Chéri
A Dual-Language Book
Colette
Edited and Translated by
STANLEY APPELBAUM
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Mineola, New York
Copyright
English translation, Introduction, and footnotes copyright © 2001 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2001, contains the complete French text of Chéri, as originally published by Arthème Fayard, Paris, in 1920, together with a new English translation, a new Introduction, and footnotes in English, all by Stanley Appelbaum.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Colette, 1873-1954.
[Chéri. English & French]
[Chéri. a dual language book / Colette ; edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum.
p. cm.
eISBN-13: 978-0-486-12040-9
I. Appelbaum, Stanley. II. Title.
PQ2605.028 C513 2001
843'.912—dc21
00-066041
Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
41599604
www.doverpublications.com
Contents
Introduction
Chéri
INTRODUCTION
The Author
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in the Burgundian town of Saint-Sauveur (often called Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye). She later credited her mother Sido (Sidonie Landoy) with instilling in her a love of nature (especially animals), a nonconformist attitude, and a pagan delight in all sensory pleasures. Her father was Sido’s second husband, Captain Jules Colette, who had lost a leg in Napoleon III’s Italian campaign of 1859, and had settled in Saint-Sauveur as tax collector. The Captain was a bad manager of money, and—to his daughter’s lasting regret—the family home was lost in 1890 (they went to live with the future author’s elder half-brother). In the previous year, young Sidonie had completed her only formal education, though she continued to read widely on her own.
Her life changed totally when she married an old friend of the family in 1893. Henry Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy (1859–1931), was the well-to-do son of a major publisher, and a notorious Parisian man-about-town. He had left an illegitimate child in the care of the Colettes, and had come on frequent visits. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette now became known as Colette Willy. She lived in Paris, where she met her husband’s numerous friends in the most advanced literary and musical circles.
Some of these friends were actually wage slaves who ghost-wrote Willy’s articles, reviews, and trashy novels. When he discovered his young wife’s literary talents, he made her another one of his slaves, publishing her half-dozen earliest novels under his own name, though he had merely touched them up. The first of these, Claudine à l’école (Claudine at School), was written between 1894 and 1896, but not published until 1900, when it was an immediate success. Largely autobiographical, like practically everything Colette wrote, it was heavily influenced by Willy’s commercially minded prurience, and emphasized Claudine’s crush on a pretty woman teacher. Three more Claudine books, published in 1901, 1902, and 1903, chronicled the heroine’s marriage and new life in Paris society. Defenders of Colette blame Willy for the flippancy of these books, and for their occasional lapses into antisemitism and homophobia (directed against men). It was not until 1904 that a different, more personal book of Colette’s appeared, the Dialogues de bêtes (Dialogues of Animals), the first published under the name of Colette Willy.
Meanwhile, the marriage had proved very unhappy for Colette. Her husband was not only a taskmaster, but also a flagrant womanizer. There was a formal separation in 1907, followed by a divorce in 1910. But Colette had gone her own way even earlier. In 1906, after some lessons, she went on the stage, chiefly in pantomime (in later years, she also acted in revues and in straight plays). It was also in 1906 that she fell under the spell of the divorced Marquise de Belbeuf, known as Missy, and entered a lesbian relationship that lasted until 1911. In 1910, she published the novel L’ingénue libertine (The Gentle Libertine), a recasting of her last two Willy-inspired works, and she serialized her first outstanding novel, La vagabonde (The Vagabond; book publication, 1911). In this underrated novel, she paints a vivid picture of the backstage life of a touring performer of modest means, and weighs all the pros and cons of married comfort versus an independent existence as a woman.
It was also in 1910 that she began her career in journalism, joining the literary staff of the major newspaper Le matin (The Morning), for which she wrote countless reportages and stories until 1923. In 1912 she married her editor-in-chief, Henry de Jouvenel (1876–1935), who was later to become an eminent politician and diplomat. This second marriage made the country girl a baroness. In the same year, her mother died. In 1913, the forty-year-old author gave birth to her only child, Colette de Jouvenel. That same year, she published L’entrave (The Shackle), a weak sequel to La vagabonde, and L’envers du music-hall (Music-Hall Sidelights).
