A Portrait of Colette
Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel’s circle included many famous artistic names—Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Salvador Dali, to name a few. Among these, the French literary giant Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, known by the mononym of her surname, is perhaps the only female icon of the nation at the time on par with Chanel herself. She was honoured by the most recent CHANEL Les Rendez-vous Litteraires Rue Cambon, an ongoing series convened by Charlotte Casiraghi, this past October.
Image credit: Charlotte Casiraghi, Clémence Poésy, Olivia Gesbert and Emmanuelle Lambert and guests at Les Rendez-vous Litteraires Rue Cambon: Portrait of Colette at Librairie 7L © CHANEL
Like Chanel, who is said to have picked up the Coco moniker when singing Qui qu’a vu Coco dans l’Trocadéro? [Who's that who saw Coco at the Trocadero?] at the Rotonde de Moulins, the legend of Colette might be said to have been born in the café-concerts and music halls of early 20th-century Paris. It was here, performing cabarets and pantomime, that she earned a living after separating from her first husband, Henry “Willy” Gauthier-Villars, who had introduced her to the Paris scene in her early twenties and under whose duress (and name!) she wrote her first novels: the Claudine series. Determined to emancipate herself and reclaim her writing, Colette sought out the music halls to support herself, where she first gave Paris a taste of the scandal she would continue to stir throughout her life, which inspired many of her best auto fictional works, including La Vagabonde (1910), L’Entrave (1913) and Le Pur et l’Impur (1932). She was famously involved with women during this time, including the artistic androgynous noblewoman Mathilde “Missy” de Morny.
Image credit: Edouard Manet, The Café-Concert, c. 1879, oil on canvas, 47.3 x 39.1 cm. Courtesy The Walters Art Museum, Maryland
The bread and butter of her pen, she said, was love. Indeed, Colette was unparalleled in her sensual treatment of desire, pleasure and relationships through the lenses of all different ages. In many ways, she predicted her future with her masterworks Chéri (1920) and The End of Chéri (1926), about the romance between an older woman and a younger man; when she married a second time, to Henry de Jouvenel, with whom she had a daughter, she initiated a relationship with her 16-year-old stepson. But she also frequently wrote about nature, dogs and cats, and her youth. She fictionalises her childhood in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, her beloved mother Sido and experiences of family, rural life and growing up in a grand garden in My Mother’s House and Sido (1930). Barks and Purrs (1904), later editions of which include the additional key dialogue Toby-dog Speaks (1908), and The Cat (1933) are testaments to the affinities between the woman of letters and her pets – the London Review of Books would call her “the frizzle-headed Cat Woman of 20th-century French writing.”
Image credit: Pierre Bonnard, Siesta (La Sieste), 1900, oil on canvas, 109 × 132 cm. Collection of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1949. Courtesy National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Her third and final marriage was to writer Maurice Goudeket, with whom she remained until death. Even in her own time, Colette's stardom is such that she was the first woman to chair the Prix Goncourt and the first woman to receive a state funeral in 1954. Her books number in the forties, having been written with the speed she trained as a journalist, only slowing when she developed crippling arthritis in her final years. They remain lauded among France’s premiere creative output of the 20th-century. Her relatively late novella Gigi (1954) is perhaps her best-known text amongst English speakers, having been turned into a play (Colette herself cast and essentially launched the career of Audrey Hepburn) and later a film.
Image credit: Jacques-Émile Blanche, Portrait of the Novelist Colette, 1905, oil on canvas, 158 x 118 cm. Courtesy of Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya
Learn more about the legendary figure through the latest Les Rendez-vous Litteraires Rue Cambon: Portrait of Colette here: https://www.chanel.com/au/fashion/event/literary-rendez-vous-colette/
