My fascination with Colette continues. She's a BIG writer, in pretty much every sense of that word, so there's still lots more scope in the months ahead (especially since I've discovered this treasure trove of free books in French, which includes many of her titles).

From that rich source I picked these two books, both of which describe Colette's mother and family.

A reader who comes to La maison de Claudine (Claudine's House) fresh from Claudine a l'ecole (Claudine at School) is immediately confused as to how the two fit together.

The first Claudine volume described her protagonist as living alone with her studious, distracted father. Yet in Claudine's House, we we are introduced to a mother, Adele Eugenie Sidonie, affectionately known as Sido; a father, Joseph-Jules Colette, who lost a leg in a military campaign in Italy in 1859; and three older siblings...

Well, it turns out that Claudine features only in the title... In an introduction to Secker and Warburg's 1955 Uniform Edition (in English), which pairs this work with a companion volume called Sido, Roger Senhouse tells us that the title Claudine's House was "most clearly chosen in the dazzling light of the huge and continuing success of the Claudine series" (I hope you couldn't get away with such a cynical and audacious coup these days...), but the edition he was contributing to had opted for the more accurate nomenclature of My Mother's House.

Whatever its name, it was first published in 1922. So Colette was almost 50 when she wrote it. Sido came out in 1929.

The real Sido, meanwhile, had died in 1912, seven years after Joseph-Jules.


All the photos in this post were taken in Normandy in 1990 (a time I look back on a little in the way Colette looks back on her childhood home...)

Claudine's House is nothing if not episodic. Without some background from Judith Thurman, whose biography I have almost finished, I would have struggled to piece together the different stories, which are not even in chronological order. Drawing on Thurman's information, and the family tree here, it becomes clear that Colette's mother married twice. By her first husband she had a daughter, Juliette, and maybe a son, Achille, but Achille was probably the son of Joseph-Jules, whom she fell in love with before the first husband died, and married once that death had taken place. With Captain Colette, Sido went on to have Leopold and Sidonie Gabrielle, aka Colette.

The presentation might be a trifle disconcerting, but there's no denying that Colette writes the most exquisite French. Claudine's House is achingly beautiful... That first chapter, entitled Where are the Children, is so hauntingly evocative that it instantly reels you in.

She describes a large old house, a little forbidding; with a lush, unruly, two-level garden, full of wisteria and lilac.

Even though Colette talks about the street outside, you somehow imagine a secluded place, tucked away in its own extensive grounds. But the pictures here and here make clear quite how sharp the contrast is between the severe front face of the house and the wonderful, rambling garden behind.



This opening chapter is an almost Proustian conjuring of memories, touching on the elegaic quality of recollection, and a sense of things irrevocably gone: "Both house and garden are living still, I know; but what of that, if the magic has deserted them? If the secret is lost that opened to me a whole world ... -- a world of which I have ceased to be worthy?"

In fact the whole idyll started to crumble as early as 1884, when Colette was 11, and Juliette's marriage had thrown into sharp relief the Colette family's increasingly desperate money problems. In 1890, they were forced to sell up, and join Achille 40 kms away in Chatillon-sur-Loing, where he practised as a country doctor.

But Colette's recollections of the house, the garden, and her mother, are still vibrant, all those years later. She shows us the strangely quiet but intensely active children, and the anxious, short-sighted mother, always wondering where those children had secreted themselves.

By the time Colette writes, two of the children are already dead. Juliette -- the one with the long, long hair, the obsession with books, and the "unfortunate" marriage that ruptured the family, caused a village scandal, and made mother and daughter strangers to each other -- committed suicide in 1908. Achille, who had always been anti-social, and grew increasingly misanthropic, died in Paris in 1913.

So, as Colette puts it, the ghost of Sido is no longer listening for the doctor's trap to come home; she's no longer looking out of the dark window every evening, saying of her older daughter: "I feel that child is not happy. I feel she is suffering." But Colette is sure that "for the two who remain she seeks and wanders still, invisible, tormented by her inability to watch over them enough: 'Where, where are the children?...'"

Colette grows up in a house full of books. From books she learns, "long before the age for love, that love is complicated, tyrannical and even burdensome, since my mother grudged the prominence they gave it. 'It's a lot of trouble, all the love in these books,' she used to say. 'In life, my poor Minet-Cheri, folk have other fish to fry. Did none of these lovers you see in books have children to rear or a garden to care for?" Her mother is liberal in what she allows her daughter to read, but she encourages her to maintain a sceptical distance from authors' tales.