There were no publications of novels during the war years. Colette’s formal connection with the cinematic world began in 1915, when she worked for the magazine Le film. In 1919, when she became head of the literary staff at Le matin, she published a novel she had begun in 1917, Mitsou; ou Comment l’esprit vient aux filles (Mitsou; or How Girls Grow Wise). In 1920, the year of Chéri (see separate section below), she became a member of the Légion d’honneur (successive promotions were to follow in 1928, 1936, and 1953), and she commenced her liaison with her sixteen-year-old stepson Bertrand de Jouvenel (this romance apparently didn’t inspire Chéri, but was inspired by the book).
In 1922 and 1923 Colette did more stage work. Her second marriage was going badly, too. Her notable novel Le blé en herbe (The Ripening Seed),1 serialized in 1922 and published in book form in 1923, was the first one signed simply “Colette.” The author was separated from Henry de Jouvenel in 1923 and divorced him in 1925, the year in which she met the man who was to become her third husband. Maurice Goudeket, her junior by sixteen years, a salesman who later entered journalism, never stole any of her limelight, and proved to be devoted after they married in 1935 (he survived her). Another event of 1925 was the creation in Monte Carlo of Maurice Ravel’s one-act opera L’enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Magic Spells), to a libretto Colette had written years earlier.
The later 1920s and the 1930s were years of glory for Colette. She was her own mistress, and she had “arrived” as a writer. She published novels and books of personal reminiscences; she wrote reviews of plays (from 1929 on); she traveled as a lecturer; she opened a cosmetics shop in Paris (briefly, in 1932); she wrote film scripts (particularly the charming Lac aux dames, directed by Marc Allégret, which premiered in 1934); she was on the maiden voyage of the Normandie in 1935; she was elected to the Belgian Royal Academy of French Language and Literature in 1936.
A major personal setback was the onset of arthritis in 1936, perhaps the result of a broken leg in 1931. By the early 1940s, one hip was severely affected, and she was increasingly immobilized for the rest of her life, largely confined to her apartment in the Palais-Royal. The Second World War impinged on her life: her husband, a Jew, was arrested in 1941, but released the following year. Her last work of fiction, the story Gigi (a return to the Belle Epoque courtesan world of Chéri), appeared in 1944, when she was seventy-one. Thanks to its stage and film versions, it is now probably her best-known work. (She was personally instrumental in choosing the unknown Audrey Hepburn for the title role of the 1951 Broadway adaptation.) In 1945, Colette was elected to the Académie Goncourt, an extremely prestigious literary society; she became its president in 1949, th
e year in which her last reminiscences were published (not counting posthumous works).
In 1953 Colette was honored by Americans, receiving an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. When she died in 1954, she was the first woman ever to be buried in France with national honors. The funeral did not include a religious service, because she had always remained aloof from religion, and had been twice divorced.
All these honors indicate the injustice of the remark occasionally made that Colette’s reputation is owed chiefly to the efforts of feminists and lesbian activists in recent decades. Not that their publicity hasn’t helped, or that it has been misplaced. Colette stood for the emancipation of women, for the recognition and glorification of their specific sexuality. In her books, men are the weaker sex, more prone than women to commit suicide over disappointments in love. Irreligious, unmystical, attuned to nature, in her last years she saw herself, and others saw her, as a sort of earth mother, an archetype of femininity.
The Novel
Chéri, possibly Colette’s best-known novel, is often regarded as her best, as well. A character named Chéri apparently figured in several stories she contributed to Le matin in 1911 and 1912. According to one report, she first conceived of the plot as we know it in 1912, but in the form of a play. She began writing the definitive novel form in 1919, and Chéri was originally published serially in the weekly La vie parisienne between the issues of January 3 and June 5, 1920; it was published in volume form shortly afterward by Arthème Fayard, Paris. As early as 1921 a stage version, by Colette and Léopold Marchand, was performed in Paris; Colette played the part of Léa at the hundredth performance, in 1922, and went on tour with the play the following year. A new Paris production was mounted in 1925, and again in 1949. A French film version was released in 1950.
