‘Mon Dieu, je ne sais rien, mais je sais que je souffre
Au delà de l’appui et du secours humain,
Et puisque tous les ponts sont rompus sur le gouffre,
Je vous nommerai Dieu, et je vous tends la main....
‘Les lumineux climats d’où sont venus mes pères
Ne me préparaient pas à m’approcher de vous,
Mais on est votre enfant dès que l’on désespère
Et quand l’intelligence à plier se résout....
‘Comme vous accablez vos préférés, Seigneur
Il semble que votre ample et salubre courage
Veuille assainir en nous quelque obscur marécage,
Tant vous nous arrachez, par des sueurs de sang,
L’âcre ferment vivant, orgueilleux et puissant.
On pense qu’on mourra du mal que vous nous faites,
Et puis, c’est tout à coup la fin de la tempête.’
But once again a flaming sword waves before her eyes and drives her forth from the common experience of humanity; even as Nature and genius banished her from love, so the cold hand of death shuts her out from religion. Her beloved dies; and she has looked on his waxen face, and seen the leaden coffin go down into the grave.
This terrible moment—which has driven many in a panic of anguish from the despair of this world to the desperate hope of a Beyond, as a stag harried and hunted to the extreme edge of a cliff will spring into the sea—this ‘sombre accident quotidien de la mort’ immures our poetess in the prison of a stoical grief, where sometimes (but very rarely) rustle the wings of that angel who led Peter out of his captivity. In that austere infrangible house of mourning she remains, aloof from life and Nature, choosing this living death rather than the treason of a life renewed and fruitful, though bereaved. There she sits still, forgetting the spring and the summer, and looks in a white agony upon the face of Truth. And in verse as firm and full as that of Emily Brontë, she recites the sterile lesson she has learned:—
‘Je m’emplis d’une vaste et rude connaissance,
Que j’acquiers d’heure en heure, ainsi qu’un noir trésor,
Qui me dispense une âpre et totale science;
Je sais que tu es mort.’
MADAME COLETTE
Imagine a young girl in the country, very young, very fresh, sensitive to the finest degree, upright, credulous, and doubtless dainty as a daisy; imagine her in the flower of her youth married and carried off to Paris—to the decadent Paris of the nineties—by a man of the world, who is also a man of letters and a man of science, intelligent, corrupt, and cynical as Mephistopheles himself. No, I am not telling you over again the story of ‘Madeleine Jeune femme’; I am telling the history of Madame Colette, and it ends differently.
There is, it seems, an amusement in elaborating the sentimental education of a young bride, in complicating it with excursions into vice and into art; brief, the gifted and immoral author who chooses to be known as ‘Willy’ was pleased to make over his wife in his own image. She was an artist to the ends of her finger-tips, and they wrote books together—the famous series of Claudine—hailed with delight by all that is least strait-laced in Paris (and, in those days especially, there was very little screwing about the moral waist of one sort of Paris!). For Colette Willy realised a personage, always charming to the man about town in its candid perversity, that of the innocent wanton, or (to quote the title of one of her stories) L’Ingénue Libertine.
One day I bought one of these Claudine books; it was called Claudine en Ménage. I opened it and thought it delightful. What an admirable style, firm and free, full of nature, full of grace, and the character of the girl, at once shrewd and naïve, pleased me immensely ... and then I began to wonder.... And then I did not know what to do with the book! I would not place it on my shelf, I could not leave it lying on the table. Finally, remembering a certain lyric of Robert Browning’s, I took it out into the forest and dropped it deep in the hollow trunk of a tree. There, among the pale wood-lice, and the centipedes, and the fungus, Claudine in her seclusion, finds audience fit though few.
One day it must have dawned on Madame Colette Willy that all men were not made on the same pattern—that there was fresh air somewhere in the world even for a married woman—that a man might be a support, and a comfort, and an example—or perhaps, more simply, that one might do without one altogether. Anyhow, Madame Colette Willy became Madame Colette; she divorced her collaborator and began her ascent out of Avernus. She was, in these new conditions, obliged to earn her living, and, mindful of the prices paid for even a successful book, she complicated her profession as woman of letters with the career of a Variety Artist.