The Collected Stories of Colette Read online

  About the Author

  * * *

  Colette, the creator of Claudine, Chéri and Gigi, and one of France’s outstanding writers, had a long, varied and active life. She was born in Burgundy in 1873, into a home overflowing with dogs, cats and children, and educated at the local village school. At the age of twenty she was brought to Paris by her first husband, the notorious Henry Gauthiers-Villars (Willy), writer and critic. By dint of locking her in her room, Willy forced Colette to write her first novels (the Claudine sequence), which he published under his name. They were an instant success. But their marriage (chronicled in Mes Apprentissages) was never happy and Colette left him in 1906. She spent the next six years on the stage – an experience, like that of her early childhood, which would provide many of the themes for her work. She remarried (Julie de Carneilhan ‘is a close a reckoning with the elements of her second marriage as she ever allowed herself’), later divorcing her second husband, with whom she had a daughter. In 1935 she married Maurice Goudeket, with whom she lived until her death in 1954.

  With the publication of Chéri (1920) Colette’s place as one of France’s prose masters became assured. Although she became increasingly crippled with arthritis, she never lost her intense preoccupation with everything around her. ‘I cannot interest myself in anything that is not life,’ she said; and, to a young writer, ‘Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you’. Her rich and supple prose, with its sensuous detail and sharp psychological insights, illustrates that personal philosophy.

  Her writing runs to fifteen volumes, novels, portraits, essays, chroniques and a large body of autobiographical prose. She was the first woman President of the Académie Goncourt, and when she died was given a state funeral and buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

  ALSO BY COLETTE

  Fiction

  Claudine at School

  Claudine and Annie

  Claudine Married

  Claudine in Paris

  Chéri

  The Last of Chéri

  Gigi and The Cat

  Chance Acquaintances

  Julie de Carneilhan

  The Ripening Seed

  The Vagabond

  Break of Day

  The Innocent Libertine

  Mitsou

  The Other One

  The Shackle

  Non-Fiction

  My Apprenticeships and Music-Hall Sidelights

  The Blue Lantern

  My Mother’s House and Sido

  The Pure and the Impure

  THE COLLECTED STORIES OF COLETTE

  Colette

  EDITED, AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY

  Robert Phelps

  TRANSLATED BY

  Matthew Ward, Antonia White, Ann-Marie Callimachi, and Others

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446467541

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2003

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  Copyright © Estate of Colette, 1920

  Selection and Introduction copyright © 1983 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Translation copyright © 1957, 1966, 1983 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Translation copyright © 1958 by Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd.

  Translated from the French. Clouk/Chéri, The Quick-Change Artist, and The Tenor from MES CAHIERS, copyright 1941 by Aux Armes de France. Dialogues for One Voice from CONTES DES MILLE ET UN MATINS, copyright © 1970 by Flammarion. A Letter, The Sémiramis Bar, If I had a Daughter . . ., Rites, Newly Shorn, Grape Harvest, In the Boudoir, and Alix’s Refusal from PAYSAGES ET PORTRAITS, copyright © 1958 by Flammarion. The Master from LA CHAMBRE ECLAIRÉE, copyright 1920 by Edouard-Joseph, Morning Glories, What Must We Look Like?, The Cure, Sleepless Nights, Gray Days, The Last Fire, and The Tendrils of the Vine, from LES VRILLES DE LA VIGNE, copyright 1934 by J. Ferenczi et Fils, On Tour, Bastienne’s Child, Cheap-Jacks, The Misfit, and From the Front from L’ENVERS DU MUSIC-HALL, copyright 1913 by Flammarion. Florie, In the Flower of Age, The Rivals, The Respite, and April from LA FLEUR DE L’AGE, copyright 1949 by Flammarion. The Hidden Woman, Dawn, One Evening, The Hand, A Dead End, The Fox, The Judge, The Omelette, The Other Wife, Monsieur Maurice, The Burglar, The Advice, The Murderer, The Portrait, The Landscape, The Half-Crazy, Secrets, Châ, The Bracelet, The Find, Mirror Games, Habit, and The Victim from LA FEMME CACHÉE, copyright 1924 by Ernest Flammarion. The Bitch, from DOUZE DIALOGUES DE BÊTES, copyright 1930 by Mercure de France. Bygone Spring from LA MASON DE CLAUDINE, copyright 1922 by J. Ferenczi et Fils. October from LA PAIX CHEZ LES BÊTES, copyright © 1958 by Librairie Arthème Fayard. The Sick Child, and The Photographer’s Wife from GIGI, copyright 1945 by Ferenczi. The Rainy Moon from CHAMBRE D’HÔTEL, copyright 1940 by Fayard. The Kepi, The Tender Shoot, Green Sealing Wax, and Armande from LE KÉPI, copyright 1943 by Fayard. Gribiche, The Patriarch, The Rendezvous, and Bella-Vista from BELLA-VISTA, copyright 1937 by J. Ferenczi et Fils.

