Les mondes de Colette | BnF

 

Last Friday I met the fabulous Rosemary Flannery,

And we went to see the Colette exhibit at BnF. 

We meant to go see Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954)

The previous week 

But there was SNOW ⛄️ 

And heavy winds💨 

Etc.

I wish we had trudged out to that futuristic hinterland sooner.

With over 350 exhibits (manuscripts, paintings, photos, engravings, big-screen projections, costumes & personal items…), you could learn everything about Colette.

What an enthralling writer, journalist, a music hall dancer, a mime artiste, cook, librettist, a woman of letters, style queen 👑 even owner of an beauty salon and acclaimed as France's greatest woman writer. Simone de Beauvoir called her “the only great woman writer in France”. COLETTE was awarded 4 ranks of the Légion d’honneur, and became the first female president of the Académie Goncourt and the first French woman to have a state funeral.

Do you remember when you first encountered Colette?

I was 12 when I decided to read every Claudine book 📚 I could get my paws on at the library. Totally inappropriate. 

I am certain I did not understand one word of what was going on, but I was obsessed. I wanted to change my name to CLAUDINE. Ha! 😹 I wish I had made an equal effort to learning French (like Jody Foster at 9). Dommage.

What a divine style icon Colette was. The French schoolgirl look of pleated skirt, white collar and bow worn with a black smock became de rigueur. Her short haircut was an essential. Colette’s first books were wildly popular.

I read somewhere that Colette claimed to have the first fountain pen ✒️ in Paris.

Colette’s fountain pens ✒️ were part of the exhibit. I was taking careful notes 📝 

She wrote ✍️ by hand always on blue foolscap.

Colette started the craze for collecting glass paperweights/ presse-papiers en verre millefiore. She called them ‘my ‘snowflakes’. Her close friend, Jean Cocteau brought a young Truman Capote to tea ☕️. He fell in love. She gave him one with a single white flower and he was hooked.

Jean Cocteau was her neighbor at the Palais-Royal.

He called her ‘a fountain of ink’. He marveled at her ability to produce work while giving the impression of complete indolence. Watch this amusing 4-minute video of one of their meetings in the exhibit. Auto-translate captions to English by turning the spool on the left.

I could not possibly go into all of Colette’s adventures, 3 husbands, multi affairs, many lovers, her mother SIDO, her childhood home in Saint-Sauveur, Burgundy and the endless cats 🐈‍⬛  I was exhausted by the end of the exhibit and wished I could return.

PHOTO BY SORTIRAPARIS

But did you know Colette created her own très chic black & red line of cosmetics briefly?

Colette discovered Audrey Hepburn,at 22, while she was playing a bit part in the film, ‘Monte-Carlo Baby’, and said,

 “Voila! There is my Gigi! Her next role was ‘Roman Holiday’.

Bonjour AUDREY ❤️

You might have figured out…the February Paris Letter will feature the fabulous SIDONIE-GABRIELLE COLETTE! 👏

I leave you with this Colette quote,

“Look around you, soak up the atmosphere of things, that’s the purpose of life.”