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Book
Colette · 1920
Colette's Chéri (1920) and its sequel render an erotic love between an aging courtesan and the beautiful young man she has half-raised and wholly desired — and the second book follows what becomes of him after the affair ends, when the impossibility of return turns the love into grief.
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What this book knows
Erotic love between an aging courtesan and her young lover enacts power, beauty's decline, and the impossibility of return.
erotic-as-power
She called up memories of rapturous nights … she saw fit to pay but coldly vindictive homage to this body so sumptuously laid out.
COL-CHE-RC-161There's nothing of the dissipated schoolboy about Patron. He has other attractions, and a good deal more to recommend him than a perky little face.
COL-CHE-RC-018desire
If only I could somehow be returned to the moment when I was saying, 'Your second piece of toast, Cheri!' — it's not yet lost and gone for ever!
COL-CHE-RC-093These pearls, these at least, are unchanged! They and I remain unchanged.
COL-CHE-RC-146grief
Disillusioned and bewildered, he looked all over the room for her, except in the very spot where she stood.
COL-CHE-RC-149A woman was writing at a small table … a broad back and the padded cushion of a fat neck beneath a head of thick grey vigorous hair. 'Who on earth can this good woman be?'
COL-CHE-RC-136Editor’s framing
Colette wrote from inside the demimonde she described, and her courtesan Léa is one of literature's great portraits of a woman reckoning with the decline of the beauty that was her power. The relationship with Chéri is tender and unequal and doomed by time rather than by morality — the obstacle is not society's judgment but the simple fact that she is aging and he is not. The first book is the affair; the second is the aftermath, in which Chéri, having married as he was meant to, cannot survive the loss of the only love that was real.
What to attend to: Colette's refusal of sentimentality about either character — Léa is vain and shrewd and clear-eyed; Chéri is spoiled and lost — and the way the eroticism is bound up with power, age, and beauty's economy. The prose is sensuous and exact, attentive to bodies and rooms and the texture of a vanishing world. Attend to the turn between the two books, where desire becomes the grief of what cannot be had again.
In Vela's reading Chéri sits in the European erotic tradition the corpus draws on, where desire is never innocent of power or time. We read it on the erotic-as-power axis and into grief, beside the writers for whom the erotic is also an account of loss.
Featured passage
Her thoughts escaped from the domination of these repeated phrases, only to sink into a great unvoiced lament. “ Oh! if only, if only I could somehow be returned to the moment when I was saying, ‘Your second piece of toast, Cheri!’ for that moment’s only just round the corner — it’s not yet lost and gone for ever! Let’s start again from there. The little that’s taken place since won’t count — I’ll wipe it out, I’ll -wipe it out. I’m going to talk to him as though we’re back where we were a moment ago. I’m going to talk to him about our departure, our luggage.” She did, in fact, speak, and said, ‘I see ... I see I cannot treat as a man a creature who, from sheer feebleness of character, can drive two women to distraction. Do you think that I don’t understand? You like your journeys short, don’t you? Yesterday at Neuilly, here today, but to-morrow! To-morrow, where? Here? No, no, my child, no need to lie, that guilty look would never take in even a woman stupider than I am, if there is one like that over there. ...’ She threw out an arm to indicate Neuilly with so violent a gesture that she upset a cake-stand, which Cheri picked up again. Her words had sharpened her grief into anguish, an angry jealous anguish pouring forth like a young wife’s outburst. The rouge on her cheek turned to the deep purple of wine-lees; a strand of her hair, crimped by the curling-tongs, wriggled down her neck like a small dry snake. ‘And even the woman over there, even your wife won’t be found waiting there ever}7 time you choose to come back home! A wife, my child, may not always be easy to find, but she’s much easier to lose! You’ll have yours kept under lock and key by Charlotte, eh? That’s a marvellous idea! Oh, how I’ll laugh, the day when ...’ Cheri got up, pale and serious. ‘Nounoune! ...’ ‘Why Nounoune? What d’you mean, Nounoune? Do you think you’re going to frighten me? You want to lead your own life, do you? Go ahead! You’re bound to see some pretty scenes, with a daughter of Marie-Laure’s. She may have thin arms and a flat behind, but that won’t prevent her from ...’ ‘I forbid you, Nounoune!’ He seized her by the arm; but she rose, vigorously shook herself free, and broke into hoarse laughter: ‘Why, of course, “I forbid you to say a word against my wife!” Isn’t that it?’
Her thoughts escaped from the domination of these repeated phrases, only to sink into a great unvoiced lament.
Read alongside · the magazine
Colette names the turn where desire becomes grief — the kind of un-nameable shift the essay attends to.
Read alongside · the emotions
6 published passages · book excerpt · research analysis
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