Missy or Max? Tu or vous?

The “tu / vous” distinction is very important in French, as a measure of intimacy between speakers and writers. Traditionally, “tu” was used only by adults to children, between close relatives, intimate friends, and lovers. Nowadays, the rigid distinction is easing, and many young people instantly use “tu” with each other, dispensing with that awkward step in a friendship of progressing from “vous” to “tu”. In the “Claudine” novels, the narrator reveals that, although she scandalizes polite society by saying “tu” to acquaintances, she never uses the familiar “tu” with her husband. In this way, the formal “vous” is a sort of erotic linguistic caress between the couple (Claudine en Ménage / Claudine Married).

In her letters to her lover Missy (“Lettres à Missy” edited by Samia Bordji and Frédéric Maget), Colette uses both “tu” and “vous” — often veering from one to the other in the same letter, or even the same paragraph, in a haphazard fashion. She wrote many of her letters late at night, exhausted after an evening’s performance in the mime play “La Chair” (Flesh) and just before going to bed. Most of the letters begin with her using “tu”. Perhaps Colette was so tired that she used “vous” by accident, but that’s an odd mistake to make with a lover — wouldn’t you always use “tu” for a lover, and always think of them (and write to them) using “tu”?

Similarly to the “tu / vous” distinction, in French you have to decide whether to use a feminine “you” or a masculine “you”. If you want to call someone “my darling”, you can say “ma chérie” my (feminine) darling, or “mon cheri”, my (masculine) darling. Unfortunately, the French language allows for no comfortable gender ambiguity, as there is in English!

In the same way that she uses both “tu” and “vous” to Missy, Colette addresses her masculine lover, for whom drag was a way of life, in the feminine, and calls her “ma chérie” most of the time. However, she does write “mon cheri” now and then, and sometimes even uses both “ma chérie” and “mon cheri” — addressing Missy as a woman and as a man — in the same letter. Does this mean that Colette thought of Missy as a woman most of the time, and occasionally as a man? I wish I could ask her. More musings on the mysterious Missy in the next post!

Lettres à Missy — letters by Colette

“Lettres à Missy” edited by Samia Bordji and Frédéric Maget, published by Flammarion (Paris 2009).

Once or twice a year, I give myself the luxury of ordering some books from France. The most recent shipload included “Lettres à Missy”: a collection of letters written by Colette to her lover, Missy (Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise of Belboeuf). Colette never dated her letters, but the editors have given each letter an estimated date by finding out when Colette visited a particular town, or performed a play, that she mentions in each letter. This must have taken a lot of patience, dedication and detective work, so much credit is due to Bordji and Maget.

Colette’s first letter in the collection was sent from Le Grand Hôtel in Nice, and has an estimated date of February 1908. Colette has just arrived from Monte-Carlo, and gossips to Missy about the friends she saw there, and who won or lost in the casinos. Colette’s tone is friendly when she mentions Willy and Meg (her ex-husband and his girlfriend) — the famously tempestuous relationship between the literary ex-couple can’t have deteriorated yet.

Colette is on tour, miming in the play La Chair (Flesh). In wild Monte-Carlo, she ripped her dress completely as part of the play, and showed off one of her beautiful breasts, and most of a thigh. In conservative Nice, however, she was allowed only to unbutton the top of her dress. Colette describes to Missy how well the audience reacted to the play, and how pleased she is that the audience in Nice loved her, despite the lack of naked flesh in play with such a promising, titillating title.

The Pure and the Impure — Colette in drag

I’m looking at a famous, gorgeous photograph of Colette in drag. She is very debonair with her cropped hair, and wears a black jacket and trousers, and silk tie. She has a finger in the pocket of her striped waistcoat (is she being suggestive, or searching for her pocket-watch?), smokes a cigarette and looks directly, perhaps challengingly, at the camera. The photograph is on the cover of Colette’s memoir-novel, Ces Plaisirs (These Pleasures), later renamed Le Pur et l’Impur (The Pure and the Impure).

The photograph was taken circa 1910, when Colette was in a relationship with Missy (Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise of Belboeuf). However, these are rare: most photographs of Colette show her in conventionally female clothing. Missy lived her life in drag, but for Colette, dressing up in men’s clothing was a fleeting pleasure rather than a lifestyle.

The Pure and the Impure, first published in 1932 when Colette was 59, is a fascinating account of subversive society in 1900s Paris — prostitutes, opium dens, transvestism and homosexuality. (And a description of the poet Renée Vivien, including her anorexia, in what is perhaps one of the earliest accounts of that illness.) In her memoir-novel, Colette recalls her much younger self, and describes how she would wear “a mannish necktie” and walk around “looking as much as possible like a bad boy” (p.61).

Drag was not a way of life for Colette; I have not seen any photographs of her dressed in a suit after her relationship with Missy ended. Missy’s masculinity was a major part of her self-image, but I imagine that, for Colette, dragging up was playful, exciting, adventurous, sexy.

Colette suggests that, although conventional femininity was not really her, boyishness wasn’t really her either: “How timid I was, at that period when I was trying to look like a boy, and how feminine I was beneath my disguise of cropped hair” (The Pure and the Impure, p.61). As a girl, she was “famous” in her village for her incredibly long, beautiful chestnut hair. As a young woman, therefore, perhaps she was bored of being conventionally beautiful, and found androgynous beauty more interesting, more exciting. Today, we are lucky to be able to choose and change our identities daily: one day a ballgown, the next, a suit.

Colette describes the erotic pleasure she takes in watching “mannish women” in suits, admiring their “strong slender hands” and “exciting scent of [the] horses” they loved to ride, (p.65). Colette is seduced by androgynous or masculine women, rather than wanting to be one herself. Colette sums it up perfectly: “The seduction emanating from a person of unknown or dissimulated sex is powerful” (The Pure and the Impure, p.68).

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).