Colette seems to have inherited from her mother her love of gardens, and their multi-faceted sensuousness. Here's a description of herself as a little girl in the garden one evening, resting her head against her mother's knees: "The linen dress under my cheek smells of household soap, of the wax that is used to polish the iron, and of violets. If I move my face a little away from the fragrant gardening dress, my head plunges into a flood of scents that flows over us like an unbroken wave: the white tobacco plant opens to the night its slender scented tubes and its star-like petals. A ray of light strikes the walnut tree and wakens it; it rustles, stirred to its lowest branches by a slim shaft of moonshine, and the breeze overlays the scent of the white tobacco with the bitter, cool smell of the little worm-eaten walnuts that fall on the grass."



Sido is not a believer, but she does her duty by going to church, where she terrorizes the priest, and uses all sorts of ploys to make him cut short his sermons. She detests the principle of confession: "Revealing, confessing, and confessing again, and exhibiting everything you've done wrong!... Stay silent, and punish yourself inwardly, that's the better way. That's what they should teach."

Ah, yes, the credo of so many generations before my own...

For Sido, however, the minutes when she's supposed to be praying in church constitute a precious bit of alone-time: "During Mass, when you compel us to remain on our knees," she tells the priest, "I get a few quiet moments in which to think over my problems." The reverend is quite understanding: "That's all right, that's all right. I will count it all as prayer."

You clearly feel that heaven for her is her garden, and the various plants and animals that inhabit it: "To those who live in the country and use their eyes everything becomes alike miraculous and simple."

She has a pragmatic view of morality. Whereas sin does not equate to irreparable shame, the source of real ruin is "the moment when you consent to become the wife of a dishonest man; your fault lies in hoping that the man who has stolen you away from your own hearth has a hearth of his own to offer you".

Her view of aging also hits home: "You'll understand later that one keeps on forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave... No, decidedly, I can't accustom myself to old age, neither my own nor other people's."



Sido, the later book, develops and enhances many of these threads. Seven years later, there is perhaps even more of a sense of loss.

Again the garden is an important theme. These gardens, tucked away behind the street, and butting on to each other, "told each other everything". These were not gardens for leisure, but gardens where you lived in summer, and did the washing, and where you chopped wood in winter, and worked in all seasons. But Colette's garden was sacred: "Perhaps our neighbours imitated, in their gardens, the peace of our garden, where the children didn't fight, and animals and people expressed themselves gently, a garden where, for 30 years, a husband and wife lived without raising their voices against each other."

Unsurprisingly, Sido had a peaceful, glorious "garden face", which contrasted with her worried "house face".

Her whole being resonates with nature: she can judge the mood of the weather, loves the exuberance of flowers (she can't bear to see them on coffins or tombs), and watches a blackbird in the cherry tree as though transfixed.



Claudine's House hinted at a streak of cruelty in Colette's mother, and a degree of over-protectiveness. Darker notes emerge in this volume too.

Sido is often sharp with Colette, offering back-handed compliments: "You are much prettier when you look silly. It's a pity it happens to you so rarely... You're a prodigy of sweetness and insipidity." But then her tone changes, and she's talking about "my jewel-of-pure-gold", my "incomparable little girl".

And it is in this book that we learn of Sido's strange friend Adrienne, who holds a powerful fascination for Colette. Sido somehow senses this, and is jealous if she spends too much time there. Eventually the women's friendship wanes. "Adrienne was careful not to entice or detain me. You don't need love to be captivated. I was ten years old, eleven years old… It took me a long time to associate a disturbing memory, a certain warmth of the heart, the magical transformation of a being and her home, with the idea of a first seduction."

Shadows notwithstanding, Sido emits a kind of radiance in both these books. In Claudine's House, there's a scene where Colette sees off her little friends, and remains alone in the garden as dusk falls. Through the window, she sees her mother's hand passing to and fro in front of the lamp as she sews, and becomes aware of the circles of security and peace that emanate from her calm presence: "Beyond these all is danger, all is loneliness."



As with all Colette's autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writing, however, there is more going on than meets the eye. Thurman and other biographers of Colette dissect this relationship, and easily pinpoint the pain it encompasses. "Sido," writes Jane Gilmour, "had been a strong and dominating mother, whose love had been both a burden and a joy." Her letters reveal care and love, but also hint at a possessiveness that sometimes struggled to distinguish her daughter's persona from her own: "'You are me,' she declared..."