In fact, as far as action and incidents go, the novel Chéri has no more material than would fill a short story. The book, whether first conceived as a play or not, certainly resembles one. It has lots of dialogue, not many characters, and a minimum of principal “sets,” especially Léa’s bedroom and Charlotte’s garden room; the other locales are reminiscent of the exteriors with which a screenplay writer “opens up” the movie version of a stage work. And the entire last chapter is one big “noble renunciation” scene that barely needs further adaptation for the footlights.
The time of the plot is 1912 and 1913, the tail end of the frivolous, frothy Belle Epoque—frivolous for those with plenty of money, like Léa, her fellow ex-courtesans, and their offspring. There is never a word about social or political problems, or the impending war that was to bring such drastic changes. Even the drug and lesbian subculture that is fleetingly introduced isn’t meant as a salutary warning but just a slice of life, because Colette herself participated in it fully.2
All the Parisian neighborhoods and streets (and all or most of the commercial establishments) mentioned in the novel are real, and appropriate. Léa lives in Passy (the sixteenth arrondissement), more particularly in the neighborhood now called the Quartier Dauphine. (Passy is Paris’s largest stretch of upmarket housing.) The eastern end of the Avenue Bugeaud is the Place Victor-Hugo; the western end is the Porte Dauphine, one of the entrances to the fashionable park known as the Bois (de Boulogne), a stylish site for coaching meets, horseback riding, carriage drives, and elegant dining. Charlotte lives on the Boulevard d’Inkermann in Neuilly (-sur-Seine); Neuilly is technically a suburb, but for all practical purposes it is a well-to-do residential part of Paris just north of the Bois. When Léa visits Charlotte, she rides through the Bois, emerging through one of the former tollhouse gates (perhaps the Porte des Sablons, which is the closest to the Boulevard d’Inkermann). When Chéri builds a new house, it is on the Avenue Henri-Martin, in the more southerly part of Passy now called Passy-La Muette; this house is still unfinished, and he and his wife are still living with his mother, when the novel ends, so that Léa indicates Neuilly when referring to his wife Edmée in the last chapter.
The Blue Dragon Restaurant, where Chéri and Desmond dine on the night that Chéri begins to “play hookey” from his wife, may possibly be a disguised name; at any rate, the nature of its clientele would preclude its being listed in a tourist guide of the time, where it might be traced today. It is located, in the novel, on or near the Rue Caumartin, in the vicinity of a cluster of Boulevard theaters (ninth arrondissement). Weber’s, where the friends meet shortly after leaving the Blue Dragon, was a popular “English tavern” (a haunt of artists and writers) not far away, on the Rue Royale, which connects the church of the Madeleine with the Place de la Concorde. From there it’s just a short walk to the Rue de Rivoli, site of Desmond’s hotel, the “Morris.” This name is almost surely a thin disguise for the venerable Meurice, opposite the Tuileries Gardens, where Colette had stayed for several weeks after breaking up with Missy in 1911; the Meurice was to gain new notoriety during the Second World War as top Nazi headquarters in occupied Paris. Visiting Patron’s gym was really a harrowing expedition for Léa: besides smelling sweat, she had to journey to the Place d’Italie in the distant thirteenth arrondissement, in a neighborhood of hospitals and technical schools. The Lewis that Léa plans to visit when she returns from her trip to the south was probably the milliner of that name located on the Rue Royale (like Weber’s). The restaurant where she can’t picture herself having lunch with Chéri (last chapter) is the Pavillon d’Armenonville (or just Armenonville), located in the Bois; it was popular with the horsy set at lunchtime, and very swank at dinnertime. The jeweler Schwabe, where Léa intends to buy a wedding present for Chéri, proved impossible to locate in a Cook’s guide, a Baedeker, and two shopping directories of the period.
