The Vagabond Read online

  The Vagabond

  Colette

  Translated, with an Introduction, by Stanley Appelbaum

  DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  Mineola, New York

  Copyright

  English translation and Introduction copyright © 2010 by Dover Publications, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Bibliographical Note

  This Dover edition, first published in 2010, contains a new English translation of La Vagabonde, which was originally published by Ollendorff, Paris, in 1910; and a new Introduction by the translator, Stanley Appelbaum.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Colette, 1873–1954.

  [Vagabonde. English]

  The vagabond / Colette; translated, with an introduction, by Stanley Appelbaum.

  p. cm.

  eISBN-13: 978-0-486-12075-1

  I. Appelbaum, Stanley. II. Title.

  PQ2605.O28V313 2010

  843'.912—dc22

  2009036164

  Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

  47585901

  www.doverpublications.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Introduction

  I: Colette’s Life

  1. Up to The Vagabond (1873–1910). Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in the town of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, some hundred miles southeast of Paris. The Puisaye area of northern Burgundy was not a fertile land of grain and vineyards, but an expanse of marsh, pasture, and sand; yet it was dearly cherished by the growing girl. Her shrewd, nature-loving, irreligious mother, née Sidonie Landoy and affectionately known in Colette’s later books as Sido (1835–1912), had inherited substantial property from her grotesque first husband, but much of it was lost through the mismanagement of her second husband (father of the future novelist), Captain Jules-Joseph Colette (ca. 1830–1905), a one-legged Army veteran who had first come to the district as a tax collector.

  The feckless captain also dabbled in scientific writing, and had intruded himself on the eminent Parisian scientific publisher Gauthier-Villars. Thus, in 1890, when the publisher’s son Henri (1859–1931), known as Willy to the readers of his trashy romantic novels, found himself with an illegitimate child to farm out, he brought it to the Colette’s home town (where wet-nursing was a normal “cottage industry” for farmers’ wives wishing to supplement their income), and used the family as agents. He and young Sidonie (who may possibly have met in Paris in 1889, when her family visited the World’s Fair) fell in love and were married in 1893.

  Now a Parisienne in high society, Sidonie acquired many useful contacts and a cultural baggage that she could never have had access to back home. In later years, however, she always depicted her first marriage as a period of severe disappointment and disillusionment: Willy was constitutionally unfaithful, and his young wife found herself one of a stable of ghost writers who churned out most of the books he put his name to. (It’s unlikely that she was actually kept as a virtual prisoner, compelled to produce so much copy a day.) At any rate, the four Claudine novels—brash, flippant, and risqué—about a rural schoolgirl who enters Parisian society (published between 1900 and 1903, with Willy appearing as sole author),1 were wildly successful and were even granted the ultimate honor of being dramatized for the stage.

  Finding her feet, Sidonie left Willy in 1906 (the final divorce decree was awarded in 1910), but not (yet) as an enemy; she continued to show him her books in manuscript for corrections and suggestions. In 1904, under the name “Colette Willy,” which she used until 1922, she published four Dialogues des bêtes (Dialogues of Animals), in which dogs and cats discuss their owners’ doings (three dialogues were added for the 1905 edition; there were eventually twelve). In 1904 and 1905, she published two very minor novels about a girl named Minne, which she combined and adapted in the 1909 L’ingénue libertine (The Loose-Living Ingenue). In 1907, she wrote a farewell to the Claudine character in La retraite sentimentale, known in English as Retreat from Love. In 1908, the title piece of the essay-and-story collection Les vrilles de la vigne (Tendrils of the Vine) symbolizes her feeling that marriage is an entrapment.

  Meanwhile, after she left Willy, she needed two basic things: a “significant other” (not promiscuous, she was usually true to one person at a time for a longer or shorter while) and a way to make a living (not only did Willy hold the rights to the Claudine best-sellers, he sold them for a song early in 1909!). Her new romance, for some years, was lesbian, with the former Marquise de Belbœuf (died 1944), known to intimates as Missy, whom she met in 1905. Her new occupation was the professional stage (she had already performed as a society amateur). In late 1905, she began taking pantomime lessons from the eminent Belgian-born mime Georges Wague (1874–1965), who has been called a renewer of the pantomime genre (wordless plays performed to music). In February 1906, she debuted in a pantomime written by the playwright Francis de Croisset (1877–1937), with music by Jean de Nouguès (1875–1932), initiating six consecutive years on the stage. In a 1907 pantomime at the Moulin-Rouge she and Missy shocked the audience with their onstage kiss. From 1908 to 1911, Colette performed chiefly in vaudeville, touring French cities; her 1909 tour took her to some thirty-two venues, and her tour in April and May of 1910 to almost as many.

