the story behind the picture

  • Thread starter Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
  • Start date
S

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

Guest
Colette (1873-1954) - in full Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

French novelist, belonging, in time, to the generation of authors that includes Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, André Gide, and Paul Claudel. Colette's career as a writer spanned from her early 20s to her mid-70s. Her main themes were joys and pains of love and female sexuality in the male-dominated world. All her works are more or less autobiographical - Colette intentionally blurred the boundaries between fiction and fact in her life. She wrote over 50 novels and scores of short stories.

"By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet." (Mes Apprentissages, 1936)

Sidonie-Cabrielle Colette was born in the Burgundian village of Saint-Sauveur-en Puisaye as the daughter of a retired army captain, Jules-Joseph Colette, who had lost a leg in the Italian campaign and who worked as a taxcollector with local political aspirations. Her mother, Adele Eugenie Sidonie Landoy, known as 'Sidonie' or 'Sido', was an unconventional character, a down-to-earth personality, devoted to her pets, books, and garden. Colette spent a happy childhood in rural surrounding, which later was the scene of her many novels. At the age of 20 Colette married 15 years older writer and music critic Henri Gauthier-Villars, ('Monsieur Willy'). Colette's biographers' have labelled her first husband as a literary charlatan and degenerate.

Encouraged to start a career as a writer Colette published in short period four CLAUDINE novels (1900-03) under her husband's pen name Willy. According to a famous story, he locked Colette in her room until she had written enough pages. The series of four novels depicted a teenage girl's improper adventures. The series became a huge success and inspired all kinds of side products - a musical stage play, Claudine uniform, Claudine soap, cigars, and perfume. However, Colette's own cosmetics shop went bankrupt. Tired of her husbands unfaithfulness she Colette broke free of him in 1905. After divorce in 1906 Colette became music-hall performer at such places as La Chatte Amoureuse and L'Oiseau de Nuit. On stage she bared one breast, which became the talk of the town. Once Colette mimed copulation in a sketch and caused a riot at the Moulin Rouge. She also had a protector, a woman known as 'Missy,' who was the niece of Napoleon III, the Marquise de Belboeuf, and managed her public image, as writer, as actress and as lesbian. Missy committed suicide in 1944 - living ruined and desperate. Among Colette's other friends and probably lovers were Natalie Clifford Barney, an American lesbian woman, and the Italian writer Gabriele d'Annunzzio.

In 1912 Colette married Henri de Jouvenel des Ursins, editor of the newspaper Le Matin, for which she wrote theatre chronicles and short stories. Their daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, later told that she was neglected by her parents - her mother never wanted a child. Colette's relationship with her young stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, became a source of gossips. In the novel CHÉRI (1920) she returned to the affair but depicted it from a point of view of a sexually unexperienced young man.

In 1910 Colette published LA VAGABONDE, a story about an actress who rejects a man she loves in order to live in an independent way. During World War I Colette converted her husband's St. Malo estate into a hospital for the wounded. After the war she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour (1920).

The 1920s brought Colette enormous fame. She entered the world of modern poetry and paintings, which centered around Jean Cocteau, who was later her neighbor in Palais Royale. The relationship and life is vividly depicted in their books. By 1927 she was frequently acclaimed as France's greatest woman writer. Especially Colette's insights into the behavior of women in love gained a sympathetic response from the reading public.

"'The great hat principle is that when you meet a woman on the street and her hat allows you to see whether she's a brunette, a blonde, or a redhead, the woman in question is not wearing a chic hat. There! ... Notice I'm not saying anything, I'll let you make up your own mind. Well?'" (from 'The Saleswoman' in Collected Stories)
In Colette's mature works two broad themes can be identified: Colette depicts peaceful world, the nature and the mother-daughter bond among others in LA MAISON DE CLAUDINE (1922), which mythologized her childhood, LA NAISSANCE DU JOUR (1928) and SIDO (1929), which celebrates Colette's carefree rural childhood, and the strength of her mother, whom the author rarely saw but wrote her many letters. The letters were destroyed by her brother when their mother died. In novels such as LA VAGABONDE (1911), LE BLÉ EN HERBE (1923), LA SECONDE (1929) and LA CHATTE she explores a darker universe, struggle between independent identity and passionate love. Most of Colette's heroes and heroines, cocottes, bisexuals and gigolos, came from the margins of society. Chéri, which is one of her most famous book, tells a story of the end of a six year affair between an aging retired courtesan, Léa, and a pampered young man, Chéri. Turning stereotypes upside-down it is Chéri who wears silk pyjamas and Léa's pearls, he is the object of gaze. And in the end Léa demonstrates all the survival skills with Colette associates with feminity. The story continued in The Last of Chéri (1951), which contrasts Léa's strength and Chéri's fragility, leading to his suicide.

