Forty-five years after her death, Gabrielle-Sidonie Colette, known simply as Colette, still inspires fascination, admiration and revulsion. Her energy and daring, the quantity and beauty of her prose, seem miraculous. Her total egotism, her collaboration with anti-Semitic publications during the Nazi occupation of France, her abandonment of her own daughter and her calculated seduction of an adolescent stepson 31 years her junior remain shocking.
Colette wrote about childhood, pet animals, and especially about love, which she conceived of as a struggle between slave and master. Jean-Paul Sartre, who met her at least twice in the early 1950s, recognised her as a monstre sacre. But if she resembled any other French writer, it was her idol Balzac, whose "Human Comedy" she claimed to have read from the age of seven. Like Balzac, Colette had an insatiable appetite for love, luxury and food. Like him, she grew obese, chronicled the customs of her time (nearly 80 volumes) and spent much of her life begging publishers for advances.
Colette's novels were banned by the Vatican, and the archbishop of Paris denied her a Christian burial, so she became the first woman to receive a State funeral instead. Shunned as a nude dancer in her youth, Colette was the first female to enter the Academie Goncourt, and she became an officer in the Legion of Honour.
Colette was born in a small village in Burgundy in 1873, the daughter of a onelegged war veteran, Captain Jules Colette, and a widowed heiress of partly African Caribbean descent named Sidonie Landoy. She was only 16 years old when she met Henry Gauthiers-Villars, the scion of a Parisian publishing house, who was nearly twice her age. Gauthier-Villars was a playboy journalist and socialite known by his pen-name Willy. He married the provincial Colette and brought her to Paris. Judith Thurman's excellent biography portrays the theatre-going, sex-obsessed, French fin de siecle - as Zola described it, "a whole society throwing itself at the cunt".
Colette joined Willy's stable of ghostwriters, producing four "Claudine" novels based on her schoolgirl memories - and Willy's fantasies of school uniforms and sexual threesomes. Willy pushed his young wife into the arms of several women, including the former drug addict and transvestite lesbian Marquise de Belboeuf, known as Missy. Colette's long affair with Missy ended when she married Henri de Jouvenel, a newspaper editor who would later become a French ambassador and statesman.
As Stephane Mallarme wrote, France is the country where everything ends up in a book, and Colette translated her own adventures into novels as quickly - and sometimes even before - she lived them. "Can't you write a book that isn't about love, adultery, semi-incestuous couplings and separation?" Jouvenel asked her.
Their marriage ended too, ostensibly because of Colette's seduction of Jouvenel's son by an earlier union, but mainly because of Jouvenel's philandering. Colette's third and final marriage, to Maurice Goudeket, a Jewish pearl trader 17 years her junior, was the happiest and longest-lasting. Long after Bertrand de Jouvenel's five-year affair with his stepmother had ended, his girlfriend, the American journalist Martha Gellhorn, met Colette. "She was a terrible woman," Gellhorn recalled. "Absolute, utter hell. She hated me on first sight, that was obvious. She was lying on a chaise longue like an odalisque, with green shadow on her cat's eyes and a mean, bitter little mouth. She kept touching her frizzy hair, which was tinted with henna."
SIMONE de Beauvoir was more charitable. Colette was already crippled by rheumatoid arthritis when they met at a dinner in 1948. De Beauvoir described the ageing writer in a letter to her American lover, Nelson Algren. "She is the only really great woman writer in France . . . She was once the most beautiful woman. She danced in music-halls, slept with a lot of men, wrote pornographic novels and then good novels. . . . Now she is 75 years old and has still the most fascinating eyes and a nice triangular cat face; she is very fat, impotent, a little deaf, but she can tell stories and smile and laugh in such a way nobody would think of looking at younger, finer women."
Judith Thurman's previous, award-winning biography of Isak Dinesen inspired the film Out of Africa. This book, too, leaves an indelible impression of an extraordinary woman and her times. Woven around Colette's imperviousness to what Thurman calls "the more fundamental forms of ethical maturity" are powerful accounts of the Dreyfus affair and the liberation of Paris. Thurman draws heavily on Colette's abundant correspondence and her book makes us regret the demise of the letter. Phone calls and email will surely cheat biographers of the future.
Lara Marlowe is the Paris Correspondent of The Irish Times
