Vagabond of the Heart

As she lay dying on her Paris daybed at age 81, Colette, so rarely at a loss for words, spoke her final one. "Regarde!" she said, sweeping her arm through the air. It is hard to imagine a more apt pronouncement, for by the time of her death in 1954, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette had lived, loved, rebelled and certainly seen more than most. And in six decades of writing, she also conveyed what she witnessed to thousands of readers, producing some 80 volumes of fiction, essays, memoirs and drama that made her one of France's most beloved authors.

Love, she once said, was "the bread of my life and pen," but so too were gender, instinct, the natural world, childhood, innocence, debauchery and the throwing off of convention, social as well as literary. When she was not writing, she was re-creating herself: taking three husbands and countless lovers, both male and female; exploring the Paris demimonde; even, strapped for cash, starting a beauty business at age 58. Such a life--one that has been copiously documented, by Colette and others--presents Judith Thurman, author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Knopf; 592 pages; $30), with both an embarrassment of riches and a Sisyphean task. Despite working on this book for nine years, Thurman, who won a National Book Award in 1983 for her biography of Isak Dinesen (and has been nominated again for this book), acknowledges that Colette remains an elusive figure, an author who hid herself in plain sight.

Elusive, but fascinating. The creator of such enchantingly lyrical and devastatingly sensual works as My Mother's House and Cheri was a mentor to many but a horror to her own daughter. At great risk to her reputation, she performed half-naked on the stage and had open lesbian relationships, yet believed that feminists deserved "the whip and the harem." She found her most secure love with her third husband, Maurice Goudeket, a man 17 years her junior who was a Jew, yet she was an anti-Semite and in the Nazi-occupied France of World War II displayed what Thurman generously calls a "moral lethargy." At 47, she began a serious love affair with her stepson, then 16. "A real woman is good," a man who knew her told Thurman. "Colette was not good."

Rather than make such bald judgments herself, Thurman sets forth her subject's contradictions in a historically sensitive, prodigiously researched biography that has more than a soupcon of modern psychological theory thrown in. Understandably, Thurman occasionally gets lost in the thicket of claims, counterclaims and feuds that envelops the novelist. But who would not? The sphinxlike Colette, inscrutable mistress of her domain, would not have had it any other way.