  Colette’s 1910 novel La vagabonde, newly translated in this volume, was a turning point in her literary career. Called her first masterpiece, “one of the first and best feminist novels ever written,” and a book that “breaks new ground and establishes a very real originality,” it passes in review, in a fictionalized form that only lightly cloaks its autobiographical underpinnings, her whole life up to the time of writing, with principal emphasis on her experiences in vaudeville and private performances as mime and dancer. The book reflects the author’s resolve at the moment to remain single (there’s only one brief hint at her ongoing, satisfying real-life liaison with Missy, which lasted until 1911), just as its 1913 sequel is an apologia for her new “submission” to the “yoke” of marriage (and the 1922 Le blé en herbe, known in English as The Ripening Seed, represents her real-life cradle-snatching; see below). For the rest of her days, Colette endlessly wrote love stories based on reality and memoirs subtly fictionalized to mask unwelcome truths (but taken as gospel by many readers and biographers). Totally self-absorbed, she created her own myth.

  (Much more about The Vagabond will be found in section II of this Introduction. An intentionally very concise account of the rest of Colette’s life now follows.)

  2. After The Vagabond (1911–1954). After the rural urchin, the mondaine, and the strolling player: the baroness! Having begun writing stories and articles for newspapers, in 1910 Colette came to know the baron Henri de Jouvenel (1876–1935), editor-in-chief of Le matin (The Morning), whom she married in December 1912, having still performed as a mime during the first months of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. The birth, in 1913, of their daughter Colette de Jouvenel (the novelist’s only child, whom she resented and neglected in her early years) interrupted the serialization of the sequel to The Vagabond; Colette always felt that its ending had thereby been botched. The year 1913 also saw the publication of the backstage tales collected in L’envers du music-hall (Behind the Scenes at the Vaudeville; Colette’s further adventures in show business will be discussed in section II, subsections 1 and 3).

  The decades that followed witnessed a tremendous outpouring of romantic novels, stories, plays, movie scenarios, war reportage, film and drama criticism, advice columns, and memoirs containing carefully dosed revelations, all written in a much-admired personal style consciously based on French classics and increasingly avoiding pomposity and purple passag
es. Just a few of the pinnacles of this output are: Chéri (1920), which led to her consecration as a novelist;2 Le blé en herbe (serialized 1922; book publication, 1923), the first of her solo books to appear as by “Colette” rather than “Colette Willy,” and reflecting her real-life seduction of her sixteen-year-old stepson in 1920 (the liaison lasted about five years); the libretto for Ravel’s opera L’enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Magic Spells), created in 1925 (her text had been written in 1915); and the story “Gigi” (1944), a return to the world of the Belle Époque courtesans she had dealt with in Chéri.

  Among the honors received by Colette through the years were: membership in the Légion d’honneur in 1920, with three promotions up to 1953; election in 1936 to the Belgian Royal Academy of French Language and Literature; election in 1945 to the highly prestigious literary society the Académie Goncourt (she served as its president in 1949); and her burial in the Père Lachaise cemetery, with national honors, in 1954 (she was the first Frenchwoman to receive them, though the Archbishop of Paris denied her a religious service).

  Her personal life included a second divorce in 1925, the year in which she met the Jewish pearl dealer and journalist Maurice Goudeket, a truly devoted husband after they married in 1935. (Sixteen years her junior, he survived her, even though he had been arrested during the German occupation of Paris.) Colette broke a leg in 1931 and suffered severely from arthritis from 1936 on; from the early 1940s she was largely bedridden and confined to her apartment in the Palais-Royal complex (just north of the Louvre), where her friendly neighbors included Jean Cocteau.