Even when Sido was widowed, and left on her own, Colette rarely visited, preferring to send gifts and messages. When Sido died, at the age of 77, Colette did not go to the funeral, and did not wear mourning.

Gilmour continues: "Colette had indeed thrown off the yoke of a mother's imprisoning love to become her own person, but she had not escaped her influence. 'I have never taken leave of a character who slowly has imposed herself on all my work,' she wrote... It was only after she had reached her own maturity that Colette was able to look back and pay homage to her mother... The myth of Sido as the goddess mother became central to Colette's creation of her own mythology, of the poetic reality she would continue to build throughout her work."

Mother-daughter relationships are always tricky. I wonder how many of us can look back on them with no regrets...



In the pages of Sido, we also learn a lot more about Colette's father -- although not as much as Colette would like to be able to communicate.

Looking back, she is surprised that she knew him so little. She was always focused on Sido. Nor was he particularly interested in his children. His focus -- in fact, his passionate attachment -- was also Sido.

Frugal at heart, and prone to bursts of anger that Colette thinks she inherited from him, he was outwardly high-spirited, always ready to sing a song, or tell a far-fetched story. His wife used to wonder at his "incorrigible gaiety". But this was a defence against pity, Colette recognizes, rather than a genuine light-heartedness.

Unlike Sido, who loved nature and earth, he was essentially a city-dweller. But he would take the family on elaborate Sunday picnics, which they didn't enjoy that much. "As we approached the village [on the way home], my father would resume his defensive hum, and no doubt we looked very happy, since to look happy was our supreme form of mutual politeness. But was not everything around us -- the beginning of the evening, the wisps of smoke trailing across the sky, and the first pulsing star -- as grave and tremulous as ourselves? A man, banished from the elements that had once sustained him, was dreaming bitterly."

She hadn't recognized this bitterness at the time. But later she realized how much he missed his lost vigour and mobility. Nor can he tolerate the idea of Sido's health deteriorating. "Keep going," he would say, as though encouraging a horse. And she kept going.

Colette regrets her distance from her father: "Too late, too late... It's the word used by negligent people, children, and ingrates... Didn't we owe each other, he and I, the recriprocal effort of getting to know each other better?"

Yet the letters she learns about, 20 years after his death, are full of her name. And when she visits a medium, the woman tells her about the spirit of an old man, whom she describes very exactly, adding: "He's very much taken up with you... You represent what he would so much have liked to be when he was on earth. You are exactly what he longed to be. But he himself was never able to do it."

And indeed, after her father's death, the family finds that the bound volumes on one of the high shelves in the library, whose titles, handwritten in Gothic lettering, indicate subjects ranging from military history to algebra, contain -- apart from a loving dedication to Sido -- only pages that are completely blank. It is "an imaginary body of work, the mirage of a writer's career".

As is the case with so many family stories, there's a note of comedy in this poignant tale. The quantity of blank pages is so enormous that the family struggles to use them all up. The brother writes prescriptions on them; the mother makes them into jam-pot covers; the granddaughters press them into service as scrap paper. But they never run out. Sido exclaims: "What, there are still more of them? I must make some into cutlet-frills. I must take some to line my little drawers." This determination to use up the pages is not an expression of mockery, Colette says, but of "piercing regret, and the painful need to blot out this proof of incapacity".



Interestingly, the medium also sees Achille, and comments: "I've never seen a dead person so sad."

Gilmour argues that while Colette had "succeeded in breaking free of Sido's possessive, overpowering love, Achille never did". She quotes a letter from Sido to Colette: "'Yes, yes, you love me..., but you are a daughter, a female animal, my likeness and my rival.' You will miss me when I am gone, she acutely observed, but you will not suffer in the way Achille will. 'For you, it won't be a big thing. You have escaped, you have set up your nest far from me.'" Achille never forgave Colette for not coming to their mother's funeral.

The younger brother, Leo, remains all his life an "elf". From childhood he had wanted nothing more than to be left alone, to dream, and be silent. As a child, he was enthralled by music, but also talented at disappearing. Bit by bit, he escaped from everything -- from his music, from his pharmaceutical studies, and then "from everything except his own elfin past". At the time Colette is writing, Leo is an elf of 63, "attached to nothing but his native place".

Fascinating, no?

Families... Philip Larkin was so right.