Secrets of the Flesh by Judith Thurman

Author:Judith Thurman [Judith Thurman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307789815
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 28

The perversity necessary to satiate an adolescent lover doesn’t devastate a woman sufficiently; on the contrary. Giving becomes a kind of neurosis, of ferocity, an egotistical frenzy.

—COLETTE,

Break of Day

1

COLETTE GENERALLY LEFT Paris for the Breton coast as soon as the hot weather set in. That summer, she brought Bertrand with her. Claire had reservations about letting him accept the invitation, but Henry insisted, telling his ex-wife that he wanted Bertrand “at his side.” After a few nights, he went back to someone else’s side in Paris, leaving the boy with Colette.1

There was a constant flow of houseguests between the city and Rozven. As there were a limited number of guest bedrooms, the schedule of arrivals and departures was a complex affair. Germaine Patat sometimes arrived with Henry, but Colette was even happier to have her on her own. The elegant Germaine may have had consumption, for Colette describes her extreme pallor and sudden flushes, her chronic high temperatures in the evening, and her battle against losing weight. “Come to me nice and pink and heavier by a kilo. I demand only one kilo!”2

Renaud also came to be fattened up, bullied, and consoled. His father had been supporting him, but he legally recognized him for the first time only that year. His mother wouldn’t do so until 1928. He had spent his childhood in boarding schools. Like so many of Colette’s characters, he was an orphan with living parents, and she was moved by his ferocity and isolation. “Defend yourself against the cockroach of depression,” she tells him in a typical letter. “It’s a creature one shouldn’t let live in clean places.”3

Renaud, however, was never warmed by the affection of his “Tante Colette,” which he evidently considered superficial, and his mature recollections of her were bitter. She belonged, he wrote,

to the race of demanding parents.… I still hear her voice calling the children to dinner, a bit the way she summoned the dogs, though in comparison to us, they always had certain advantages. They were served their meals with delicacy and invited to enjoy them, while we had to behave, eat what we were given down to the last crumb, and do as we were told.… As everyone knows, children never give satisfaction, and their existence troubles the peace of their parents, even when they don’t have the bad taste to disturb the animals, as Bel-Gazou did at a meal the day she was bitten by a wasp. Aunt Colette reproached her sharply for having excited the creature—well known for its passivity—by her frightened movements.4

Francis Carco and his wife, Germaine, alternated and sometimes overlapped with Léopold Marchand and his mistress, Misz Hertz, and with Meg Villars and her new husband, Charles Catusse. “When a woman is earning money,” Colette joked jealously to Carco, who was by then back in Paris, “has pretty clothes, a man to fuck her, another begging to fuck her, a third—a superb and smitten gigolo making the same proposition—and when this woman is sad and yellow, there’s something wrong with her.

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