligentsia that populated the literary salons of the day. Willy fostered his new wife’s popularity by buying her clothes and showing her off. Willy was already a successful and established writer when Colette tried her hand at her husband’s trade. She wrote thinly disguised and erotically charged memoirs of her school days. Willy liked them so much that he had them published under his name. The first “Claudine” novel was a sell-out success. So Willy locked Colette in the attic and didn’t letter her out until she finished the sequel.
Of course this sort of treatment didn’t fare well with headstrong Colette. As soon as she was able, she left Willy and tried to make a living on her own. She wrote, she performed in plays, cabarets and dance halls. She bordered on the edge of respectability, and these encounters with the Parisian underworld fuelled her creativity.
Colette Colette’s Claudine was the original Lolita, an underage girl bursting with saucy exploits and earthy sexuality. In the 1920s Colette wrote of opium dens and alternative society of fashionable, wealthy lesbians. She knew of both first hand. Later she waxes philosophical and lets cats and dogs argue the contradictory natures in men and women in Dialogues des Betes. In her later works, Colette returns to her most familiar theme of erotic urges and sexuality. This time her protagonist is an older woman and her paramour a younger man. The scandalous theme was again, like the Claudine novels, culled from reality as Colette was having an affair with her real life step-son.
France loved their audacious, outspoken Colette. They honoured her by making her the first woman admitted to the prestigious Académie Française. And they grieved severely when she died. Parisians cued all day in a kilometre-long line down the rue di Rivoli in order to pay respects or perhaps leave a flower on her coffin displayed at the Palais Royal.
To her dying day, she was a robust woman of remarkable energy. Lusty, soulful, stylish and smart, Colette is the Ultimate Parisienne.
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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
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