How the French Invented Love (35 page)

    My English mistress seemed adorable to me that night under the library lamp. Her cat’s eyes shone pure gold, at once malicious and caressing . . . she seemed so utterly at ease in this warm, softly lit room that I already felt ready to love her so much, so very much, with all my irrational heart. Yes, I’ve known perfectly well, for a long time, that I have an irrational heart. But knowing it doesn’t stop me in the least.

At school, Claudine’s “irrational” love for Mlle Aimée is threatened by similar feelings coming from Mlle Sergent, as well as the attentions of two male teachers from the boys’ school. Mlle Aimée is receptive to her many suitors, but in Claudine’s home, her pupil takes full advantage of the exclusive situation.

    How nice it was there with her in the warm library! I pulled my chair right up against hers and laid my head on her shoulder. She put her arm round me and I squeezed her supple waist.

        “Darling little Mademoiselle, it’s such ages since I’ve seen you!”

        “But it’s only three days . . .”

        “ . . . Don’t talk, and kiss me!”

         . . .

        She kissed me and I purred. Then, suddenly, I hugged her so violently, that she gave a little shriek.

    I wished my English grammar to the devil! I much preferred to lay my head on her breast while she stroked my hair or my neck and I could hear her heart beating breathless under my ear. How I loved being with her!

This happy state of affairs is short-lived, since Mlle Sergent has more to offer Mlle Aimée than Claudine. The senior teacher, “a Fury, with snakes in her red hair,” gradually takes over and totally subjugates Mlle Aimée, to the amusement of all the observant schoolgirls except Claudine. Mlle Sergent and Mlle Aimée become a model lesbian couple, with the senior member assuming the traditional male role of mentoring the younger, more feminine, partner.

Claudine does not let the setback with Mlle Aimée discourage her. Aimée’s younger sister, Luce, wants to take her sister’s place in Claudine’s heart, and though Claudine rebuffs her with gruff mockery, she gets some peevish satisfaction out of Luce’s servile devotion. She also knows how to fend off the men who come on to her, including the school doctor. Claudine has a creaturely confidence in herself that becomes the hallmark of Colette’s female characters. Independent at all costs, they refuse to be cowed and often act with the prerogatives of men, including their sexual freedom.

No piece of literature written by an English or American woman at the turn of the twentieth century dared to portray love between women so openly. The Anglo-Saxon world would have to wait for Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel,
The Well of Loneliness
, which attracted publicity from the legal challenges it encountered in England and the United States, but never acquired the broad success of Colette’s works. Once again, the French set in motion a wave of sexual revolution that would crest more than once during the rest of the century.

I
n the subsequent Claudine novels,
Claudine in Paris
and
Claudine Married
, the young heroine discovers the joys and deceptions of marriage and finds herself pushed into a lesbian relationship by none other than her husband. The circumstances of Claudine’s marriage are not unlike those of Colette in real life: she marries an older, previously married man, who has a son and who introduces her to sophisticated Parisian society. True, Claudine’s marriage is more attractive than Colette’s—after all, we are in a novel, where it is possible to improve upon one’s material situation and endow one’s partner with more appeal. Initially, Claudine is enchanted with her husband, Renaud, despite their twenty-year difference in age, and she becomes captive to his voluptuous sexuality, “made up of desire, perversity, lively curiosity and deliberate licentiousness.”
⁵
What do all these words mean? We shall find out soon enough.

Renaud wants Claudine to choose her day in Paris, which means the day she will be at home to receive visitors. Claudine refuses: such social niceties are beyond her. She sees no need to imitate Renaud in his worldly ways. One afternoon, however, when an exotic couple visit Renaud on “his day,” Claudine comes under the spell of the beautiful Rézi, a Viennese-born blonde married to a rich but odious Englishman. Claudine and Rézi promise to meet at Rézi’s home on the avenue Kléber at five o’clock. This is the consecrated time that French lovers meet for sexual encounters. The set phrase
un cinq à sept
—“a five to seven”—has come to signify a love tryst.

