2023-11-02 09:20:21
Fields roll away to the horizon, rapeseed sways sluggishly, forests never end. Time seems to freeze in the field, forest and meadow Burgundy of the Puisaye. Most of the villages in the unspectacular, still deeply rural area between the upper reaches of the Loire and the Yonne are quickly traversed. The gravity of the French provinces looms over the alleys and walls, farms are widely scattered, the red roofs are just enough to highlight the velvety green of the forests, as it says at the beginning of “Claudine à l’école”. With the first of three more Claudine novels published in quick succession, a writer who was still nameless at the time because the books were published under Willy, the “nom de plume” of her first husband Henry Gauthier-Villars, achieved a brilliant success in 1900. It was not until 1923 that the natural talent from Puisaye published her first book under what later became a world-famous artist name, which was not a first name but her father’s family name: Colette.
The road to get there is long, leads through two divorces and numerous love affairs, from the liberating separation from Willy to a relationship with Mathilde de Morny, called Missy, the niece of Napoléon III, staged for the theater stage, to the amour fou of the soon-to-be fifty-year-old with the not once 17 year old son of her second husband. The path also leads Colette back to the Puisaye again and again. In the first work, the fictional location of the very real event, based on her childhood memories, is called Montigny-en-Fresnois. It was easy for contemporaries to identify the place as Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. The heroine, a young woman from the provinces with fresh courage and a cheeky mouth, breaks with the mannered poses of the fin de siècle – this Claudine comes across as decidedly modern because she is unaffected. A healthy dose of emotional confusion contributes to the scandal and thus to the sales success.
#Love #great #writer #years #Colette