  II: Commentary on The Vagabond

  1. Publication History; Stage and Screen Adaptations. Colette began writing The Vagabond in August 1909. It was serialized in twenty consecutive installments in the weekly La vie parisienne (Parisian Life) from May to October of 1910; it came out in book form in November, published by (Paul) Ollendorff, Paris, who had already brought out three of the Claudine novels.

  With Colette as part-author, the novel was dramatized for the stage in 1923; she acted the main role on tour later in the 1920s, with the great couturier Paul Poiret in the role of Brague. A silent-film version was shot in Rome in 1916 as a Franco-Italian coproduction; directed by Eugenio Perego, it starred the popular French actress known as Musidora (later an idol of the Surrealists). A second film version, 1931, was directed in France by Solange Bussy, with Colette serving as assistant director.

  2. The Characters. Renée, of course (the name, which connotes rebirth, may have been borrowed from that of a personal friend), is Colette herself, earning her keep as a mime, dancer, and actress after a marriage that has metamorphosed a country girl into a society woman. Like Colette, Renée has previously written novels (though not of the same kind) and now rediscovers her deepest satisfaction, and indeed her identity, in the act of writing. Colette has even lent Renée her own face, that of a “wary fox,” as well as her own myopia and unusually keen sense of smell. Renée’s self-sufficiency partially reflects Colette’s own situation at the time of writing, though, thanks to Missy, Colette wasn’t a recluse like Renée. The use of first-person narrative, in a pervasive present tense, reinforces the association between author and character. (The character Renée is recalled to mind in Colette’s 1928 novel La naissance du jour [Break of Day].)

  Max is weak, and weakly portrayed, like many of Colette’s male protagonists. Her she has definitely loaded the dice against him: no true match for Renée either mentally or spiritually, he is merely a socially acceptable male, possessing the requisite equipment to satisfy a woman’s cravings. Since “Max” was another nickname of Missy’s, Colette must have had a lot of private fun writing the steamier love scenes. In real life, a department-store heir whom Colette met in 1908 did pursue her for some years, but mainly after the publication of this novel.

  Taillandy is a total caricature of Willy as a monster with no redeeming features. This was the first of many occasions on which Colette “paid him back” for what she perceived, or at least portrayed, as his unwarranted dominance over her. In The Vagabond, however, it is unclear how, or why, the painter Taillandy would have deprived Renée of her author’s rights and royalties.

  Brague, naturally, is the mime Wague, who partnered Otero (see subsection 6) as well as Colette. He actually did at one time teach mime at the Conservatoire (see Brague’s quip after the sex-maniac practical joke in Part Three of the novel). As a character in The Vagabond, though his honest craftsmanship and conscientiousness are emphasized, Brague serves largely as comic relief, thanks to his jokes and his drastic slang. Brague reappears briefly in the sequel to The Vagabond and in the above-mentioned L’envers du music-hall (which also features animal acts and characters reminiscent of Jadin and the Old Caveman). Wague is referred to by his real name in the 1940 novella “Chambre d’hôtel” (Hotel Room) and the 1946 memoir L’étoile Vesper (The Evening Star).

  Hamond is the à clef character standing for the real Léon Hamel (ca. 1860–1917), a well-off dilettante who gave Colette financial advice and was part of the circle around her and Missy. Colette’s extensive correspondence with him had begun in 1908.

  Margot doesn’t seem to represent any one real person, but her detailed characterization surely incorporates traits of Colette’s friends or relatives.

  The lesbian actress Amalia Barally is clearly reminiscent of Missy in some ways. Her colleague Cavaillon stands for Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972), already a vaudeville headliner in France at the time of writing, though not yet an international superstar. Colette had met him in Lyons during her 1909 tour; like Cavaillon, he was twenty-two in 1910.

  Last, but not least, Fossette (the name means “dimple”) stands for the bulldogs that Colette fancied in real life, and whose “psychology” she carefully observed, though shamelessly anthropomorphizing them. In The Vagabond, Fossette is variously described as black-and-white,3 “black as a truffle,” and brindled.

  3. Show Business. The present translation uses the word “vaudeville” for the kind of show Renée appears in; this was the normal American term, from at least 1885 on, for what had usually been called “variety” earlier. Some appropriate form of the word “variety” was long used in the major Western European languages, though there were also traditional local terms; for instance, Colette’s original French text sometimes uses the (nineteenth-century) terms café-concert and café chantant, but chiefly the loan word from England music-hall (cf. the British expression “on the halls” for our “in vaudeville”).