  The Hidden Woman, Dawn, One Evening, The Hand, A Dead End, The Fox, The Judge, The Other Wife, The Burglar, The Murderer, The Portrait, The Landscape, Secrets, Châ, The Bracelet, The Find, Mirror Games, Habit, The Victim and My Friend Valentine were first published in England by Peter Owen Ltd under the title THE OTHER WOMAN in 1972 and have been retranslated for this volume

  All rights reserved

  First published in Great Britain in 1984 by Secker & Warburg

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 09 944908 0

  Introduction

  These one hundred stories are taken from some dozen volumes published during and after Colette’s lifetime. Dating from 1908 to 1945, they vary in length and intensity, but even the slightest is echt Colette, and if the one called “The Kepi” is probably the least sentimental love story ever told, the one called “April,” about a teenaged Adam and Eve, is probably the truest.

  As always in Colette’s world, the subject matter avoids any political or metaphysical themes and remains firmly implanted in the private life, in the joys and stresses of what Tolstoy once called “man’s most tormenting tragedy—the tragedy of the bedroom.” The backgrounds shift from Paris to the Mediterranean coast, from North African gardens to theater dressing rooms, from louche yet somehow wholesome bars to the fresh, sane countryside of the author’s native Burgundy. The people we meet are lovers, loners, liberated women, sexual outsiders, acrobats and mimes, children and adolescents, old maids and divorcees, and to their needful lives Colette brings not only her classically trim art of storytelling but the canny, profoundly generous knowledge of all-too-human nature for which her name has become virtually a synonym.

  These stori
es also represent Colette as an innovator, as well as a master, of the art of fiction. Most of our past century’s experimentation with the novel has tried to impose omniscience on it, ignoring its primary reality as something being told by the voice whose name is on the title page (Valéry: “When all is said and done, a book is merely a selection from its author’s monologue”). Like Proust, Colette declined anonymity and, in her most original work, establishes her own presence firmly in the foreground.

  With closely observed action and dialogue, she mixes some of the intimacy and even irrelevancy (yet so keenly selected and arranged) of a good memoir. The result—imaginary autobiography, post-novel, whatever you want to call it—communicates that quality of truth Thoreau had in mind when he said, “I desire to speak like a man in a waking moment to men in their waking moments.”

  Hence any mere digest of the plots of the stories would be misleading. For even when, as in “The Rendezvous” or “Bella-Vista,” there is a surprise ending, this is the least of the matter. Even the supple and wonderfully economic narrative line, even the lean precision of the prose itself, are peripheral to, or contained in, what remains the most imposing element in Colette’s art: the use of herself.

  This has nothing to do with her actual private life. It has simply to do with art, the art of using her own first person, and creating on the printed page a savory and magnetic presence (imaginary for all I know) called Colette. She has created many memorable characters—Léa, Chéri, Phil and Vinca, Julie de Cameilhan, Cigi. But Colette eclipses them all: tart, moody, hardworking, she could take St. Benedict’s “Laborare est orare” as her motto. Capable of reckless lyricism on behalf of what moves her, capable also of a superb contempt, she is essentially a born watcher, fierce, dedicated, with an absolute vocation to behold. Listen to her at her most characteristic, talking to herself on a late spring evening in Provence:

  The night was murmurous and warmer than the day. Three or four lighted windows, the clouded sky patched here and there with stars, the cry of some night bird over this unfamiliar place made my throat tighten with anguish. It was an anguish without depth; a longing to weep which I could master as soon as I felt it rise. I was glad of it because it proved that I could still savor the special taste of loneliness.

  Essentially Colette was a lyric poet, and her basic subject matter was not the world she described so reverently but the drama of her personal relation to the world. Her injunction to those around her was always “Look!” and her own capacity to behold was acute and untiring. But when she is writing at her best, it is not what she describes so much as her own presence, the dramatic act of herself watching, say, a butterfly, which becomes so absorbing, morally exemplary, and memorable. This is no accident, for the very delicate art of using the first person without indulgence is one that Colette developed as thoroughly, and as consciously, as Joyce explored the art of eschewing it.

  At first she practiced it in only her non-fiction, and whether she was writing a brochure for a perfume manufacturer, or a text to be read over Paris Mondial Radio to American students, or marginal notes for an almanac, she wove a deliberate thread of her personal life, her private myth, into the fabric. Later she began to do the same thing in her fiction. The result was a story in which the author sets aside Joyce’s aloofness and brings the art of narration back to its origins, with Colette herself consciously in the foreground, intimately, unfearfully telling the reader what she has seen or heard, or maybe even imagined, and no longer pretending she is not there.

  It is not, of course, a genre Colette invented. Prosper Mérimée probably suggested it to her, as much as anyone, in stories like “Carmen” and “The Venus of Ille.” But it is certainly a genre which Colette perfected. In “Bella-Vista,” for instance, she tells us about a middle-aged couple—both women—who keep a small offbeat hotel in the South of France. As a guest, Colette studies their relationship, its frailties, vulnerableness, risks; judges and revises her judgments; and then discovers the truth: which I shall not reveal here except to say that their secret is quite other than it seems. It is a strange, even beautiful story, but the character who is telling it, reconstructing it from day to day, is its greatest center of interest. It is the progression of her reactions that—in the best sense—instructs us in the morality of being a neighbor. And it is the qualitative greatness of her example that makes it just and unfulsome, exact and prescient, to think of her, as Glenway Wescott once did, as “a kind of female Montaigne,” who wrote stories as well as essays.

