Three pocket books recommended by François Angelier: Colette in the spotlight

Ce 1^is Januaryin the company of Matisse, whose bodies and warmth of tones she had a taste for, and Frida Kahlo, a beacon woman like her, Colette (1873-1954) entered the public domain. The big deal: she had already been there for more than a century and never left, a popular figure with a populous body of work! And in such diverse titles that we should write “Colettes”. Between Willy's penholder stitching his four Claudine in the dark and the president of the Goncourt academy; the mimodrama, mistress of Mathilde de Morny, delivering a sapphic kiss on the stage of the Moulin-Rouge; the lover of Bertrand de Jouvenel, 17 years old, his stepson; the drama columnist and friend of restaurateur Raymond Oliver creates a “dark and profound unity, vast as night and as light” (Baudelaire), whose diversity it is precious to decline, petal by petal, text by text.

With The Pure and the Impure, two capital letters, please, published in 1941 by Calmann-Lévy, it is the “bad genres” Colette who honors us with her freedom of being and her double-leafed loves: “The true mental hermaphroditism which burdens certain highly organized beings. » Following him, from room to room, we go from an opium den, where the pleasures are not just impure smoke, to the confidences of an old Don Juan, delivered one evening in a dark casino. Shut up, a very moving couple, a prelude to gay studiesthat formed by “the ladies of Llangollen”, lesbians of the 19th^e British century sheltering their loves and gardening in the bucolic folds of a Welsh Eden. The darkest and most heady moment of this album with gold letters, bound in goatskin, remains the night, in Neuilly, at the home of Renée Vivien, Belle Epoque hetaira and collector of giant Buddhas dressed in a sleepless night. Extraordinary parade of forbidden desires and artificial ecstasies.

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