38
PARTISAN REVIEW
was quickly covered over by another layer of rich paint. The adolescent
Colette watches her mother mend a broken vine, binding it around
twenty times with gold string.
" ... I shivered and thought it was jealousy," she wrote, "but it was
merely a poetic echo awakened in me by the magic of that effective aid
sealed in gold."
[n her memoir, personal longings are transformed into a matriarchal
mythology, and
I ,
perhaps foolishly, wanted
to
meet the founder of this
pagan faith. Books, however, shou ld be kept separate from their makers,
but just like a lover who courts domesticity, not realizing that fami li arity
will extinguish the glow of romance, we continue to seek out the flesh
and blood human who has already given us the best of himself on the
printed page. Eventually, I did penetrate that special apartment above the
entrance to the courtyard of the Palais Royal. But it was merely ordi–
nary, dark, and cramped, permeated by the smell of cabbage being
cooked next door.
Colette de Jouvenel (known as "little Colette" to distinguish her
name from her famous mother's) was our guide, pointing out this, ex–
plaining that. Everything had been left reverently in place, exactly as it
used to be. For the guardian of this museum - domicile - each homely
object represented a relic in a shrine. We followed Little Colette all over
the premises, the rooms the ailing, aged writer had called home for her
last years. [ paused longest near the bed from which the arcades at the
Palace cou ld be viewed when the heavy window drapes were parted. But
with the disappearance of its occupant, the legendary "barge-couch" was
just another shabby piece of furniture, and the "blue lantern" (the title
of her last book) was merely a goose-necked lamp. [n the kitchen, how–
ever, the utensils appeared to have been put aside only yesterday: the
knives, forks, and spoons at readiness for use, a pottery bowl, though
empty, held the shadow of piled fruits and those rare hairy chestnuts in–
digenous to the region of Provence. I thought of the Etruscan tombs in
which the deceased are buried along with their household artifacts to
keep them company in the realm of death. In Colette's apartment, on
the contrary, these domestic articles were preserved for the benefit of the
living - the fans of the renowned author. But they served only to em–
phasize her death and the perishability of humans in contrast to the per–
manence of inanimate objects.
A large photograph of a handsome, fair-haired man caught my eye.
"My father," Colette de Jouvenel explained.
This portrait must have been a posthumous addition to the museum.
Surely, Colette had not lived with the likeness of her divorced husband.
In her life, as in her books, Henri de Jouvenel had glided almost imper–
ceptibly. His regular, virile countenance was a jarring note in this femi-