  Robert Phelps

  A Note on the Text

  The Colette canon includes at least four categories of “short story” which overlap and mix genres:

  chroniques: 1,800- to 3,500-word texts which include personal reportage, portraits of people, animals, flowers, theater reviews, etc.

  autobiographical sketches, as My Mother’s House

  lyrical meditations whose mode is not narrative, such as “Gray Days” and “The Last Fire”

  short stories proper, with characters, dialogue, a plot, conflict, and resolution.

  In Colette’s work, these texts tend to metamorphose into one another. An autobiographical sketch, such as “The Seamstress,” is also a short story and a lyric monologue. “The Sémiramis Bar” is at once a letter, a self-portrait, and a cheerful aside on the Sapphic underground in Paris, 1910. “The Watchman” is part diary, part animal portraiture, part autobiography. The story called “Green Sealing Wax” might have been included in My Mother’s House.

  Therefore, in choosing one hundred texts to comprise The Collected (not Complete) Short Stories of Colette, I have tried to include all the stories that are patently fiction yet that have never before appeared in one volume (e.g., the early fable “The Tendrils of the Vine” and Colette’s last story, “The Sick Child”); texts that have not been heretofore available in English (e.g., the early Chéri stories; the witty, sardonic “Dialogues for One Voice”); and to exclude the animal dialogues, which constitute a genre unto themselves, the purely autobiographical sketches such as appear in My Mother’s House, and the reportage in which Colette deals with public rather than private matters.

  Of the one hundred stories gathered here, it should perhaps be specified that the following appear in English for the first time: “The Other Table,” “The Screen,” “Clouk Alone,” “Clouk’s Fling,” “Chéri,” “The Return,” “The Pearls,” “Literature,” “My Goddaughter,” “A Hairdresser,” “A Masseuse,” “My Corset Maker,” “The Saleswoman,” “An Interview,” “The ‘Master,’ “Morning Glories,” “What Must We Look Like?,” “The Cure,” “Gray Days,” “The Last Fire,” “The Quick-Change Artist,” “The Tenor,” “Florie,” “Monsieur Maurice,” “The Advice,” “The Half-Crazy,” “Alix’s Refusal,” “The Respite,” “The Bitch,” “Bygone Spring,” and “April”; also the Preface to “Bella-Vista.”

  The remainder have appeared in American periodical or book form over the past fifty years, beginning with “The Fox” in Harper’s Bazaar in May 1933. The following are newly translated for this edition: “A Letter,” “The Sémiramis Bar,” “‘If I Had a Daughter,’” “Rites,” “Newly Shorn,” “Grape Harvest,” “In the Boudoir,” “The Victim,” “The Hidden Woman,” “Dawn,” “One Evening,” “The Hand,” “A Dead End,” “The Fox,” “The Judge,” “The Omelette,” “The Other Wife,” “The Burglar,” “The Murderer,” “The Portrait,” “The Landscape,” “Secrets,” “Châ,” “The Bracelet,” “The Find,” “Mirror Games,” “Habit,” “In the Flower of Age,” and “The Rivals.”

  R.P.

  Translator’s Acknowledgments

  Since my translations of Colette’s stories appear here for the first time, I would like to thank Richard Howard for having brought Nancy Miller, Robert Phelps, Colette, and me together. My thanks also to Irene Ilton, Jean Audet, Jean-Jacques Sicard, Annie Gandon, and Ivan Kovacovic, all of whom helped bring me closer to Colette. My most special gratitude goes to Jean Alice Jacob
son, who did far more than help me bring a faint reflection of Colette’s genius into English.

  Matthew Ward

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Colette

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  A Note on the Text

  Translator’s Acknowledgments

  PART I

  Early Stories

  CLOUK/CHÉRI

  The Other Table

  The Screen

  Clouk Alone

  Clouk’s Fling

  Chéri

  The Return

  The Pearls

  DIALOGUES FOR ONE VOICE

  Literature

  My Goddaughter

  A Hairdresser

  A Masseuse

  My Corset Maker

  The Saleswoman

  An Interview

  MY FRIEND VALENTINE

  A Letter

  The Sémiramis Bar

  “If I Had a Daughter . . .”

  Rites

  Newly Shorn

  Grape Harvest

  In the Boudoir

  The “Master”

  Morning Glories

  What Must We Look Like?

  The Cure

  Sleepless Nights

  Gray Days

  The Last Fire

  A Fable: The Tendrils of the Vine

  PART II

  Backstage at the Music Hall

  ON TOUR

  The Halt

  Arrival and Rehearsal

  A Bad Morning

  The Circus Horse

  The Workroom

  Matinee

  The Starveling

  Love

  The Hard Worker

  After Midnight

  “Lola”

  Moments of Stress

  Journey’s End

  “The Strike, Oh, Lord, the Strike!”