Colette

FLASHBACK

Vanity Fair, 1935

La Chatte that got the cream: Crouched watchfully in the armchair, Colette is photographed by Steichen, the light of her genius striking sideways. She was in her sixties, and Vanity Fair called her "the greatest living woman writer... [and] the first woman in France to bob her hair. " She was the Coco Chanel of letters—worldly, brave, lucid, feral, and as quintessentially French as the Comedie-Franqaise. Though she could raise her voice and her skirts gaily in music halls, she was best at bringing alive the kind of melancholy that stands life on its head. She wrote reams of nonfiction. Flowers and Fruit, a forthcoming collection of poetic essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), was written late, when arthritis confined her to a divan she called her raft. For inspiration, a Swiss publisher sent her flowers once or twice a week, hoping Colette might press them in her classical prose. She deserved these bouquets more richly than she knew.