Colette
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (French: [sidɔni ɡabʁijɛl kɔlɛt]; 28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954), known mononymously as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.
For other uses, see Colette (disambiguation).
Colette
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
28 January 1873
Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Burgundy, France
3 August 1954 (aged 81)
Paris, France
- Colette
- Colette Willy
Novelist
Early life[edit]
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born on 28 January 1873 in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in the department of Yonne, Burgundy.[1] Her parents were war hero and tax collector Jules-Joseph Colette (1829–1905) and his wife Adèle Eugénie Sidonie ("Sido"), née Landoy (1835–1912). Jules-Joseph Colette was a Zouave of the Saint-Cyr military school. A war hero who had lost a leg in the Second Italian War of Independence, he was awarded a post as tax collector in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye where his children were born. Colette had three older siblings: maternal half-sister, Juliette (1860–1908), maternal half-brother, Achille (1863–1913), and full brother, Léopold (1866–?).[2][3][4] Colette attended a public school from the ages of 6 to 17. The family was initially well off, but poor financial management substantially reduced their income.[5][6]
Post divorce[edit]
Colette and Willy separated in 1906, although their divorce was not final until 1910. Colette had no access to the sizable earnings of the Claudine books – the copyright belonged to Willy – and until 1912 she initiated a stage career in music halls across France, sometimes playing Claudine in sketches from her own novels, earning barely enough to survive and often hungry and ill. To make ends meet, she turned more seriously to journalism in the 1910s.[15] Around this time she also became an avid amateur photographer. This period of her life is recalled in La Vagabonde (1910), which deals with women's independence in a male society, a theme to which she would regularly return in future works.
During these years she embarked on a series of relationships with other women, notably with Natalie Clifford Barney[16] and with [17] Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise de Belbeuf ("Max"), with whom she sometimes shared the stage. On 3 January 1907, an onstage kiss between Max and Colette in a pantomime entitled "Rêve d'Égypte" caused a near-riot, and as a result, they were no longer able to live together openly, although their relationship continued for another five years.[10][16][18]
In 1912, Colette married Henry de Jouvenel, the editor of Le Matin. A daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, nicknamed Bel-Gazou, was born to them in 1913.
Last years, 1940–1954[edit]
Colette was 67 years old when France was occupied by the Germans. She remained in Paris, in her apartment in the Palais-Royal. Her husband Maurice Goudeket, who was Jewish, was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1941, and although he was released after seven weeks through the intervention of the French wife of the German ambassador,[24] Colette lived through the rest of the war years with the anxiety of a possible second arrest.[25][26] During the Occupation she produced two volumes of memoirs, Journal à Rebours (1941) and De ma Fenêtre (1942); the two were issued in English in 1975 as Looking Backwards.[10] She wrote lifestyle articles for several pro-Nazi newspapers.[27] These, and her novel Julie de Carneilhan (1941), contain many anti-Semitic slurs.[28]
In 1944, Colette published what became her most famous work, Gigi, which tells the story of the 16-year-old Gilberte ("Gigi") Alvar. Born into a family of demimondaines, Gigi is trained as a courtesan to captivate a wealthy lover but defies the tradition by marrying him instead.[29] In 1949 it was made into a French film starring Danièle Delorme and Gaby Morlay, then in 1951 adapted for the stage with the then-unknown Audrey Hepburn (picked by Colette personally) in the title role. The 1958 Hollywood musical movie, starring Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan, with a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner and a score by Lerner and Frederick Loewe, won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
In the postwar years, Colette became a famous public figure. She had become crippled by arthritis and was cared for by Goudeket, who supervised the preparation of her Œuvres Complètes (1948–1950). She continued to write during those years and published L'Etoile Vesper (1946) and Le Fanal Bleu (1949), in which she reflected on the problems of a writer whose inspiration is primarily autobiographical. She was nominated by Claude Farrère for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.[30]
Journalism[edit]
Colette's first pieces of journalism (1895-1900) were written in collaboration with her husband, Gauthier-Villars—music reviews for La Cocarde, a daily founded by Maurice Barres and a series of pieces for La Fronde.[31] Following her divorce from Gauthier-Villars in 1910, she wrote independently for a wide variety of publications, gaining considerable renown for her articles covering social trends, theater, fashion, and film, as well as crime reporting.[32] In December 1910, Colette agreed to write a regular column in the Paris daily, Le Matin -- at first under a pseudonym, then as "Colette Willy."[33] One of her editors was Henry de Jouvenel, whom she married in 1912. By 1912, Colette had taught herself to be a reporter: "You have to see and not invent, you have to touch, not imagine .. because, when you see the sheets [at a crime scene] drenched in fresh blood, they are a color you could never invent."[34] In 1914, Colette was named Le Matin's literary editor.[35] Colette's separation from Jouvenel in 1923 forced her to sever ties with Le Matin. Over the next three decades her articles appeared in over two dozen publications, including Vogue, Le Figaro, and Paris-Soir. During the German Occupation of France, Colette continued contributing to daily and weekly publications, a number of them collaborationist and pro-Nazi, including Le Petit Parisien, which became pro-Vichy after January 1941, and La Gerbe, a pro-Nazi weekly.[36] Though her articles were not political in nature, Colette was sharply criticized at the time for lending her prestige to these publications and implicitly accommodating herself to the Vichy regime.[37] Her November 26, 1942 article, "Ma Bourgogne Pauvre" ("My Poor Burgundy") has been singled out by some historians as tacitly accepting some ultra-nationalist goals that hardline Vichyist writers espoused.[38] After 1945, her journalism was sporadic,[39] and her final pieces were more personal essays than reported stories. Over the course of her writing career, Colette published over 1200 articles for newspapers, magazines, and journals.[40]
Source:[48]