August 31st, 2010

“Champagne should not be drunk, it should be tasted. One should not swallow it greedily. One should taste it slowly in narrow glasses, in well-spaced, thoughtful sips.” – Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in Bordeaux in 1873. Encouraged to begin writing, she published the four Claudine novels under her husband’s pen name ‘Willy’. It was rumoured at the time that her husband used to lock her into her room until she had written enough pages. The series was an enormous success, inspiring all kinds of side-products – Claudine soap, Claudine uniform, a musical, cigars and perfume. Colette opened her own cosmetics shop, but it quickly became bankrupt.

Her husband was frequently unfaithful and Colette obtained a divorce in 1906. She went onto the music hall stage – during her act she would often bare one breast, and on one occasion at the Moulin Rouge she mimed copulation in a sketch, which nearly caused a riot. She took lovers of both sexes.

Remarrying in 1912, Colette continued to write, and during the first world war she converted her husband’s estate in St Malo to a hospital for the wounded. After the war she entered the world of modern poetry and art, and by the end of the 1920s was acclaimed as France’s greatest woman writer. In the 1930s she was made a member of the Belgian Royal Academy, and was the first woman to be admitted to the Goncourt Academy. In 1935 she married for the third time, to Maurice Goudaket, a Jew whose pearl business had been ruined during the Depression. He was forced to go into hiding during the German occupation.

Colette died in Paris in 1954, and was given a state funeral.

Photo credit: Secrets of the Flesh: a life of Colette by Judith Thurman (London: Bloomsbury, 1999)