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 in the 13th.

Posters were plastered everywhere since September and  it closed on Sunday.

What an enthralling writer, journalist, performer, actress, cook, woman of letters, style queen 👑 even a cosmotologist and acclaimed as France's greatest woman writer. Simone de Beauvoir said so.

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 even wanted to change my name to CLAUDINE. Ha! 😹 I wish I had considered 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’ as 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. Change the captions to English by turning the spool.

I could not possibly go into all of Colette’s adventures, 3 husbands, 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 go back.

PHOTO BY SORTIRAPARIS

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

And of course, Colette discovered Audrey Hepburn, while she was playing a bit part in a movie in Monte Carlo and said,

 “Voila! There is my Gigi!

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.”