There are no ordinary cats.
--Colette
But first, the Rules:
- Do not troll the diary. If you hate pootie diaries, leave now. No harm, no foul.
- Please do share pics of your fur kids! If you have health/behavior issues with your pets, feel free to bring it to the community.
- Pooties are cats; Woozles are dogs. Birds... are birds! Peeps are people.
- Whatever happens in the outer blog STAYS in the outer blog. If you’re having “issues” with another Kossack, keep it “out there.” This is a place to relax and play; please treat it accordingly.
- There are some pics we never post: snakes, creepy crawlies, any and all photos that depict or encourage human cruelty toward animals. These are considered “out of bounds” and will not be tolerated. If we alert you to it, please remember that we do have phobic peeps who react strongly to them. If you keep posting banned pics...well then...the Tigress will have to take matters in hand. Or, paw.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette grew up in a village in Burgundy and had a happy childhood. She learned from her mother to love nature and animals and she never lost that love. She especially loved cats and she favored the Maltese breed.
Quoting a cat:
Our instinct of self-preservation, our dignity, our modest reserve, our attitude of weary renunciation (which comes of the hopelessness of ever being understood by them), they dub, in haphazard fashion, egoism.
Colette, Barks and Purrs
“Them,” of course, means humans. But Colette seems to have understood some things.
Colette said that she would never have thought of writing if she had not married—at only twenty—Henri Gauthier-Villars (“Willy”) a writer and publisher fifteen years older than she and very prominent at the time. He quickly discovered that she could write and he made her write. The Encyclopedia Britannica says that he even locked her up with writing materials so that she couldn’t concentrate on anything else. In this way, she wrote her first four novels—the “Claudine” novels—and a number of other works. Willy published the Claudine novels under his own name and—the books were popular--kept all of the royalties. He also introduced the initially naive Sidonie to the Paris demi-monde, (He was a rather louche character.) which gave Colette the background for many stories..
Colette left Willy after about nine years and finally got a divorce a few years after that. (Whew!) But, ironically, that exploitative marriage was a gift to literature.
Writing only leads to more writing.
--Colette
After her divorce, Colette had no money—because of the stolen royalties. She tried various jobs—including journalism—and for a time was a night-club entertainer. She sometimes played her own character Claudine, and in one revue she played a cat.
She was married again—to Henri Jouvenel. Their daughter figures as Bel-Gazou in Colette’s animal story, La Paix chez les bêtes. She divorced Jouvenel also, but during the marriage she did produce a lot of work, including Cherie and La Fin de Cherie. In1935 she married the writer Maurice Goudeket and that marriage was happy.
It was also productive. During that time, Colette published her memoirs and many other works, including Gigi and La Chatte, which is a study of jealousy in which the cat is very important.
Colette became a member of the Belgian Royal Academy (1935) and the French Académie Goncourt (1945). She was also named a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. (All three honors were rarely granted to women.) Willy doesn’t seem to be much heard about now.
Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
--Colette
In later life, Colette was much afflicted with arthritis and was no longer very physically active. But she still wrote and she always had her much-loved cats around her.
Many of Colette’s works are available in French on Project Gutenberg. For English translations, go to Barnes & Noble or another major bookseller.