“The oblique eyes, from the suburbs cat, rigged with the Kohl. A face with fine traits, mobile like water. Red cheeks for the blush. The lips of her thin and ductile like a steel thread, but lit by a scarlet red like those of a real street girl."Thus in 1947 Truman Capote described Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, born in Burgundy in 1873 and soon became simply Colette, one of the old French writers of the last century but also, and above all, a free woman, protagonist of the world's and intellectual life of the Belle Epoque, Music-hall actress and at some point even "Founder" of a cosmetic line called obviously "Colette" and that she owned in the beauty institute who had opened together with her daughter at nr. 6 of Rue Miromesnil in Paris.
The debut of Colette took place a little more than twenty years when you from the village Natio you moved to the capital with the first husband, the Parisian journalist Willy who was her initiator to her letters and freedom of tastes and costumes. And she was pushed by Willy and for him glory of her that she began to write the first novels of her, the series dedicated to "Claudine", the sensual teenager who scandalized France.
When she left her Willy she continued her writer's life by alone, though with her career as an actress and dancer.
A second marriage with the aristocratic Henry (De Jouvenel) gave her a daughter (Colette called Bel-Gazou), and the third of her tied her forever to the beloved Maurice (Goudetket), an intellectual of Dutch origin younger than her ; Maurice will assist you until the death of her, in the long illness he had forced colette at the immobility and to leave the house with her at the Palais Royal with ever greater fatigue, whose windows had become her observatory of her on the world.
A world always looked with her eyes from her as a free, sharp and precise cat and described with a writing of incomparable lightness, by heartbreaking memorable characters.
Colette is a woman, a writer who invites you to discover or rediscover through her novels, we love very "cheri" and the "Beasts dialogues", in which voice is given to the worshiped French Bouledogue Toby-Chien... by the way... Did you know that Colette helped to give luster to this particular canine breed, whose presumed ugliness also had to shine the beauty of the master?
And what was Colette to discover and choose a very young Audrey Hepborn for the cinematographic transposition of her "giant" novel?
Or through the films, such as the recent "Colette" with Keira Knightley or the superb "cheri" by Stephen Frears with Michelle Pfeiffer and, why not, with a bit of music leading to Paris, a Chanson as "Champs Elysées" of Zaz.
