40
PARTISAN REVIEW
the church at Combray.
After a deep bow, the waiter, carrying a menu as large as a map of
the world, withdrew. Colette had ordered white trumes. "My mother's
favorite dish," she told us, adding that Colette used
to
say that they pre–
pared them, here, just as Sido used
to
do.
Sacha, seated between his mistress and me, was daintily picking at the
smoked salmon on her plate.
"I like it here," Colette de Jouvenel commented , "they truly appre–
ciate dogs."
Yet I sensed that our hostess was eager to return to her home in the
country. But the site was not Saint Sauver, with its luxuriant southern
fertility . Rather, I pictured her striding over the sandy barren hillocks of
Normandy, her tweed cape billowing in a salt, north wind. She is fol–
lowed by a pack of sporting dogs and the citified dandy, Sacha, her
constant companion on her brief stays in Paris. The obscure rural exis–
tence must have been a lonely one, lived in the shadow of her mother,
and it was she who brought little Colette to the city (an awkward,
middle-aged vestal virgin),
to
tend the altar
to
literary fame.
I had heard, often, people murmering, "Poor little Colette, she
never had a real mother!" It was true that motherhood was not natural
to Colette, who entrusted the care of her "Bel Gazou" to a governess,
while she led her uninterrupted Parisian life away from the salubrious sea–
side nursery of her only child. On brief visits, she played the mother role,
a classical actress declaiming her love in self-conscious poetic phrases.
Now I see Colette de Jovenel walking alone. Overhead, the gulls seem
to be calling, "Bel-Gazou, Bel-Gazou," but the name repeated by the
birds is cold - distant as the white caps on the horizon of a gray, north–
ern ocean.
We parted from our hostess outside the restaurant Grand VeFour. In
my last view of Little Colette, she is standing in a heavy rain with Sacha,
her miniature poodle , held closely, like a cherished baby, in her arms,
sheltered from the downpour by the oversized, mannish, black, utilitarian
umbrella.
Behind her, through the sooty fog, the image of the other Colette
loomed. The Parisian author, woman of the world, with her trademark
thatch of curly hair, her clever feline glance, beneath the frivolous
belle
epoqlle
bang. Mother and daughter are joined in a double exposure of
the insufficiently loved child.
