PARIS MATCH
As Keira Knightley brings Colette to life in a new film, we revisit the novelist’s unforgettable contributions to Bazaar
In a photograph taken by Louise Dahl-Wolfe published in the December 1951 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, the French novelist Colette, aged nearly 80, leans back against cushions beneath a sumptuous-looking blanket. In her right hand she holds a pen, and there’s a large notebook open on her lap. It’s as if the photographer has interrupted her mid-sentence, for her head is turned to the camera with a piercing look, painted lips pursed, a great cloud of fuzzy hair around her head. Colette, reveals the caption, was photographed in her Paris bedroom where the walls were lined in red velvet and from whose window you could see the Palais Royal. She was apparently still receiving visitors ‘with the coquetry of an inveterate actress’.
In the accompanying piece – one of so many that Colette wrote over the decades for Bazaar – the author reflected on her long career: ‘How old was I when I began to write? When I wrote the first of the Claudine books, I was just twenty-two and had two braids of golden hair whose total length came to sixty-four inches. I can still look at them in one of my adolescent pictures and still remember the dire curse pronounced by my mother when I dared to cut them off.’
It is a perfect slice of Colette’s style – delicate and precise (those 64 inches of hair) but also spiced with danger and rebellious to its core. From the moment she started writing novels about a young girl called Claudine, her voice was distinct and fierce and yet also hidden. Her first four books weren’t published under her own name, but attributed to her husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars, better known in artistic Parisian circles as the author ‘Willy’. The film Colette, with Keira Knightley in the title role, charts those early years of their tumultuous and sexually adventurous marriage (they share a female lover). The pair are celebrated in Paris for their work but also their social charisma and sheer chutzpah. A montage sums up Colette’s particular power at the time, as woman after woman across the city suddenly sports a new haircut – a radically sharp bob – precisely in imitation of her own. Colette didn’t disappear behind her husband for long. After she and Willy divorced in 1910, she toured France with a theatre troupe, often performing scenes from the Claudine books. She married again (twice), and had relationships with both men and women, but although the circus of her personal life provoked fascination, it was the work that lasted. And so much of this work began right here, in the pages of this magazine.
Take Gigi, perhaps Colette’s most famous novel, for which notes were written especially for Harper’s Bazaar. In the June 1946 edition, an extract appeared alongside adverts for curve-conscious swimsuits and seamless nylon stockings. ‘She could look like an archer, like a cardboard angel, or a boy with skirts on, but rarely like a girl,’ wrote Colette of her indelible central character. Her creations were always close to their author, young women who were vivid and charming, with a spirit that challenged the restrictions of the times.
As well as being a novelist, Colette wrote journalism and memoir. Perhaps one of her most moving articles for Bazaar was called ‘Paris from My Window’, published in 1944 after the liberation of the city. In the piece, she described her experience of the Occupation: ‘No one need pity me for having lived four years between these walls without one day, one night, one hour of diversion. I chose to live the life of war. The lack of transportation, my age, an arthritis of the hip, tied me, less than my preference, to a window; it has been from there that the people of Paris, punctual in their goings and comings, dedicated to their work and privations, have set me an example.’ She recounted learning to make logs by binding together old wrapping paper and newspapers, logs that would neither last long nor warm the room, and revealed how she would torture herself by reading aloud from cookbooks listing ingredients – butter, eight eggs – that she would never be able to find or buy.
But mostly Colette wrote about watching, from her apartment, the many women of Paris – ‘wives without husbands, girls without brothers’ – who she’d see stubbornly carrying on in the face of increasing deprivation. ‘It would take a presence as constant as my own, an eye as sedulous as mine, to discover beneath your alert, dignified and erect bearing any trace of disintegration.’ She chose them as her subjects because while the liberation of Paris would eventually be the subject of forensic military analysis, the minutiae of their stoic survival would inevitably be forgotten. Or as she herself put it: ‘She will not have her historians.’ Colette wrenched herself out of the shadow of her first husband and into the spotlight. It was only right, in her eyes, that she performed the same service for her fellow women.
‘Colette’ is in cinemas from 11 January.