True Pleasures (14 page)

It's a few short steps to the corner café, La Palette, where I order a beer and a plate of cheese at an outside table. It's cool all right, one of those spring days that reverts to winter, but it's good to sit here with my jacket pulled close around me and feel the bracing air against my cheeks and the sharp tang of the beer against my throat. And now, as the wind flirts with my hair, my mind steps through the years and down the street, taking a right at rue Jacob, where, on the third floor at 28, another famous Frenchwoman made her first Parisian home. The year is 1893, fifty years after George Sand's flight to Paris. The woman is Colette, a twenty-year-old bride newly arrived from the provinces.

Unlike George Sand, the young Colette didn't find liberty in Paris. The apartment on rue Jacob was small and dark, it had
no light, no air
; it was
almost a poor man's flat
and
profoundly melancholy
. Nor did Colette find solace in the city; for this homesick country girl, Paris was an expanded prison:
I did not wish to know Paris. The town filled me with dread
.

Colette had married a wily, manipulative man fifteen years older than herself. Far from rebelling against him, she embraced her wifely servitude:
There are many scarcely nubile girls who dream of becoming the show, the plaything, the licentious masterpiece of some middle-aged man
, she said. Willy was a Parisian celebrity. He published titillating books, but a stable of writers secretly wrote them. His little country wife was in love with him, but Willy was not a good husband; he was neglectful, unfaithful and intermittent in his attentions. In the first year of her marriage Colette wilted like a plant deprived of sunshine; her illness became so grave that her mother came from the country and nursed her back to health.

When Willy told Colette to write down some of her school stories, she set about the task with agreeable indifference. She sat down in the gloomy apartment and dutifully filled the pages of her notebooks. Willy rejected her work, saying:
I was wrong. It's no use at all
. He returned to his stable of ghost-writers, to his artistic feuds and his mistresses, and Colette returned, ‘relieved' to her cat, Kiki-La-Doucette, to her divan and her books, to her correspondence with her mother, to her few friends. With her long, long plait, her pointed chin and dark blue eyes, Colette was rather like a princess in a fractured fairy tale, only half-aware of her imprisonment, unconsciously waiting for her release.

It wasn't until one day five years later that Willy stumbled across the manuscript when he was cleaning out his desk.
He opened one of the copy-books, turned the pages: ‘It's rather nice.' He opened a second copy-book and said no more. A third, a fourth. ‘My God!' he muttered. ‘I am the bloodiest fool.' He swept up the scattered copy-books just as they were, grabbed his flat-brimmed top hat and bolted to his publisher's. And that is how I became a writer
, Colette concluded, as if it were all so simple. Willy published Colette's first Claudine novel (
Claudine à l' École
) in 1900 under his own name and it was immediately a huge success.

I swallow a hard mouthful of beer with a bite of cheese and try to imagine how a born writer could spend five years of her life with her first major work tucked away in a drawer – forever, for all she knew. And then how this writer could endure a further five years in which her work was published under her husband's name. Colette's professed indifference seems remarkable: how could this woman have been so casual about her monumental gift? How could she have been so indifferent to her vocation? How could she have passively tolerated her husband's domination?

Then, by pressing Colette to write for four hours every day, Willy was rapidly able to capitalize on
Claudine
's success with three sequels – each published under his own name.

Willy's domination lasted from his marriage to Colette in 1893 until their separation in 1906. First he persuaded his wife to accept that he would have his own mistresses. Then he encouraged Colette to pursue several lesbian relationships. Finally he pushed Colette to go on stage, laying the groundwork for her future independence. Colette, passive and unfocused, was well aware that she
wanted to separate from her husband, but in the end it was he who delivered the final blow:
… what I had heard was a dismissal. While I had been dreaming of flight, close beside me someone had been planning to turn me quietly out of the house – out of my own house
. She recalled the humiliation of the marital split:
I remember the flush that crept over my cheeks, I remember my stupidity. Deprived by fraud of something I had wished to leave by stealth
.

Colette's journey from innocence to experience is often portrayed as a story of calculated rebelliousness. Her many biographers absent-mindedly refer to the occasion when Colette left Willy – except she didn't. In the frontispiece to Judith Thurman's bulky biography,
Secrets of the Flesh
, the publisher Bloomsbury trumpets Colette as ‘the twentieth century's first modern woman'. Except she wasn't. Perhaps these assumptions persist because the later Colette – massive and self-assured – bore so slim a resemblance to the slight, timid Colette of her youth. Perhaps it seems impossible to believe in a passive Colette, a docile Colette. Colette re-invented herself, but she did so – at least at first – from necessity, not choice.

Far from being modern, it seems to me that Colette was entirely pagan. Hers was an ancient temperament.
Content yourself, I urge you, with a passing temptation, and satisfy it
, she told her best friend, the actress Marguerite Moreno,
What more can one be sure of than that which one holds in one's arms, at the moment one holds it in one's arms …

When I was a little girl my parents lovingly led my little brother and me to the end of their double bed where we were encouraged to kneel and say our prayers before the image of the exposed and bleeding heart of Jesus. I look back on those occasions now with bewilderment. What is it about Christianity and its obsession with sacrifice and
death? No doubt that's one reason why I cherish Colette's writings. She turned away from death. It didn't interest her, she always said – not even her own. When her mother died, she refused to go to her funeral or to wear mourning. As for the meaning of life, Colette simply asked:
Does one really have time to discover or create one?

