Above all, Careau captures the technicality of Colette’s prose. Rachel Careau’s meticulous and agile translation of this pair of novels brings to Anglophone readers some of Colette’s finest writing, rich in the sensuality for which she is widely known - but also in the sharpness of her social observations, so ahead of her time that they come across as radical even by contemporary standards. In the same way, her well-known relationship with a man 30 years her junior - who also happened to be the son of her second husband - was largely assumed to be the basis of one of her most famous novels, “Chéri,” and its sequel, “The End of Chéri.” “Since childhood, I’ve been on first-name terms with French wine,” she said in an advertisement for Nicolas wine-sellers in 1940, the year she began to write a column in “Paris-Soir” dispensing lifestyle advice to women.įor many of her readers, Colette’s life and fiction were indistinguishable: Her childhood formed the basis for her earliest works, the “Claudine” novels that describe a girl growing up in a Burgundian village before moving to Paris. Her reputation - frequently described in French as sulfureuse, or nefarious - had evolved radically over her 81 years: The sexually liberated, gender-fluid Colette of the turn-of-the-century Parisian demimonde had turned into an eccentric traditionalist, in love with cats and cooking and the French terroir. The thousands who came to pay their respects were mourning the loss of someone whose life had been as memorable as her vast literary output.

(Her friend Marcel Proust had not made the cut.) Colette had been president of the Goncourt and the Belgian Royal Academies and a recipient of the Legion d’Honneur - the highest Francophone literary honors. Her state funeral held in the main courtyard of the Palais-Royal, where she’d lived for many years, was the first for a female writer, an honor traditionally reserved for those of the stature of Victor Hugo. At the time of her death in 1954, Colette had a strong claim to the title of France’s most famous, and beloved, writer.

The last of chéri