Yes here we are again with another of the very welcome clubs hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. They've provided me with some great discoveries in the past and this one is no exception.
I'm not quite sure why I've read so little of Colette, but I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that when I first bought the house in France where I now live, more than twenty years ago, I decided to plunge into reading French literature in the original language. My first choices were Proust and Colette, both of which proved to be far too ambitious. My French is probably better now, and I rather wish I had a copy of Cheri in that language because I always find myself, when reading translations, trying to guess what the original French actually said. Anyway since then the only novels of hers I've read have been The Cat and La Ble en Herbe (1923), translated as Ripening Seed - reviewed here in 2011. But I digress.
Cheri is possibly Colette's most famous novel, so maybe I don't need to tell you what it's about. But I will anyway. This is the story of a mis-matched love affair. Young Fred Peloux, known to everyone as Cheri, an impossibly beautiful young man aged 25 when the novel begins, is the son of a celebrated and rich courtesan, Charlotte Peloux. Wealthy, petulant and spoiled, he has been involved for the past six years with Lea, a courtesan who is a contemporary of his mother, and thus 24 years his senior. Their relationship, though primarily sexual, is often teasing and playful - she has moulded him from an uncertain, unhealthy boy into the confident handsome young man he is now, and he treats her partly as a mistress, partly as a mother figure - his pet name for her is Nounoune. But as the novel starts, Fred has succumbed to pressure from his mother and one of her friends, Marie Laure, to agree to marry Marie's daughter, an innocent, convent-educated young girl called Edmée. When he tells Lea this news, she appears to take it in her stride. She's been expecting this to happen eventually and shows no particular reaction. But when he leaves her and embarks on his marriage, she finds herself unexpectedly heartbroken. Determined to regain her former enjoyment of life, she sets off for the South of France, hoping to find some more lovers to continue her successful career.
Cheri, meanwhile, soon finds himself completely dissatisfied with his marriage. Edmée can in no way measure up to the delights of his relationship with Lea, and he is increasingly absent from home, at one time spending three months in a hotel with his best friend. He tortures himself with imagining what Lea is up to, and lurks around her house waiting to see if she has returned. Eventually after six months she does, not in a happy state of mind. She has fully realised how much she is ageing, and how lonely she is - the men she met in the south were no substitute for Cheri. Eventually one evening he bursts into her room and they share a passionate night. Lea hopes that perhaps they can now disappear somewhere together, but in the morning she realises this cannot happen. Cheri has become too much aware of her ageing body. As the novel ends she watches him out of the window as he leaves her front garden, and sees him fling his head into the air and take a deep breath, as if celebrating his freedom.
This is a beautiful, sad novel. These people are inhabitants of a world we are not usually called upon to admire but even Cheri with all his arrogance and selfishness cannot help being a sympathetic character, As for Lea, she could easily be a tragic figure but she emerges in the end as someone who will survive. The writing (even in translation!) is superb and the sensuality of this relationship is conveyed with great delicacy and empathy. When Lea, lying next to her sleeping lover and with her arm and leg crushed by his weight, imagines a life together for the two of them, this is how she thinks:
'He is here!' she whispered, immersed in a feeling of blind security. 'He is here forever!' her senses re-echoed. The well-ordered prudence, the happy common sense that had been her guide throughout life, the humiliating vagaries of her riper years and the subsequent renunciations, all beat a retreat and vanished into this air before the presumptuous brutality of love.