The characterizations in the novel depend largely on a repetition of the people’s tics. Charlotte constantly repeats words and flaps her arms. The Baroness de la Berche is always wishing people well—out loud, only. Léa is always scolding Chéri like a child, and Chéri is always trying to save money in cheese-paring ways. But for Léa, Chéri, and Edmée the author provides a myriad of reflections, interior monologues, and descriptions of gestures which flesh out the characters and the book, turning it into the traditional French conception of a roman psychologique. As elsewhere, Colette introduces some improbabilities:3 as different in nature, intelligence, and background as her characters are supposed to be, nearly each one is a past master at bitchy repartee, as if Charlotte Peloux’s Sunday open house were the Algonquin Round Table! And even Edmée, the eighteen-year-old ingenue, is allowed to indulge in a complex literary metaphor.
The plot of Chéri is not particularly original; for instance, the subject of a young man deserting his older mistress is the chief element of Adolphe, the 1816 masterpiece by Benjamin Constant. It is with her distinctive style, made up of swift, sure, almost impressionistic touches and skillful use of leitmotifs, that Colette creates her own atmosphere and her own emotional universe.
The opening chapter of Chéri is outstanding in this regard. Through dialogue, gesture, and brief description—without any consecutive “history”—we are made aware of the year and of the two main characters’ social standing and wealth, individual natures, and relationship to each other; and we are introduced to the main “set” of the “play”: Léa’s bedroom, to which we’ll return again and again. Léa’s constant reprimands reveal her as a “perverted mother,” and Chéri’s “ugly laugh” warns us about nasty undertones in his character. We first see Chéri in silhouette, as a cavorting devil (later we are repeatedly told about his devilishly sloping eyebrows); much later, when he leaves home and returns to Léa, he is a dark silhouette against her bedroom door. In the opening chapter, Léa helps Chéri get dressed; in the closing chapter, he refuses her aid (in both instances, his tie has been wrapped around a bust of Léa). The pearl necklace mentioned in the opening dialogue becomes a major motif, a symbol of Léa (explaining her past life, and indicating her own solidity as well as Chéri’s childishness and vanity); later we learn that Chéri had finge
red that necklace when they became lovers; we will find him comparing it to the necklaces worn by Edmée and by “Pal.” Finally, the opening chapter warns Léa about Chéri’s marriage, preparing the entire plot of the novel.
(Another example of a recurring leitmotif is Chéri as a hunting hound. He sighs like one when he sleeps, when he laughs, he’s like a hound about to bite; and Edmée is flung to him, like a doe flung to a hound.)
The language and style of Chéri are a personal mixture of idioms and slang with classically correct, and even hyper-correct, fine writing (préciosité). Colette indulges extensively in a couple of grammatical tics: (1) connecting two words with a comma instead of et (“and”); and (2) using et instead of mais (“but”) where the meaning is clearly adversative. She also overemploys certain favorite words, particularly the adjective sec, which is put to a bewildering number of uses.
Fond of sequels (Claudine à l’école had four, including La retraite sentimentale; the novel L’entrave was a poor sequel to La vagabonde), Colette belatedly supplied one to Chéri, as well, in 1926: La fin de Chéri (The Last of Chéri; begun as early as 1923, when Colette was gloomy over the failure of her second marriage). This austere, acerb, grim, humorless book (as different from Chéri as possible) takes place after the First World War. Edmée has become completely emancipated, thanks to wartime conditions, and Chéri’s marriage is totally meaningless. He seeks out Léa again, but she is now beyond caring, and almost beyond everything (at sixty, or less!). With nothing left to live for, he kills himself.
Some critics find that this ending reveals the depths of character that were only latent in the title character of Chéri. Others find that his suicide is ludicrous, both in the general circumstances and vis-à-vis his particular self-loving nature. Certainly, the sequel reads as if Colette had unwisely identified herself much too closely with the Léa of Chéri, and was taking personal revenge on her poor character for having deserted her some years earlier.