How the French Invented Love (34 page)

With the publication of
Cities of the Plain
, Proust left himself open to attacks for his obsessive portrayals of homosexuals. Gide criticized him for having made “inverts” so unattractive, hardly the model that Gide presented to his readers. (“Invert” was a common term for homosexual at that time.) Colette, on the other hand, wrote Proust a letter of praise in July 1921: “Nobody in the world has written pages like those on the Invert, no one.”

By grappling with his personal demons on the written page, Proust was able to dramatize those impediments to love that were his own: jealousy, hypersensitivity, and fear of loss, along with bouts of snobbery, cruelty, and indifference. His fictive lovers bear many of these same unfortunate traits. Yet, as readers, we are able to sympathize with them and, through them, discover previously hidden truths about ourselves. How Proust “took his private, thoroughly idiosyncratic world and made us feel at home in it” still astonishes his devotees.
⁶

As an adult lover, Proust remained at heart the little boy of thirteen who had written in a friend’s album that his idea of unhappiness was to be separated from his mother. Around the age of twenty-one, he wrote in another album that his principal character trait was “the need to be loved” and that his preferred occupation was “to love.” He added that his greatest misfortune would have been “not to have known my mother or my grandmother.” Not everyone is destined to transform the love of one’s mother into the love of a heterosexual partner. And not everyone is destined to produce a masterpiece.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Lesbian Love

Colette, Gertrude Stein, and Violette Leduc

T
HANKS TO MY CONVENIENT SHORT HAIR . . . MEN AND WOMEN FIND ME EQUALLY DISTURBING.

Colette,
Claudine Married,
1902

Colette at the Olympia, circa 1900. Photograph by Reuthinger. Paris: Musée d’Orsay. Copyright Kathleen Cohen.

B
etween 1900 and World War II, lesbians came out in Paris as never before. With their cropped hair and boyish jackets, they were immediately recognizable to each other, as well as to tourists, in the bars, bistros, and cabarets where gay women were known to congregate. Newspapers given to gossip made no secret of the fact that Madame X was living with her latest
protégée
or that two women riders in the Bois de Boulogne went home to the same bed. Despite ongoing religious and societal disapproval, lesbian and bisexual women became increasingly visible before World War I, and their androgynous figures eventually fed into the
garçonne
or flapper style of the 1920s. In avant-garde circles, it was even fashionable to be gay, just as it would be during the last quarter of the twentieth century in certain American universities.

Who were these women flouting age-old conventions and loving other women, instead of men? Some were originally provincials, like the courtesan known as Liane de Pougy and the young writer Colette, open to sexual opportunities in Paris that were not available in
la France profonde
. Among the provincials coming to Paris, many were working-class women—domestic servants, factory workers, models, and prostitutes—thrown together for mutual support as they earned their keep far from their families and childhood communities. Some were foreigners, like the Americans Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Natalie Barney, and Romaine Brooks, who came to taste the aesthetic and erotic pleasures of the vaunted French capital and never went home. A good many were Parisian-born, accustomed to big-city freedom and willing to embrace whatever was new in fashion, including Sapphic clothes and modes of loving.

“Sapphic,” referring to the ancient Greek lesbian poet Sappho, took on a positive meaning when used by lesbians, as opposed to the negative meaning that most men had given it. Throughout the nineteenth century, male critics had accused women of being Sapphic if they wore trousers, smoked cigarettes, wrote fiction, or departed in any other way from socially accepted norms. At the height of her renown, Liane de Pougy was one of the first women to claim the word publicly in her 1901 novel
Idylle Saphique
, based on her exalted love affair with Natalie Clifford Barney during the summer of 1899.

Barney was the acknowledged queen of the “Amazons”—a word that refers, in French, both to a riding habit and to a lesbian. Outrageously wealthy and equally headstrong, Barney became famous for the literary salons and amateur theatricals that drew to her home on the rue Jacob a clique of French and American writers for over sixty years. It was at one of Barney’s events that Colette made her theatrical debut as a shepherd in love with a nymph. At a subsequent soirée she also played the part of the legendary shepherd, Daphnis, in a play written by Pierre Louÿs. Mythological characters were popular in homosexual circles as a form of homage to the ancient Greek world that had produced Sappho, as well as such eminent apologists for homosexuality as Socrates and Plato. Louÿs, while not a homosexual himself, was the friend of André Gide and other gays, and much appreciated for his scandalous
Chansons de Bilitis
(
Songs of Bilitis
), which he claimed to have translated from one of Sappho’s female contemporaries. The name “Bilitis” quickly circulated as another term for lesbian and was adopted in the United States by an early lesbian rights group called the Daughters of Bilitis.

Barney did nothing to hide her love of women, which enraged her American father before he conveniently died at the age of fifty-two and left her $2.5 million! With that kind of money, Barney could well afford to spend the rest of her life writing poetry and memoirs, traveling, and entertaining her many gay friends. She counted among her female lovers the writers Colette, Renée Vivien, and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, as well as her longtime partner, the stunning painter Romaine Brooks. Under her aegis, an elite lesbian clan thrived in Paris, the only city—according to Barney—“where you can live and express yourself as you please.”
¹

But Sapphic love, so public in Paris, had to be hidden in the provinces, where whispers and rumors could result in social ostracism and even loss of employment. This was the world Colette explored in her first novel,
Claudine at School
, set in her native Burgundy. Love, the major theme of all Colette’s books, sprang from pantheistic Burgundian roots and from the shining presence of her mother, Sido.

