Books: Look!

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Broke, bewildered and 33, Sidonie jumped at the first job she was offered: playing a "cat woman" in a vaudeville show. Terrified of men after her experience with Henri, she clung to the first friendly women she met: a group of well-known literary lesbians. During the next six years, she lived as mistress to the cigar-chomping Marquise de Belboeuf and published three novels. At 40, mostly recovered from Henri and somewhat disillusioned with dykes, Colette married Paris Publisher (of Le Matin) Henri de Jouvenel, and six months after the wedding gave birth to her only child, a daughter also named Colette.

In the years after World War I, Colette harvested the peculiar fruit of her bohemian years. She wrote Mitsou, Chéri and La Fin de Chéri, and in these books finally found her own voice as a writer, a voice in which masculine force was suffused with feminine tenderness, and boulevardiering decadence with a wonderful country freshness. In her 50s she extended her mastery. Her ideas, her images became ever more exact and effective. "The dog lay down with a great rumble and thump that sounded like a bag of potatoes being emptied"—"At the windows hung some nasty little curtains fit for wrapping abortions."

Forget Nothing. At 62, she made her third marriage—to Maurice Goudeket, a man 16 years younger than she. "Ah, la la!" she wrote to a friend. "A nice kettle of fish your girlfriend's in, and loving it, up to the eyes, up to the lips, and up to even further than that!"

The marriage was a great success on both sides. In her 60s, she invented an ingenious new form of fiction, part memoir and part essay. At 69, she wrote her most popular story, Gigi. At 76, she produced her finest book of essays, Le Fanal Bleu.

The last book was written under a painful burden of arthritis. What kept her going? "My gambler's spirit, my instinct for the game of life." Night after night, often all night, the aging lioness with the mad grey mane and a brow like Beethoven's sat writing under the strong blue light she loved. "Go away slowly, slowly, without tears; forget nothing! Go away adorned, and do not stop on the irresistible way, do not stop for rest except to die. And if you have, to the very end, kept in your hand the friendly hand that guides you, then lie down smiling, sleep as one privileged."

On August 3, 1954, Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, 81, slept as one privileged. With her last breath, as the light faded, she whispered: "Look!"