MADAME COLETTE

Imaginea young girl in the country, very young, very fresh, sensitive to the finest degree, upright, credulous, and doubtless dainty as a daisy; imagine her in the flower of her youth married and carried off to Paris—to the decadent Paris of the nineties—by a man of the world, who is also a man of letters and a man of science, intelligent, corrupt, and cynical as Mephistopheles himself. No, I am not telling you over again the story of ‘Madeleine Jeune femme’; I am telling the history of Madame Colette, and it ends differently.

There is, it seems, an amusement in elaborating the sentimental education of a young bride, in complicating it with excursions into vice and into art; brief, the gifted and immoral author who chooses to be known as ‘Willy’ was pleased to make over his wife in his own image. She was an artist to the ends of her finger-tips, and they wrote books together—the famous series ofClaudine—hailed with delight by all that is least strait-laced in Paris (and, in those days especially, there was very little screwing about the moral waist of one sort of Paris!). For Colette Willy realised a personage, always charming to the man about town in its candid perversity, that of the innocentwanton, or (to quote the title of one of her stories)L’Ingénue Libertine.

One day I bought one of these Claudine books; it was calledClaudine en Ménage. I opened it and thought it delightful. What an admirable style, firm and free, full of nature, full of grace, and the character of the girl, at once shrewd and naïve, pleased me immensely ... and then I began to wonder.... And then I did not know what to do with the book! I would not place it on my shelf, I could not leave it lying on the table. Finally, remembering a certain lyric of Robert Browning’s, I took it out into the forest and dropped it deep in the hollow trunk of a tree. There, among the pale wood-lice, and the centipedes, and the fungus, Claudine in her seclusion, finds audience fit though few.

One day it must have dawned on Madame Colette Willy that all men were not made on the same pattern—that there was fresh air somewhere in the world even for a married woman—that a man might be a support, and a comfort, and an example—or perhaps, more simply, that one might do without one altogether. Anyhow, Madame Colette Willy became Madame Colette; she divorced her collaborator and began her ascent out of Avernus. She was, in these new conditions, obliged to earn her living, and, mindful of the prices paid for even a successful book, she complicated her profession as woman of letters with the career of a Variety Artist.

That is to say, she went on the music hall stage and was immensely applauded; and I am sure she is a splendid variety artist—just as I am sure that Marguerite Audoux must have had a lovely ‘cut’—just as I know (and as any one who goes to the Place des Vosges can see) that a great cabinet-maker was spoiled in Victor Hugo.... The music hall feeds its flock. After a few years Madame Colette returned to literature—returned, I mean, to the exclusive practice of literature, which she had never really abandoned—henceforth independent.

A Paris music hall may appear a strange place of purification, but it all depends on what one is used to. The courage, the indefatigable industry, the gentleness, the charity and kindliness of her new companions impressed Madame Colette; and she admired the relative pureness of their lives. We see her, in our fancy (like Roumanille when he contemplated the lambs frisking in the meadows), gazing on the clowns, and the quick-change artists, and the circus-riders, and the dancers, and the leaders of performing dogs, as she murmurs:—

‘Coume fan ben tout ço que fan!Et l’innoucénço, coum es bello!’

And gradually her novels showed the influence of a healthier environment. It is true that at first she wroteLes Vrilles de la Vigne. But her last three volumes possess (with rare literary beauty)a freedom of soul and a sensitiveness which at least, to my thinking, go far to compensate a little colour-blindness as to morality. Experience has rendered her wise and sad, indulgent and serene; it has shown her how to organise her impressions, so that her art—simple as it is and apparently facile—has some of the qualities of a philosophy. In the terms of a metaphor dear to Mr Henry James, her novels henceforth are, not a slice of life, but an extract, an elixir.

Not that her last three volumes—La Vagabonde,L’Envers du Music Hall, andL’Entrave—are to be recommended without precaution. They are very free; they describe a world beyond the precincts of conventional morality, and they are also very Pagan. There is mighty little inner life in the world of Colette Willy! But those who read Mr Compton Mackenzie or Mr Maxwell will, after all, find nothing more alarming inLa Vagabonde, or even inL’Entrave. And they will admire a natural and yet exquisite faculty of expression—it is difficult to write with a more delicate exactness than Madame Colette—and also a psychology, and a sort of disenchanted mansuetude, that go hand in hand with a love of youth, a sense of youth, quite extraordinary. For my part, I find the lady very taking; but I do not recommend her to the more serious admirers of Paul Claudel.

InLa Vagabonde, we see her as a music hall star, dropped from the sphere of the woman of the world, and all the happier in her new orbit,although aware she is a stranger there. Men, of course, pay her court, and one of them, Maxime Dufferein-Chautel (whose tender, bourgeois, authoritative nature is admirably depicted) comes very near to being her lover, and proposes to make her his wife. But Max, good, solid, faithful, is the least subtle of lovers—a great, affectionate Newfoundland dog of a man. And Renée Néré, the vagabond, who has borne so resentfully the yoke of her first husband’s heart, fears to suffer as much from the narrowness of a second husband’s brain. She cannot resign her liberty to an inferior, and, on the eve of their marriage, she sends him a cruel little letter:—

‘Max, mon chéri, je m’en vais,’

and is off with her troupe on a tour to the New World.

On the first page ofL’Entrave, she has met again with this old lover, or rather, herself unrecognised, she has seen him pass, one day at Nice, on the Promenade des Anglais, he, his young wife, and his little child. He has not mourned her long! And Renée feels oddly dispossessed: no one, nothing, belongs to her; she has no place in the world for she is no longer a star of the stage. A convenient inheritance has given her the means of liberty—that liberty she coveted of old—and she strays from hotel to hotel on the Riviera mixing with theatrical visitors, frequenting the better sort(which, I suppose, means the wealthier sort?) of demi-monde, yet oddly out of place among these amiable barbarians who have neither an idea nor an ideal.

The most barbarian of all is little May, a young hetairaà la mode, fresh, fair, and five-and-twenty. Renée is a dozen years older and ought to know better; but she steals poor May’s lover away from her; and she shackles herself with this uncultivated young man for life, because she loves him; and it is the first time that she has loved. Ah, she no longer asks herself: is he her equal?... Madame Colette, like her heroine, has consented to the hobble, to the shackle, toL’Entrave. She, too, has married, has found for herself again a place in organised society, has seen open out before her unsuspected interior horizons, and murmurs perhaps, like Renée Néré:—

‘Se peut-il, Beauté, que je te préfère l’âme qui t’habite?’

And I await her next novel with almost a tremulous expectation.

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