In the 1940s Colette focused on her later years in L'ÉTOILE VESPER (1946) and LE FANAL BLEU (1949). Her use of the character/narrator 'Colette' added with fictional and real characters constantly questions the relationship between autobiography and fiction. GIGI (1945) was published when the author was 72; the novel was made into a film in 1948 and in 1958 Vincente Minnelli directed a musicalized version of it.

In the 1930s Colette was made a member of the Belgian Royal Academy. She was the first woman to be admitted to the prestigious Goncourt Academy. In 1953 she became a grand officer of the Legion of Honour. She won also many awards for her work, and became a legendary figure in Paris as writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). During the last 20 years of her life Colette suffered crippling form of arthritis, which had been set off by the fracture of a fibula in 1931. Her marriage 1924 with Henry de Jouvenal ended in 1924. From 1935 she was married to Maurice Goudaket, whose pearl business had been ruined during the Depression. Colette supported him more or less because as a Jew he did not find work and had to hide when the Germans occupied France. Colette died on August 3, 1954 in Paris. She was accorded a state funeral despite the refusal of Catholic rites on the grounds that she had been divorced. Her funeral was attended by thousands of mourners.

For further reading: Madame Colette by M. Crosland (1953); Prés de Colette (Close to Colette) by Maurice Goudeket (1955); Colette by E. Marks (1960); The Delights of Growing Old by Maurice Goudeket (1966); Colette - The Difficulty of Loving by M. Crosland (1973); Colette by R.D. Cotrell (1974); Colette by Y. Mitchell (1975); Colette Free and Fettered by M. Sarde (1980); Colette, ed. by E.M. Eisinger and M.W.McCarthy (1981); Colette by J.H. Stewart (1983); Colette by J. Richardson (1984); Colette by N. Ward Jouve (1987); Colette: A Life by H. Lottman (1990); Creating Colette: From Ingenue to Libertine 1873-1913 by Claude Francis, Fernande Gontier ( 1998); Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman (1999); Creating Colette: From Baroness to Woman of Letters, 1912-1954 by Claude Francis, Fernande Gontier (1999); Colette by Claude Pichois and Alain Brunet (1999); Colette by Julia Kristeva (2002) - OTHER WRITERS CLOSELY ASSOCIATED WITH PARIS: Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), Gaston Leroux (The Phantom of the Opera), Alexandre Dumas (père), Honoré de Balzac, Eugéne Sue, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Émile Zola, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.

Selected works:

CLAUDINE À L'ÉCOLE, 1900 - Claudine at School
CLAUDINE À PARIS, 1901
CLAUDINE EN MÉNAGE, 1902
CLAUDINE S'EN VA, 1903
LA VAGABONDE, 1910 - The Vagabond
L'ENVERS DU MUSICHALL, 1913 - Music-Hall Sidelights - film 1935, dir. by Max Ophuls
CHÉRI, 1920 - transl. - suom.
LA MAISON DE CLAUDINE,1922 - My Mother's House - Claudinen koti
LE BLÉ EN HERBE,1923 - The Ripening Seed - Vilja oraalla - film 1956, dir. by Claude Autant-Lara
LA FIN DE CHÉRI,1926 - The Last of Chér - Cherin loppu
SIDO, 1930
CES PLAISIRS,1932 - "Those Pleasures”
LA CHATTE,1933 - The Cat
DUO, 1934
MES APPRENTISSAGES, 1936 - My Apprenticeships
LE PUR ET L'IMPUR,1941 - The Pure and the Impure
GIGI, 1944 - film versions: 1948 dir. by Jacqueline Audry, starring Daniele Delorme, Gaby Morlay, Yvonne de Bray; musical version in 1958 dir. by Vincente Minnelli, starring Leslia Caron, Louis Jourdan, Maurice Chevalier - note: Leslie Caron's vocals were dubbed by Betty Wand
PARIS DE MA FENÊTRE, 1944
LE FANAL BLEU, 1949
EN PAYS CONNU, 1950
CHÉRI, 1952 (play)
Six Novels, 1957
The Collected Stories of Colette, 1983
Collected Stories, 1983
Flowers and Fruit, 1986 (edited by Robert Phelps)




