chez colette

These empty rooms remind me of you...Colette’s apartment in the Palais-Royal stands in disrepair, stripped of all but memories. FRAÇOISE SAGAN takes us on an evocative journey through the writer’s last home in Paris

The walls are bare, the hallways deserted, the faucets rusty, the parquet floors silent. The human being who made it all alive and warm, the talented soul who for millions of readers turned these few walls into a place of comfort, intimacy, and grace—Colette—is gone. All the dark and hidden comers are once more what they were—stone, glass panes, plaster, wood, paper, iron. How astonished Colette would be, she who at every encounter with people or with things spread wide the fan of her five senses. She who, while a thousand other writers were describing the beauty of the cat, described as well the softness of its coat, its throaty purring, the smell of its fur. She who, through the instinctive richness of her perceptions, gave life in her prose to objects, to places, to supposedly inanimate houses.

My first morning in the Palais-Royal—my eyelids still closed— 1 had the illusion of a beautiful morning in the country, for under my window a gardener’s rake moved in unison with the wind blowing from east to west through the leaves, and that liquid bubbling that rises and falls in the sonorous throat of pigeons.”

—Colette, Trois...Six...Neuf...

Whether it was the house in southern France, where she spied upon the play of light and the grass growing in the walls, or whether it was the Paris house, where nature never entered and where her imagination or her memory would re-create the sensual world. Especially in the Palais-Royal, her last home.

Here, on the parquet floors off the rue de Beaujolais, Colette breathed the same wax odor that rang from the staircases of her childhood; in a glass cabinet in the red room was a stone she stroked, as smooth and cool as the pebbles given her long ago by a boy who had a crush on her; rattling the open shutters was the same wind she had heard knocking against the windows of a hotel in Provence one night when her heart was aching—the same wind that would rise all through her life.

Above the rue de Beaujolais, safe and cozy in her last home, Colette remembered all those who had haunted her other homes. Snug in her last bed, she remembered all those who had shared it. And she recalled, perhaps, that you can’t love houses until you love people. Then one last time, she fell asleep.

“I needed an apartment high up, airy, bright...”-Colette,Trois...Six...Neuf...