CHERI
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CHERI
In Colette’s 1944 novella Gigi, a charming tale of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl raised by her grandmother and great-aunt, courtesans in their heyday who now enjoy a wealthy retirement, the free-spirited heroine listens to the advice of her great-aunt Alicia.
“Never wear second-rate jewels, wait till the good ones come to you. . . precious stones and pearls. . . white, yellow, blue, blue-white or pink diamonds. . . sapphires, when they come from Kashmir,” Alicia says.
The matriarchs of Gigi’s family are dictatorial in their tastes, which are gleaned from entertaining men as professional connoisseurs of pleasure. Whether it’s aromatic chamomile tea, the rustle of a ruffled silk skirt, a warm chinchilla blanket, or red vases from China, the detail in Colette’s prose sing with sensual pleasure, painting a scene in which the reader can see, hear, smell and enjoy the hedonistic delights of the demimonde inhabited by the author herself, who was infamous for indulging her own insatiable appetites.
Born in rural France, Colette shifted to Paris after marrying her first husband, Henri “Willy” Gauthier-Villars, a failed writer who made her ghostwrite his popular Claudine series, which was dramatized in the 2018 film Colette starring Keira Knightley. Colette eventually divorced Willy and continued her love affair with the artist Mathilde de Morny, better known as “Missy.” Throughout her life, Colette married three times, and kept numerous lovers. Life imitated art, and vice versa. The novel Chéri centered on a young man entrenched in a love affair with Léa, a 49-year-old courtesan, paralleling Colette’s own passionate seduction of Bertrand de Jouvenel, her teenage stepson.
Indeed, Colette’s inclination to test the limits of the flesh and freefall into sensual ecstasy encompassed a way of life in which pleasure was found in everything: eating, drinking, lounging in the interior of one’s home, plants and flowers, fabrics luxuriating against the skin. After Chéri leaves Léa, she sits naked in her bathroom, sprays herself with sandalwood perfume, and unfolds a silk nightgown. Life itself is worth living beyond heartbreak, and the enjoyment of beauty remains boundless even with the transformation of old age.
Written by Iman Sultan
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