Colette — how far would she go to shock the bourgeoisie?

Colette’s lover from 1905 to 1911 was Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise of Belboeuf (often known as Missy). It’s interesting how many of Colette’s numerous biographers list only her liaisons with men, simply ignoring her long-term, live-in relationship with the marquise, or dismiss it as part of Colette’s love of scandalising the bourgeoisie.

I concede that a brief affair (or two) with a woman might not mean that Colette had serious feelings for women, but surely a relationship that lasted for six years must be more than a passing fad. I’ve even read about Colette’s marriage to her third, Jewish (and last) husband, Maurice Goudeket, also explained away as merely a desire to épater la bourgeoisie.

This implies that Colette could not seriously be in love with a Jewish man or with a woman. This says more about the biographer’s prejudices than it does about Colette. The implication is small-minded, intolerant and old-fashioned: all the things that Colette was not.

You only have to remember that in 1907 — almost half a century before women in France had the right to vote, Colette dared to embrace Missy in public, on stage, to a full house. When the audience turned on them, shouting and jeering, even throwing chairs at them, Colette reacted with dignity and was “applauded for her extraordinary courage”. When a journalist asked if she had been frightened, she retorted, “No, it’s not in my nature. Look: I’m not trembling at all.” (From my favourite of Colette’s biographers, Judith Thurman, in her book “Secrets of the Flesh” p.172).

Review of Chéri — the film

Two of my favourite Colette novels, Chéri and La fin de Chéri, have been made into a sumptuous, lavish film. I couldn’t wait to see it! Colette wrote the novels — novellas, really — in the 1920s, but they are set in the dazzling, glorious days of La Belle Époque, circa 1900. Most of the story takes place, it hardly needs saying, in Paris.

Léa, a courtesan of “a certain age” takes Chéri as her last lover before retiring from the boudoir. To complicate matters, Chéri is the pampered 19-year-old son of Léa’s best friend and fellow courtesan, Madame Peloux (Kathy Bates).

Rupert Friend is perfect as the pretty, feminine boy for whom Léa is both mistress and mother. Michelle Pfeiffer is wonderful as Léa, but is too thin and pretty to embody the role. I’ve always imagined Léa as plump and bosomy, mature but still attractive — Helen Mirren, perhaps. The American accents were a jarring discord, and the lack of female body hair another jarring note, as well as being anachronistic. A woman in 1900 would no more have thought to shave her underarms than she would have thought of shaving her head.

The costumes and sets are gorgeous, and evoke the period’s love of beauty, extravagance and the exotic. Some of the story is set and filmed in Biarritz, one of my favourite places in France. Biarritz is a chic, elegant town in the Basque area (near the Spanish border) on the beautiful but rough Atlantic coast. Biarritz was the place to be if you were rich and gorgeous in the 1900s. My grandmother used to take me there for creamy hot chocolate and hot, salty buttered toast in a lovely, old-fashioned tea-room… what I would give to go there again!