pic232531.jpg
 
my brain hurts now! could not be ARSED reading that
 
f*** you, i should have known better than post something morrissey related huh
 
steady on tiger, i was just saying it's a lot of text for 2 in the morning, some people!
 
I thought it was gonna be that pathetic doctored pic of me again..btw, how am I doing on hot or not?
 
Re: I thought it was gonna be that pathetic doctored pic of me again..btw, how am I doing on hot or

How would I know? Just trying to break the monotony of seeing your ugly ass all over the internet.

Shoot me.
 
FAO The boring c*** with the daft name

> How would I know? Just trying to break the monotony of seeing your ugly
> ass all over the internet.

> Shoot me.

Bang Bang, You're dead shitface.
 
Yeah, he's a bit touchy isn't he claire?Maybe he was born with male & female genitalia?
 
> Colette (1873-1954) - in full Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

> French novelist, belonging, in time, to the generation of authors that
> includes Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, André Gide, and Paul Claudel.
> Colette's career as a writer spanned from her early 20s to her mid-70s.
> Her main themes were joys and pains of love and female sexuality in the
> male-dominated world. All her works are more or less autobiographical -
> Colette intentionally blurred the boundaries between fiction and fact in
> her life. She wrote over 50 novels and scores of short stories.

> "By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost
> belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers
> of memory, binds the bouquet." (Mes Apprentissages, 1936)

> Sidonie-Cabrielle Colette was born in the Burgundian village of
> Saint-Sauveur-en Puisaye as the daughter of a retired army captain,
> Jules-Joseph Colette, who had lost a leg in the Italian campaign and who
> worked as a taxcollector with local political aspirations. Her mother,
> Adele Eugenie Sidonie Landoy, known as 'Sidonie' or 'Sido', was an
> unconventional character, a down-to-earth personality, devoted to her
> pets, books, and garden. Colette spent a happy childhood in rural
> surrounding, which later was the scene of her many novels. At the age of
> 20 Colette married 15 years older writer and music critic Henri
> Gauthier-Villars, ('Monsieur Willy'). Colette's biographers' have labelled
> her first husband as a literary charlatan and degenerate.

> Encouraged to start a career as a writer Colette published in short period
> four CLAUDINE novels (1900-03) under her husband's pen name Willy.
> According to a famous story, he locked Colette in her room until she had
> written enough pages. The series of four novels depicted a teenage girl's
> improper adventures. The series became a huge success and inspired all
> kinds of side products - a musical stage play, Claudine uniform, Claudine
> soap, cigars, and perfume. However, Colette's own cosmetics shop went
> bankrupt. Tired of her husbands unfaithfulness she Colette broke free of
> him in 1905. After divorce in 1906 Colette became music-hall performer at
> such places as La Chatte Amoureuse and L'Oiseau de Nuit. On stage she
> bared one breast, which became the talk of the town. Once Colette mimed
> copulation in a sketch and caused a riot at the Moulin Rouge. She also had
> a protector, a woman known as 'Missy,' who was the niece of Napoleon III,
> the Marquise de Belboeuf, and managed her public image, as writer, as
> actress and as lesbian. Missy committed suicide in 1944 - living ruined
> and desperate. Among Colette's other friends and probably lovers were
> Natalie Clifford Barney, an American lesbian woman, and the Italian writer
> Gabriele d'Annunzzio.

> In 1912 Colette married Henri de Jouvenel des Ursins, editor of the
> newspaper Le Matin, for which she wrote theatre chronicles and short
> stories. Their daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, later told that she was
> neglected by her parents - her mother never wanted a child. Colette's
> relationship with her young stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, became a source
> of gossips. In the novel CHÉRI (1920) she returned to the affair but
> depicted it from a point of view of a sexually unexperienced young man.

