Colette sidonie gabrielle biography books

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Colette was a complicated and contradictory figure.Photograph from Getty

“Chéri” sold thirty thousand copies by the fall of its first year, and inspired André Gide to send Colette a letter of praise. (“I will bet that the one rave you never expected to receive was mine,” he wrote.) Between the serial publication of that novel and the publication of its sequel, Colette, in an unsettling case of life imitating art, seduced her sixteen-year-old stepson, Bertrand. “I invented Léa as a premonition,” she later wrote. Just as Léa groomed the teen-age Chéri, so this depraved maman taught Bertrand to swim, fed him hearty meals, and took his virginity.

The affair lasted about five years, at the end of which Colette began writing “The End of Chéri.” When we pick up the action again, it is 1919, and Chéri has returned from the war. His wife, Edmée, has evolved into an independent woman who runs a hospital for wounded soldiers and is besotted with the head doctor. Chéri and Edmée’s marriage is sexually arid, oriented around money and appearances. “I have nothing to fear from her,” Chéri reflects, “not even love.” Afflicted by nostalgia for the world of his youth, he feels at odds with peacetime society. Energetic Parisians are building businesses by day and dancing into the night, bu

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Books by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

Claudine undecorated Parijs
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Vtoraia. Zhizhi [The Extra One. Gigi]
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Så længe som vinen gror
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Bella Vista
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CLAUDINE À L'ÉCOLE (illustré)
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CLAUDINE À L'ÉCOLE (illustré)
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La Chambre éclairée
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Paris dealing ma fenêtre
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Le Képi
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Claudine à l’École: Colette
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La Paix chez maintain equilibrium bêtes
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Le Fanal bleu
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Chéri
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Le Voyage égoïste: suivi con quatre saisons
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Claudines Hjem
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Utro
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Sido
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Život a smrt drahouška Freda
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Colette

French novelist (1873–1954)

For other uses, see Colette (disambiguation).

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (French:[sidɔniɡabʁijɛlkɔlɛt]; 28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954), known mononymously as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.

Early life

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Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born on 28 January 1873 in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in the department of Yonne, Burgundy.^[1] Her father, Captain Jules-Joseph Colette (1829–1905) was a war hero. He was a Zouave of the Saint-Cyr military school, who had lost a leg at Melegnano in the Second Italian War of Independence. He was awarded a post as tax collector in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye where his children were born. His wife, Adèle Eugénie Sidonie, née Landoy (1835–1912) was nicknamed Sido. Colette's great-grandfather, Robert Landois, was a wealthy Martinican mulatto, who settled in Charleville in 1787.^[2] In an arranged first marriage to Jules Robineau Duclos, C