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PARTISAN REVIEW
that alone were the true end of feminine life and to it all else were
tributary. As Colette obliquely reminds us when she discusses the in–
domitable slum-women of Paris, it is the need to maintain this delicate,
passive process that is the source of the essential female ruthlessness,
her whim of iron and, as Madame de Beauvoir in
The Second Sex
fails
to mention either through insensitivity or tactics, her unbreakable shield
in the war of the sexes.
It is an interim period in that war, a temporary lull filled with the
bitter memories and pungent smoke of the last battle that this semi–
autobiographical work opens upon. Renee, the narrator, has just freed
herself from a marriage to a libertine of monstrous proportions and is
busy making a new life for herself as a music-hall performer. With ex–
quisite sensitivity she evokes not the world about her but what that
world starts to life in her, sensations, feelings, musings, which transmute
themselves almost spontaneously into verbal felicities of a slight but
high order, so that, as in Proust, the words and the milieu seem to be
interlocked, born of each other, and possessed of a kind of self-renewing
personal charm. The crux of the story is her struggle to decide between
marriage and independence and her final aching acceptance of the
life of the inviolate wanderer she chooses to be.
The wistful elegance of Colette's style mitigates but does not ex–
tinguish the great pain and torment behind the story, the pain not
merely of an irrevocable, desperate choice but a sense that a long–
cherished tradition of French femininity is coming to a bitter end.
Colette's work (especially in this poignant, faultlessly-written volume),
graceful, dedicated to the feminine sensibility with incredible exclusive–
ness, is probably best understood as the last harvest of that tradition,
one which had (considering the status of women elsewhere) .even then
lasted past its time. In the work of Madame de Beauvoir we get the
awkward strength, breadth and hit-or-miss violence of a talent that
tries, not only to capture the present, but, very much in accord with
the law of combined development, to be in the van of the invasion of
the future.
William S. Poster