At first Claudine is satisfied with gazing at Rézi and inhaling her perfumed presence. The sensual creature we have come to know in the two earlier novels delights in observing the minute features of another lovely woman—her hair, her skin, her eyes, her eyelashes and delicate fingers. It may very well be, as one American feminist critic has claimed, the first time since Sappho that a woman author describes the pleasure she derives from gazing at another woman, and makes no excuses for it.
⁶

Claudine’s own appearance is of no small concern to her and her new friend, who gives her advice on clothes, hair style, and the art of deceiving one’s husband. Claudine has already cut off her long braids (as did Colette, to the great chagrin of her mother) and looks more like the “new woman” of her generation.

    Because of my shorn mane and my coldness towards them, men say to themselves: “She only goes in for women.” . . . If I don’t like men I
must
be pursing women; such is the simplicity of the masculine mind.

Claudine (like Colette) is attracted to both men and women. After her conjugal initiation into heterosexual love, the mysteries of lesbian love are revealed to her by Rézi.

    . . . five oclock visit to Rézi or from Rézi; she is becoming more and more attached to me without trying to hide it. And I am becoming attached to her, God knows, but I conceal it. . . .

Claudine hides her growing infatuation as best she can, limiting herself to combing Rézi’s hair and sensing the presence of Rézi’s body through her clothes, sometimes daring to press up against her, accidentally. Soon she, too, longs for more intimate pleasures. Her husband Renaud encourages the relationship because he considers Rézi a suitable mentor for his provincial wife. But there is also a definite voyeuristic component in his encouragement, something that Claudine recognizes as perverse. Like many men, he is intrigued by lesbians and says as much: “You women can do anything. It’s charming, and it’s of no consequence whatever.”

Note the typical downgrading of women’s sexuality, as if love between women were not as serious as heterosexual love, or to be compared with male homosexuality, which Renaud condemns. This is a position one can trace back to the Hebrew Bible’s condemnation of sex between men and its silence on sex between women. Renaud takes an especially dim view of male homosexuals because he has an outrageously gay son, Marcel, who plays a minor but piquant role in Claudine’s life. This two-faced treatment of female and male homosexuality was characteristic of the French at the turn of the century. Lesbians were simply not vilified as much as gay men, especially lesbians from the upper classes. In fact, postcards showing two or three comely women caressing each other in various stages of undress were considered a turn-on for men.

Claudine suspects that if she were to take a male lover, Renaud would not be so indulgent. “For Renaud, adultery is a question of sex,” meaning male penetration. Eventually it’s Renaud who provides Claudine and Rézi with a bachelor apartment, where they won’t be disturbed by either of their husbands. He himself holds on to the key so they have to depend upon him to open the door. Talk about perversity!

I am tempted to continue this description of Claudine’s love affair with Rézi, but then I would deny you the pleasure of reading the story and experiencing its surprising ending. Suffice it to say that it offers delicious pages describing female delight, without ever becoming vulgar or pornographic.

B
iographers seem to agree that the model for Rézi was based on a real incident in Colette’s life, on her affair with an American woman named Georgie Raoul-Duval. For a time during the summer of 1901, both Colette and Willy were sleeping with Georgie. The threesome ended very badly, with recriminations on everyone’s part. Then the situation was exacerbated when Georgie got wind that her former lovers were writing about her. Georgie bought up the entire first printing of
Claudine amoureuse
(
Claudine in Love
) and had it pulped, but Colette and Willy managed to resell the novel and publish it under a new title,
Claudine en ménage
(
Claudine Married
). Within a few months it had sold some seventy thousand copies.

Willy, always the promoter, knew how to eke out more profit from the Claudine series. He turned
Claudine at School
and
Claudine Married
into two plays, each with highly successful runs in Paris. He marketed “Claudine” products, such as stiff schoolgirl collars, hats, lotions, perfumes, and postcards showing pubescent Claudines in schoolgirl attire. Colette and Willy, now both Parisian celebrities, continued to live together, but their marriage was soured by Willy’s incessant womanizing. Colette still wanted to have a serious love relationship, and she was to find it with a woman. Her long-term union with Missy, the Marquise de Belboeuf, lasted from 1906 to 1911, the period that coincided with Willy and Colette’s lengthy divorce proceedings.