  “Pantomime” has meant different things in different places (in England, for instance, it’s a spoken and sung Christmastide extravaganza loosely based on children’s literature). In France, after the fairground tradition, there had been the great early-nineteenth-century tradition of Jean-Gaspard Debureau (“Baptiste”; cf. the film Les enfants du paradis), followed after a lapse of some decades by a late-nineteenth-century renaissance, in which prominent scenarists and composers provided notable wordless dramas. A revitalization of this form seems to have been carried out in the opening years of the twentieth century by Wague and others, but the necessarily brief vaudeville pantomimes and dances performed by Renée, Brague, and the Old Caveman were apparently melodramatic, raunchy, and kitschy. (Later in twentieth-century France came the newer, more ambitious symbolic pantomime developed by Étienne Decroux and Jean-Louis Barrault, and later by Marcel Marceau.)

  Revue, originating in France by the 1880s and reaching London and New York by the 1890s, was at first literally a topical review of the year’s events, mounted at year’s end, more or less.

  Baret was the real name of the most important booker of vaudeville tours in France at the time.

  Colette used a show-business milieu in a number of other works besides those already mentioned, including Mitsou (1919), La seconde (1929), and “Gribiche” (a story in the 1937 collection Bella-Vista).

  Show-business ventures of Colette subsequent to The Vagabond, and not yet mentioned, incl
uded: collaboration in the dramatizations of Chéri (1921; she played the main role at its 102nd performance and toured in the role in 1925 and later) and of La seconde (1951); and writing film scripts (1919, 1934, and 1935; the 1935 Divine, directed by Max Ophüls, was based on L’envers du music-hall).

  4. Sites in and Around Paris. Renée’s Paris is confined to the Right Bank and, generally speaking, to the north-central and northwest parts of the city, from the Bois de Boulogne (in the far west) and its fashionable outskirts (the Rue Pergolèse is near the northeast corner of the major park), northeastward past the nontouristy residential neighborhood Les Ternes (north of the Place de l’Étoile), to the folksy Montmartre area, where she works and dines.4 The boulevards mentioned by name—Clichy, Rochechouart, Malesherbes, Haussmann, Batignolles—are in Montmartre, or only blocks away, to the west or south; Haussmann crosses Malesherbes at the Place Saint-Augustin. The old fortifications of Paris, not demolished until 1919, a haunt of low life and crime, are mentioned specifically at the very outset of Part Three, but elsewhere in the present translation appear as “city limits” or the like.

  The Alhambra Theater, where Renée’s impresario Salomon has an appointment, was near the Place de la République; it opened in the 1860s as the Château d’Eau, and became the Alhambra music-hall in 1903. The Moulin-Rouge is on the Boulevard de Clichy and the Place Blanche in Montmartre; opening in 1889 as a dance hall, it was converted into a big auditorium in 1903. The Folies-Bergère, in the 9th arrondissement, opened in 1872 and featured revues from 1886. The Comédie-Française (the classical national theater going back to Molière’s day) is north of the Louvre, alongside the Palais-Royal.

  Both of the rustic suburbs mentioned, Meudon and Villed’Avray, are to the southwest of Paris.

  5. Cities on Renée’s Tour, in Part Three.5 Saint-Étienne is in the Rhône-Alpes region, southwest of Lyons. In Lyons, the Théâtre des Célestins opened in 1792 as the Théâtre des Variétés, and was later called the Theâtre de Comédie. In Marseilles, the Canebière is the most famous street, a major artery. In Nîmes, the amphitheater, the “baths (or temple) of Diana” in the Jardin de la Fontaine (opened 1750; the oldest public park in France), and the Tour Magne are all ancient Roman ruins, and among the foremost tourist attractions in the city. In Bordeaux, several broad thoroughfares in the historic city center are called cours, rather than avenue or boulevard; the term Bordelaise means a female inhabitant of the city, as well as referring to a culinary sauce. In Caen, the Folies-Caennaises is probably a fictional name for the theater that Colette describes elsewhere as a filthy sty.