When Colette was about thirty-three an idea occurred to her.
I had become vaguely aware of a duty towards myself, which was to write something other than the Claudines
. It was at this point, I think, that Colette began her process of self-invention, less in the conscious manner of George Sand, and more like the lovely organic unfolding of a flower.

Colette simply opened up to her own gifts. As she blossomed, she naturally drew upon the prosaic clutter, the here-and-nowness of the world around her: household pets and tangled gardens, the St Tropez seaside and the Palais Royal courtyard, messy desks and stale theatrical dressing rooms, her lover's looks and her mother's advice. No experience in her life was beneath inclusion in Colette's art. And because Colette's life took some extraordinary directions, naturally she wrote about some shocking matters. On more than one occasion a newspaper began serializing one of her works (
The Pure and The Impure, The Ripening Seed
) only to stop abruptly as it became apparent just how sexually exact and explicit Colette could be. It was as if Colette actively, warmly embraced the world, the flesh, the devil.

With the air whipping up more strongly around my face, I rise and pay my bill. I stroll down to 20 rue Jacob. In 1907 American heiress Natalie Barney, a beautiful and promiscuous lesbian, bought this house. She hosted parties for literary Paris, at the end of which the female guests would celebrate their femininity by donning diaphanous
gowns and dancing in the garden temple, followed by a cup of tea. Colette performed naked for the assembled women on several occasions. A frustrated literary figure reportedly once pulled out his penis and waved it at the dancing women, shouting,
Have you never seen one of these?

Colette and Natalie Barney had a brief affair, and a long friendship. Even when they were old ladies Natalie would climb the steps of the Palais Royal to visit Colette for a long gossip: two old dames remembering their glory days.

Standing on this gorgeous street, my heart surges as I imagine these extraordinary and gifted women making their way in this little corner of Paris. And even though George Sand died just three years after Colette was born, there's a curious link between them. It's one of those only-in-Paris six degrees of separation.

The house at 20 rue Jacob was built in the seventeenth century by George Sand's great-grandfather, the soldier Maurice de Saxe. He gave it, complete with its ‘Temple d' Amitié' in the garden, as a love token to his mistress, the great and cultivated actress Adrienne Lecouvreur. In her short life, Adrienne Lecouvreur was a woman as remarkable and notorious as George Sand and Colette would become. She had many lovers. Voltaire was probably one of them. He adored her and, along with Maurice de Saxe, was by her side when she died.

Natalie Barney knew about the romantic history of her house when she leased it. She, like George Sand, had a taste for an older Paris, a Paris of romantic associations. And, like George Sand, she was generous, placid and romantically ruthless. She once made separate dates with eighteen women for one night. She used to say:
I love my life … I never act except according to my pleasure
. It's a stirring
echo of George Sand's wilful declaration:
Because I want it. That said everything
.

I head to the river, turning my back on the Left Bank of Paris, where the landscape binds up and subsumes all contradictions: saints and sinners, good and bad, society and individual, Christian and pagan. It's as if the tensions of these opposing forces are forever constrained by the stones and the buildings and the enduring trees. And then there are the women who confronted these tensions, who found their own ways through them and beyond them. Who always rejected death and sacrifice in favor of life and art.

When Colette died in 1954, she was the most famous and revered writer in France. She was given a State funeral, the first time a woman had been so honored. And yet the Catholic Church refused to send a priest to preside at the funeral. Graham Greene sent a famous letter of protest – and tribute – from across the Channel, explaining,
A writer whose books we love becomes for us a dearly loved person
.

Several hundred years earlier, when Adrienne Lecouvreur died in the house bought for her by George Sand's ancestor, the Church refused to give the actress a Christian burial. Like Colette, she had simply broken too many taboos. Voltaire protested, another male writer composing a passionate tribute to an artist he loved:
This incomparable actress, who almost invented the art of speaking to the heart …

I hug all these thoughts to my heart, and my jacket more warmly around my chest, as I head back to the river and home.

A few hours later Rachel and I are shrugging off our coats in the doorway of Chez Omar, a restaurant on the rue de
Bretagne. It's close to Rachel's place and convenient and cheap. ‘It's also fashionable, don't ask me why,' says Rachel, as we survey the high-spirited crowd.

This shabby room toned in mustard and wood does seem an unlikely fashion hangout. Far from being glamorous, it's warm and gently lit. Our host is Omar, a dapper old gentleman, whose shrewd eastern gaze rests upon us.

‘This is my friend Lucinda,' says Rachel, hugging my arm. ‘She's a writer, from Australia.'

‘I have many clients from Australia,' says Omar in softly accented English. ‘Do you know John Waters, the singer? He always comes here. And the designer, Collette …'

‘Dinnigan,' I say. ‘Yes, I know them. Well no, I don't know them, actually. But I know
of
them.'

Rachel and I stand at the bar waiting for our table as we sip a tepid
kir
. Rachel is telling me about the latest conference she has been invited to address: she is leading the intellectual argument in favor of global free trade, she is proving – bravely, methodically, logically – that third-world poverty can only be eradicated if wealthy nations like France open their trading doors. It's a message that many people don't feel inclined to hear. I feel proud to be her friend.

Omar suddenly walks back down the bar to us. He looks across the wooden counter directly at me. He is fractionally shorter.

‘I would like to take you to lunch on Sunday.'

Rachel and I both know that Rachel is not included in this invitation.

‘Well,' I say. This is something new. ‘Ah,' I reply, ‘well, that's very kind, let me think about it.'

Omar nods calmly, and then he shows us to our table.