> In 1910 Colette published LA VAGABONDE, a story about an actress who
> rejects a man she loves in order to live in an independent way. During
> World War I Colette converted her husband's St. Malo estate into a
> hospital for the wounded. After the war she was made a Chevalier of the
> Legion of Honour (1920).

> The 1920s brought Colette enormous fame. She entered the world of modern
> poetry and paintings, which centered around Jean Cocteau, who was later
> her neighbor in Palais Royale. The relationship and life is vividly
> depicted in their books. By 1927 she was frequently acclaimed as France's
> greatest woman writer. Especially Colette's insights into the behavior of
> women in love gained a sympathetic response from the reading public.

> "'The great hat principle is that when you meet a woman on the street
> and her hat allows you to see whether she's a brunette, a blonde, or a
> redhead, the woman in question is not wearing a chic hat. There! ...
> Notice I'm not saying anything, I'll let you make up your own mind.
> Well?'" (from 'The Saleswoman' in Collected Stories)
> In Colette's mature works two broad themes can be identified: Colette
> depicts peaceful world, the nature and the mother-daughter bond among
> others in LA MAISON DE CLAUDINE (1922), which mythologized her childhood,
> LA NAISSANCE DU JOUR (1928) and SIDO (1929), which celebrates Colette's
> carefree rural childhood, and the strength of her mother, whom the author
> rarely saw but wrote her many letters. The letters were destroyed by her
> brother when their mother died. In novels such as LA VAGABONDE (1911), LE
> BLÉ EN HERBE (1923), LA SECONDE (1929) and LA CHATTE she explores a darker
> universe, struggle between independent identity and passionate love. Most
> of Colette's heroes and heroines, cocottes, bisexuals and gigolos, came
> from the margins of society. Chéri, which is one of her most famous book,
> tells a story of the end of a six year affair between an aging retired
> courtesan, Léa, and a pampered young man, Chéri. Turning stereotypes
> upside-down it is Chéri who wears silk pyjamas and Léa's pearls, he is the
> object of gaze. And in the end Léa demonstrates all the survival skills
> with Colette associates with feminity. The story continued in The Last of
> Chéri (1951), which contrasts Léa's strength and Chéri's fragility,
> leading to his suicide.

> In the 1940s Colette focused on her later years in L'ÉTOILE VESPER (1946)
> and LE FANAL BLEU (1949). Her use of the character/narrator 'Colette'
> added with fictional and real characters constantly questions the
> relationship between autobiography and fiction. GIGI (1945) was published
> when the author was 72; the novel was made into a film in 1948 and in 1958
> Vincente Minnelli directed a musicalized version of it.

> In the 1930s Colette was made a member of the Belgian Royal Academy. She
> was the first woman to be admitted to the prestigious Goncourt Academy. In
> 1953 she became a grand officer of the Legion of Honour. She won also many
> awards for her work, and became a legendary figure in Paris as writer
> Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). During the last 20 years of her life Colette
> suffered crippling form of arthritis, which had been set off by the
> fracture of a fibula in 1931. Her marriage 1924 with Henry de Jouvenal
> ended in 1924. From 1935 she was married to Maurice Goudaket, whose pearl
> business had been ruined during the Depression. Colette supported him more
> or less because as a Jew he did not find work and had to hide when the
> Germans occupied France. Colette died on August 3, 1954 in Paris. She was
> accorded a state funeral despite the refusal of Catholic rites on the
> grounds that she had been divorced. Her funeral was attended by thousands
> of mourners.

