On January 28, we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of the author of “budding wheat”. The reissue of the “herne notebook” devoted to this familiar writer is an opportunity to evoke some of the features of her art and her life which make it dear to us.
By Jean-Louis Jeannelle (specialist in literary studies and collaborator of the” world of books “)
What do we celebrate with the republication of the “Herne notebook” Colette of 2011, which is accompanied by Paris, I love you !, Collection of its texts on the capital? The birth, January 28, 1873, of little Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye (Yonne)-theater of a blessed childhood often resurrected? Or is it not rather the centenary of her birth to writing, she whose surname (which has become both a first name and a pseudonym) appeared on a cover until 1923, with the wheat in grass?
From Claudine at school (1900), Colette had so far made her “learning”, fading behind the signing of his prolific husband, the novelist Willy (1859-1931). The childhood had not been painless. Shortly after her meeting with Missy (Mathilde de Morny), the young woman had separated from Willy and, remarried in 1912 with the journalist and diplomat Henry de Jouvenel (1876-1935), had half revealed by signing “Colette Willy “or even” Colette (Colette Willy) “. It took him longer to escape the sulphurous reputation that his very naked appearances had earned him on stage, his bisexuality displayed or his affair with the son of his second husband, Bertrand de Jouvenel, who was only 16 years old …
celebrated, Colette was during her lifetime, and even more at her death. Four days after her death on August 3, 1954, she had the honor of national funeral. In his own way, the Church also paid tribute to her past as a actress by refusing religious funeral to her. Certainly, no historical action, no services rendered to grateful humanity, nor complete works “pleaiaded” in advance or in stride (he had to wait thirty years). But Colette was, and remains, a familiar writer. She sculpted her personality with multiple facets, while refusing to serve as a model, and embodied a certain idea of France, but without fights or universal ideals.
Today, she stands, with Beauvoir or Duras, at the top of a literary history where women finally find the place which had been refused to them, even if her anti -feminist Foucades continued to hinder – in 1927, she s ‘Indignant, during an interview on the entry of women into politics, that we can instill in women “the taste for virility, in all areas, and especially the will to be able”: “Once his passions Awakened, the woman no longer knows any limits. “The privileges of which Colette had been able to equip herself never made an activist.
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