The Provocative Colette by Annie Goetzinger

The Provocative Colette has a preface by Nathalie Crom - who is not credited in the book but seems to be a French literary journalist - talking about the image the public has of Colette as an old, immobile woman, and contrasting it to the portrayal in this book. But I doubt most English-language readers have any image of Colette that strong - here, she's known primarily as the author of Gigi, and maybe of Chéri as well. I don't think I've actually read any Colette, and I knew only vaguely about her career - married to an older man, originally writing works published under his name, a vague sense that she had a lot of stereotypically French scandals, a vaguely Belle Époque timing.

That's not incorrect, but BD creator Anne Goetzinger goes into a lot more detail here, in a book that covers Colettes's whole adult life but focuses most closely on the initial phase of her career. Whether you have the presumptions of the French or the Americans, Goetzinger will set you right with detailed, well- constructed pages and long narrative captions to explain it all.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in 1871; this book begins on her wedding day in 1893, to the popular writer Henry Gauthier-Villars - who, in a fortuitous bit of foreshadowing, met Colette's family because the wet nurse for his illegitimate son was part of that household. Colette and family live out in the countryside, but marrying Gauthier-Villars - who wrote under the pen-name "Willy" - means she will move to Paris immediately and be part of Willy's high-society life.

Willy is a notorious libertine, the kind of man whose sole hobby and pastime seems to be having sex with other women. (That has always seemed exhausting to me, but I suppose everyone has the things they love most in life.) Colette doesn't realize this for a while, but eventually does, and reacts badly, with what seems to be a psychosomatic illness her mother has to come and nurse her out of. Afterward, Colette starts having affairs with other women herself - Goetzinger doesn't say so here, but I suspect lesbian dalliances were seen, by Willy and Frenchmen in general, as not "real" in the way a woman's affairs with men would be. I have no idea how the young Colette would have characterized her sexuality in a modern context, but she does seem to have slept with men exclusively after her marriage with Willy ended.

On the professional side, Willy was a "novelist" something in the James Patterson mold - he had ideas, and hired jobbing writers to actually write the books for him. Along the same lines, he encouraged or pushed or forced Colette to fictionalize her life into a series of novels about "Claudine," published under Willy's name and very popular. The Paris crowd seems to have fairly quickly realized Colette was the real author - I think they all knew Willy didn't really write his own books to begin with - and she also developed a second career as an actress, often as Claudine.

Those are the two themes of Colette's life, and of the book: her various affairs, first mostly with women and then with men, who did not get older as quickly as she did; and her various careers, as a journalist and novelist and dancer and actress and general stage performer. Goetzinger's hundred pages here carry Colette up to 1924, when she was just over fifty and when she broke up her second marriage by carrying on an affair with her husband's teenage stepson. As I understand it, Colette's biggest literary success and acclaim was in the 1920s and '30s, so Goetzinger deliberately cuts her story short at that point - this is explicitly the story of what formed Colette, and turned her into the woman who wrote the books than French audiences would recognize.

From my seat, a hundred years and an ocean away, it seems that Colette was scandalous for being a famous French woman who behaved exactly like a famous French man would, and did. I might think the whole thing sounds hugely tiring - all that running about, slamming bedroom doors like a farce - but it is oh-so French, and we have to allow nations their characteristic quirks.

Goetzinger, as I understand it, is one of the greats of French comics, working mostly in historical formats, like this book and Girl in Dior, the only other book of hers I've seen. She's had a forty-plus year career, of which (I think) not a lot has been translated into English. But this is a fine biography of an interesting writer who had a quirky, particular life, and Goetzinger's art makes it engaging and lively.