Many English readers first make the acquaintance of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) through the stage or film adaptations of her novella Gigi (1945; 012550.p.6.). Deliciously frothy, it captures with elegance and grace the extravagant world of the belle époque, far removed from the austerities and humiliations of wartime France under the German occupation, and might give the impression that the author was a frivolous airhead with little interest in the realities of those harsh times. Yet while she was conjuring up the vanished Parisian demi-monde to enchant her readers and, she admitted, to lift them out of the drabness and anxiety of their daily lives, she was engaged in a far more dangerous and deadly serious enterprise – rescuing and assisting Jews, including her own husband, whom she hid throughout the war.

Born in January 1873 as the daughter of a retired army officer, Colette grew up amid the countryside of Burgundy which she lyrically describes in many of her writings. Her marriage at the age of twenty to Henry Gauthier-Villars, a writer and music-critic known as Willy, who was fifteen years her senior, transplanted her to Paris and led to the publication of her first novels, the Claudine series. These four broadly autobiographical stories of a young girl’s schooldays, her marriage to a much older man, her encounters with Parisian society, visit to the Bayreuth Festival and love affair with Annie, the narrator of the last book, did not appear under her own name, however, but under that of Willy, who, she later claimed, had read her jottings in old school exercise books, encouraged her to write, and appropriated the results. He combined plagiarism with infidelity, and in 1906 Colette left him and, with the help of Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf, became a music-hall artiste of some notoriety and the lover of her sponsor. She recorded her experiences and her fascination with the world of the music-hall and circus in Garçon, l’audition! (1901; the British Library possesses a presentation copy signed ‘Willy’), Entre deux airs (1895; 1578/1186), whose author was given as ‘L’ouvreuse du Cirque d’été’, and Mes apprentissages (010665.df.11).

Colette, Garçon, l’audition! (Paris, 1901) 1578/1188

In 1912 Colette married Henri de Jouvenel, the editor of the newspaper Le Matin,  and the following year gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Colette. During the war she converted the de Jouvenel estate at St-Malo into a convalescent home for officers and in 1920 was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in recognition of her services. The marriage ended in 1924 when Colette divorced her husband following an affair with her stepson Bertrand de Jouvenel which is reflected in her novels Chéri (1920) and La fin de Chéri (1926), whose depiction of the relationship of the hedonistic young hero and the ageing courtesan Léa aroused considerable controversy.

Portrait of Colette by Jean Cocteau, from Colette, Le pur et l’impur (Paris, 1941) X.900/21054.

Colette enjoyed her new freedom to mingle with the Parisian circle of artists and writers surrounding Jean Cocteau in the 1920s, and rose to become acknowledged as France’s greatest female writer. As well as novels and autobiography, she wrote the libretto for Maurice Ravel’s opera L’enfant et les sortilèges (first performed in 1925), the story of a rebellious child who is punished by the objects which he has damaged in a tantrum and is finally rescued when he shows his repentance by tending a wounded squirrel. The list of characters includes a pair of cats, creatures for which Colette had a lifelong love; they feature frequently in her writings, and her novel La chatte (1933) centres on the bond between a young man and Saha, the cat who displaces his bride in his affections.

A cat looks on as Colette writes. Picture from Colette, Mes apprentissages ([Paris], 1936) 010665.df.11.

Colette’s third marriage in 1935 to Maurice Goudeket endured happily for the rest of her life, but placed her in considerable danger during the German occupation because of his Jewish origins, which compelled him to go into hiding in their attic. Remaining in Paris and continuing to write and publish, Colette made a living which enabled to help many other Jews, and in 1945 was elected to the Académie Goncourt as its first-ever female member, becoming its president in 1949. Since 1935 she had been a member of the Belgian Royal Academy, and in 1953 became a Grand Officier of the Légion d’honneur. Her work is notable for its delicate and subtly sensuous quality, evoked in such details as Claudine licking the precious ruby presented to her by her bridegroom ‘because it ought to melt and taste like a raspberry fruit-drop’, the scents of the wild herbs in Colette’s mother’s garden, the salt and sunshine of a holiday in Normandy where two adolescents discover each other in La Blé en herbe (1923, 012547.ccc.11), and the textures of fine lace or a cat’s fur.

When she died on 3 August 1954, Colette was buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, the first woman in France ever to be given a state funeral. Although she was denied a Roman Catholic ceremony because of her two divorces, the scandals surrounding her racy career, bisexuality and spicy early novels had long since been dispelled by recognition of her outstanding gifts as a writer.

Susan Halstead, Curator Czech and Slovak