> For further reading: Madame Colette by M. Crosland (1953); Prés de Colette
> (Close to Colette) by Maurice Goudeket (1955); Colette by E. Marks (1960);
> The Delights of Growing Old by Maurice Goudeket (1966); Colette - The
> Difficulty of Loving by M. Crosland (1973); Colette by R.D. Cotrell
> (1974); Colette by Y. Mitchell (1975); Colette Free and Fettered by M.
> Sarde (1980); Colette, ed. by E.M. Eisinger and M.W.McCarthy (1981);
> Colette by J.H. Stewart (1983); Colette by J. Richardson (1984); Colette
> by N. Ward Jouve (1987); Colette: A Life by H. Lottman (1990); Creating
> Colette: From Ingenue to Libertine 1873-1913 by Claude Francis, Fernande
> Gontier ( 1998); Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman
> (1999); Creating Colette: From Baroness to Woman of Letters, 1912-1954 by
> Claude Francis, Fernande Gontier (1999); Colette by Claude Pichois and
> Alain Brunet (1999); Colette by Julia Kristeva (2002) - OTHER WRITERS
> CLOSELY ASSOCIATED WITH PARIS: Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame),
> Gaston Leroux (The Phantom of the Opera), Alexandre Dumas (père), Honoré
> de Balzac, Eugéne Sue, Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, Émile
> Zola, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.

> Selected works:

> CLAUDINE À L'ÉCOLE, 1900 - Claudine at School
> CLAUDINE À PARIS, 1901
> CLAUDINE EN MÉNAGE, 1902
> CLAUDINE S'EN VA, 1903
> LA VAGABONDE, 1910 - The Vagabond
> L'ENVERS DU MUSICHALL, 1913 - Music-Hall Sidelights - film 1935, dir. by
> Max Ophuls
> CHÉRI, 1920 - transl. - suom.
> LA MAISON DE CLAUDINE,1922 - My Mother's House - Claudinen koti
> LE BLÉ EN HERBE,1923 - The Ripening Seed - Vilja oraalla - film 1956, dir.
> by Claude Autant-Lara
> LA FIN DE CHÉRI,1926 - The Last of Chér - Cherin loppu
> SIDO, 1930
> CES PLAISIRS,1932 - "Those Pleasures”
> LA CHATTE,1933 - The Cat
> DUO, 1934
> MES APPRENTISSAGES, 1936 - My Apprenticeships
> LE PUR ET L'IMPUR,1941 - The Pure and the Impure
> GIGI, 1944 - film versions: 1948 dir. by Jacqueline Audry, starring
> Daniele Delorme, Gaby Morlay, Yvonne de Bray; musical version in 1958 dir.
> by Vincente Minnelli, starring Leslia Caron, Louis Jourdan, Maurice
> Chevalier - note: Leslie Caron's vocals were dubbed by Betty Wand
> PARIS DE MA FENÊTRE, 1944
> LE FANAL BLEU, 1949
> EN PAYS CONNU, 1950
> CHÉRI, 1952 (play)
> Six Novels, 1957
> The Collected Stories of Colette, 1983
> Collected Stories, 1983
> Flowers and Fruit, 1986 (edited by Robert Phelps)
Now you've got me on a roll! I have a few of her books (only in trade paperback, sorry) My favorite of Collette's is "Earthly Paradise". How I wish that were so.
 
Re: f*** you, i should have known better than post something morrissey related huh

claire voyant is a fool. If they had read about Collette and her somewhat bittersweet life, they might have learnt something. I know my books, and I am not often wrong.
 
see you soon Fatty.where will you be tomorrow night?
 
Do you owe me an apology GU? I think so...
 
GU owes the third world an apology for eating their emergency food rations
 
why would i want to read about a jumped-up feminist?
 
sorry

from gu.

see you at next S&G

(btw he made me do it)
 
Hmmm...

> from gu.

> see you at next S&G

> (btw he made me do it)

Hmmm....It's not nice to post pics of people without their permission ESPECIALLY when they didn't want to be photographed in the first place!

Perhaps I should post one or 2 of those camera phone pics of you & your friend.......

Or maybe 'that' pic will be removed ASAP.
 
Re: Hmmm...

> Hmmm....It's not nice to post pics of people without their permission
> ESPECIALLY when they didn't want to be photographed in the first place!

> Perhaps I should post one or 2 of those camera phone pics of you &
> your friend.......

> Or maybe 'that' pic will be removed ASAP.

Again, sorry for that, I plead innocence as I've been laid up with a Coccyx Injury and twas not me that posted them pics.

Toodle-pip
 

Similar threads

A
Replies
8
Views
2K
I agree with you, king leer. Yessir, that's my int
I
D
Replies
7
Views
828
Mr.Improper PIMP of the fuckin nation...and charle
M
T
Replies
13
Views
1K
Bardot of Barking
B
Back
Top Bottom