Missy was born into nobility as the daughter of Auguste de Morny, a Parisian dandy and diplomat, and the Russian princess Sophie Troubetzkoy. After her father’s death and her mother’s remarriage to a Spanish duke, Missy and her siblings were raised in Madrid. In 1881, Missy married the Marquis de Belboeuf. From this mixture of nationalities at the highest level, she was to emerge as one of the most individualistic women of her day. Even during her marriage, Missy refused to hide her true sexual orientation, which her husband was willing to accept, for a time. They divorced in 1903. From this point on, Missy wore her hair short and dressed as a man. Other lesbians cut their hair, but none were so openly virile as Missy.

Both Colette and Missy had had lesbian affairs before they met, but Colette was to be the great love of Missy’s life, and Missy was to be the stable, loving, maternal figure Colette had longed for. She moved in with Missy in November 1906, while maintaining cordial relations with Willy, who was now living with a certain Meg Villars. The press took note. The November 26, 1906, issue of
Le Cri de Paris
published a gossip article on the foursome, Colette–Missy and Willy–Meg, to which Colette wrote an indignant response: “Do not unite in the mind of your numerous readers two couples, who have arranged their lives in the most normal manner that I know of—that is, according to their own pleasure.”
⁷

The one person outside the foursome who was pleased with Colette’s new partner was her mother, Sido. Remarkably, she wrote to her daughter: “I am happy, my love, that you have, close to you, a female friend who cares for you so tenderly. You’re so used to being spoiled that I wonder what would become of you if it ceased.”
⁸

Colette was beginning to perform, not only in amateur theatricals but also in professional shows, much to the dismay of Willy’s family, who, like most respectable bourgeois, considered actresses only one step above prostitutes. She and Missy took pantomime lessons with the famous teacher Georges Wague, and decided to put on a show created by Missy.
Dream of Egypt
(
Rêve d’Egypte
) presented Missy in the part of a male scholar who resurrects an Egyptian mummy, played by Colette. Even before their sensational onstage kiss, the couple were bombarded by negative publicity. Whoever heard of a female member of the aristocracy, dressed as a man, appearing onstage at the Moulin Rouge! At the premiere, the opposition led by Missy’s ex-husband was so vocal and violent that their teacher, Wague, was obliged to replace Missy in subsequent performances. But Colette, with her feline Egyptian movements, was so successful that it launched her as a mime and public performer. For the next four years, she would go from success to success, traveling throughout France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland in various spectacles, including stage adaptations from the Claudine series and a play called
La Chair
(
The Flesh
), in which she caused a sensation by baring one of her breasts. It is to this period that we owe the many tender letters she wrote to Missy, letters that attest to their mutual devotion and to Colette’s dependence on Missy for emotional and financial support.
⁹

Bordeaux, late September 1908: “I love you. I miss you. I miss you more than anything. Be good, take care of yourself. My God! You have made me forget how to live alone, I who had a kind of intense, melancholy taste for solitude. I love you.”

Brussels, late November 1908: “I kiss you, my sweet velvet. Kiss me fully, as in the carriage when I accompanied you to the station.”

Lyon, early December 1908: “I am, to my very depths, profoundly grateful for all that you are for me, for all that you do for me. I kiss you with all my heart, my dear love.”

In the spring of 1909, Colette went on tour with a theatrical adaptation of
Claudine in Paris
. Missy accompanied her as her makeup artist, dresser, and hair stylist. During a short separation, a letter from Liège dated May 14 thanks Missy for her generous help and warns Missy to be careful of her health. A day later she wrote again: “My God, without you I am practically nothing.”

In early June, from Marseille, Colette wrote one of her most tender love letters.

    My dear love, I have finally received a letter from you, the first one! I’m very pleased. It’s grumbling, it’s nice, and I find it delicious because you say that you miss your odious child. My darling, that’s enough to fill me with joy, and I’m blushing, all alone, with pleasure, with a sort of loving pride. I hope this word does not shock you, my modest little Missy; there’s really no word other than love that can express the complete, exclusive tenderness I feel for you.