But Willy could have no way of knowing that his young wife was pulling off something quite extraordinary. More impressive than her newfound diligence was the personage her book allowed her to meet, then admire: herself. “I have discovered an astonishing young girl,” she told Olympe Terrain in 1896. “Do you know who she is? She’s exactly me before my marriage.”
“She” is Claudine, the autobiographical heroine of the series that bears her name: a self-portrait of the artist as a restless, sexually frustrated teenager whose extravagance is as boundless as her potential for pleasure. We get the first glimpses of Colette’s indulgent future in her first book,
“You’re called Claudine, aren’t you?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Oh, you’ve been ‘talked of’ for quite a time…. Our mistresses used to say about you: ‘She’s an intelligent girl but as impudent as a cock-sparrow and her tomboyishness and the way she does her hair set a very bad example’… they say you’re crazy and more than a bit eccentric.”
“Charming women, your teachers! But they’re more interested in me than I am in them. So tell them they’re only a pack of old maids who are furious because they’re running to seed. Tell them that from me, will you?”
Scandalized, she said no more.
Petulant and self-centered, bored and all too aware of her own foolishness, Claudine is a shockingly modern heroine for one who lives in turn-of-the-century France. Constantly on the lookout for diversion and scandal, she creates her own if need be. She compares her breasts to those of her friends, mocking their bodies even as she marvels at her own. She listens hard to adult conversations not fit for childish ears and retaliates against grown-up doubts by acting willfully immature. When forced to look after the younger students at school, she makes them transcribe ridiculous tripe. She refuses to subdue her luxurious hair or behave for the school superintendent, whose licentious looks both thrill and scare her. Disregarding the strict expectations of her era, she leaves school when she pleases, opting instead for long walks through pungent French forests and lazy days at home.
In Claudine’s indulgences, we see a bit of the author’s own suppressed fervor for life: Claudine
Is it because I’m getting older? Can I be feeling the weight of the sixteen years I’ve nearly attained? That really would be too idiotic for words.
Claudine’s indulgence isn’t confined to the schoolroom; she falls in love as spectacularly as she flouts convention in school. She doesn’t just love, she declares it, after a deliciously drunken night with an older man. She throws herself into marriage and then into sadness, feeling the precariousness of her position as a societal curiosity and a baby bride. And she abandons herself to a passionate love affair with another woman with the blessing of a husband she wishes would object. For Claudine, this outrageous approach to her personal affairs isn’t just a means of shocking and gaining attention: it is a declaration of independence in a culture still governed by the corset and the chattel marriage contract, a hypocritical world of appearances and one that gladly overlooks infidelity and abuse as just another side of drawing-room life. It’s hard to understand just how torn about city life Colette herself felt until we read about Claudine’s struggle to feel at home in her own skin in a controlled, stifling urban setting. And it is possible that Colette didn’t understand just how imprisoned she felt before she wrote about it.
Not that the results of her scandalous reminiscences weren’t a success.
But Colette’s triumph was her own prison sentence. The girl who had once longed for sensual domination now found the country house in which Willy sequestered her as a kind of glorified literary slave a bit more than she had bargained for. Worried about money, Willy prodded her to make her next books even more scandalous and titillating. She complied, writing five Claudine novels, two hugely successful plays, and two other books under Willy’s name. Isolated and dominated, Colette was a good worker and an assiduous writer. Soon the books became a kind of dialogue in which Colette narrated the ups and downs of her increasingly complicated marriage to Willy, even using her scandalous attachment to a woman named Georgie as fodder for
Colette was stunned, both by her lover’s unfaithfulness and her husband’s. But there wasn’t much time to mourn other people’s flaws when her own literary daughter had become so unruly. The Claudine novels weren’t just popular, they were a phenomenon. Wherever she went, Colette could see mountains of Claudine-branded merchandise… and hear whispers about the true authorship of the books. Colette herself was suddenly famous, and she found herself in an increasingly awkward position. Willy now celebrated her androgyny, encouraging her to wear scandalous clothing and insisting on making creepy in-public appearances flanked by his wife and Polaire, a gamine actress who created the Claudine role on the stage. Willy treated them like twin dolls, fondly calling them his “daughters” and, it is to be assumed, bedding them both. Colette played along, but not without a sense of betrayal.
For me, Colette’s next move overshadows her more famous future escapades. Sure, she went on to do her time in the theater, where her bare-breasted, passionate kiss with her then-lover, the cross-dressing Mathilde “Missy” de Morny, the marquise of Belboeuf, led to a full-blown art riot. She seduced her sixteen-year-old stepson, engaged in indulgent collaboration with the Vichy regime, even outrageously neglected a daughter who would forever be overshadowed by her famous mother. These moves were all classic Colette, but they could never have happened if it weren’t for the stand she took when it came to her first published works. This rebellion started in a social setting, where Colette’s frank raconteurism and untutored accent gave away her outsider status. It spilled over into a series of books in which lust and love are turned out at the seams, torn apart, and cobbled back together again in outlandish fashion. And it ended up practiced inside the formerly private confines of a marriage whose shelf life was up and whose inner life she no longer bothered to obscure.
In the end, it wasn’t the indiscretions or sleaze that got to Colette. It was the sight of Willy, that infamous dilettante and faux celebrity, co-opting her childhood and her heroine and claiming them as his own. Finally free from the bonds of her first, all-encompassing love and straining under the expectations of a society that neither appreciated nor sustained her, it was time to stake a claim to her most indulgent creation: herself. The details of Colette’s battle to get her name on her own literary works could fill their own book. Aware he was being made to look a fool, Willy fought hard for the character he had encouraged and fostered. But the details don’t matter much. What counts is that Colette finally fought for her name, gambling on behalf of her heroine and her legendary personal identity.
Must a heroine engage in legal battles, seduce her husband’s lover, or mock the very foundations of society in the name of self-indulgence? I think not. After all, Claudine and Colette’s most over-the-top moments were personal