G
abrielle Sidonie Colette was born in 1873 in Basse-Bourgogne. She was the much loved fourth child of a twice-married mother. Brought up by a doting mother, surrounded by the bounties of Burgundy, Colette carried with her throughout life the primal memories of a lost paradise, not unlike Proust’s Combray. Still, the attributes of her lost paradise did not resemble his. Proust, a member of the Parisian
haute bourgeoisie
that mingled with the aristocracy, never had to work, whereas Colette’s family were petit bourgeois country folk, for whom work was a necessity, as it would be for the adult Colette. But as a child, Colette considered herself a “queen of the earth,” happy in her skin and enraptured by the verdant woods and vines of her native region.

When Colette was sixteen, her parents went bankrupt and were forced to sell their home and all their belongings. Colette moved with her family to a smaller home in a neighboring town. What was she to do? For a young woman without a dowry, the best scenario was to find a husband who would take her as is. “As is” did not mean second best, for Gabri (as she was called by her family) was a very attractive young thing—slim, pretty, with a foxlike face. Her long, thick, golden brown hair tied into braids hung down below her knees. In her later writing, Colette would present her adolescent self as a mixture of brusque self-confidence, sexual curiosity, and romantic longings.

Love came her way when she was sixteen in the form of Willy Gauthiers-Villars, a man fourteen years her senior. Willy was the errant offspring of a good Catholic family, with roots in publishing. He himself had literary pretentions, and by the time he met Colette, he had published several articles, though they—and everything else he subsequently published under his name—were the creation of others. Willy was a gifted fraud. He ran a factory of ghost writers, known in French as
nègres
. To this day, the French use that unfortunate word, which can only be translated as “niggers.” Some of the best-known articles published under Willy’s name were on music and appeared in a series called
Lettres de l’ouvreuse
(Letters of the Usherette), which Gabrielle had read before Willy entered her life in person.

A minor Parisian celebrity and rakish ladies’ man, Willy was enchanted by the budding country girl, so ready for pleasures of the flesh. He had lost his first wife, the mother of his infant son, and was ready to try marriage again, though it seems that Colette would have given herself to him without marriage. (This is at least the version she presents of herself in
Claudine in Paris
.) Married in May 1893, they honeymooned in the rugged Jura region and then settled in Paris in his bachelor apartment, which Colette found small and depressing. Willy introduced her to his lively Parisian circle, replete with famous writers and musicians like Anatole France, Marcel Schwob, Catulle Mendès, Debussy, Fauré, and Vincent d’Indy, as well as many of the ghost writers in his stable. She even met Proust during a dinner hosted by the formidable Mme Armand de Caillavet (one of the models for Proust’s Madame Verdurin). But Colette did not feel comfortable in salon society: she missed the nurturing atmosphere of her Burgundian homeland and the mother earth figure incarnated in Sido.

In the winter of 1894, Colette discovered that her husband was having an affair. This would be the first of his numerous adulteries during their thirteen-year marriage. Still in love with her husband, Colette was devastated, and within the year she fell into a serious illness that kept her in bed for two months. Only the ministrations of her mother, in constant attendance, brought her back to life. As sick as she was, and throughout the years to come, Colette managed to keep her deep unhappiness hidden from her mother, Sido, who may have had her suspicions but never knew the particulars of Willy’s betrayals.

Sometime after her cure, Willy suggested that Colette write down her schoolgirl recollections. For several months, ending in January 1896, she wrote the pages that would become famous as
Claudine at School
. Oddly enough, Willy did not appreciate their value when he first read them. It wasn’t until 1898, while tidying up his desk, that he found the manuscript stashed away in a drawer and, upon rereading it, recognized its worth. He prodded Colette to “add a little spice” to the affectionate relations between Claudine and her schoolgirl friends, and then lost no time in finding a publisher.
²
Claudine at School
, published under the name of Willy with no credit to his wife, became a phenomenal hit, with more editions during the first half of the twentieth century than any other French book. At the time of their divorce, Colette signed the contracts that sold the novel outright under Willy’s sole authorship. Later she would write: “I shall never forgive myself for having done so.”
³

What is so special about the Claudine stories that have made them popular to this day?
Claudine at School
is written as the diary of a fifteen-year-old Burgundian girl. It exudes the vitality of a country adolescent, cheeky and indomitable in her relations with her schoolmates, teachers, and even the local inspectors. She brings into the schoolroom the feel of the Burgundian countryside with its pungent woods, meadows, farms, vineyards, and roaming animals. Imbued with a rustic strength, Claudine is sure of herself and dominates everyone around her, including her indulgent father. (There is no mother in this novel.)

On her fifteenth birthday, Claudine is obliged to drop the hem of her skirts to her ankles. It’s time for her to be socialized into the manners of a young lady intended for marriage. Claudine finds her own way into adulthood, spurred on by her infatuation with the newly arrived assistant schoolteacher, Mlle Aimée, who is described as small, pretty, and talkative and possessing “one of those complexions that look so delicate but are so reliable that the cold doesn’t even turn them blue!”
⁴

Claudine, a clever little devil, succeeds in persuading her father that she needs English lessons in her home, to be given by Mlle Aimée for fifteen francs a month. Since the little schoolteacher earns only sixty-five francs a month, how can she refuse?

The English lessons quickly degenerate into French conversations, designed by Claudine to establish a more personal rapport. She inquires about her instructor’s life under the direction of the senior teacher, Mlle Sergent. Did they sleep in the same room? They did, to Claudine’s jealous dismay. Already by her second English lesson, Claudine can’t control her overflowing heart.