January 28
Sidonie-Gabrielle Claudine Colette's Birthday
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Colette was the pen name of Sidonie-Gabrielle
Claudine Colette who was
France's most popular novelist, the only women elected to the Academie
Goncourt, and the only women
in France to be given a formal state funeral. When the Archbishop of Paris
refused to allow her a Catholic burial there was an international protest
and she was buried in
Le Père Lachaise Cemetery
in Paris. In 1893 she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, a famous wit known as 'Willy', who was 15 years her senior. She was forced to write her first books, the Claudine series, under the pen name of her husband who took the credit himself. Claudine a l'ecole (Claudine at School) was immensely popular because of the tantalizing descriptions of lesbian crushes of the schoolgirls on their teachers. Paris went Claudine crazy after the book's publication and there were hundreds of articles of clothing, cosmetics, and foods named after Claudine including the Chapeau Claudine, Perfume Claudine, and Glacé Claudine (Claudine's Licorice Ice Cream). |
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Sidonie-Gabrielle Claudine Collette |
In 1906 Colette left her unfaithful
plagiarist husband
and became a music-hall performer. Her manager was Mathilde de Morny,
the Marquise de Belbeuf, known as Missy, with whom she became romantically involved.
In 1912 Colette married Henri de Jouvenel,
the editor of the newspaper Le Matin. The couple had one daughter
whom she left in the care of an English nanny, only rarely coming to
visit her.
In 1914, during
World War I, Colette was approached to
write a ballet for the Opéra de Paris which she outlined under the
title Divertissements pour ma fille. She chose Maurice Ravel to write the
music which he reconstructed as an opera, L'Enfant et les
sortilèges, first performed March 21, 1925.
During the war she converted her husband's St. Malo estate into a
hospital for the wounded, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour
(1920). She divorced Henri in 1924 after a notorious affair with her
stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel. Colette married Maurice Goudeket in 1935.
Collette wrote more than 70 works. Her mature novels were marked with her
ability of describing the varying tensions in personal relationships without
making moral judgments. Many of her novels had characters whose attitudes on
life, sex, and personal relationships, were often controversial, and many of her novels were banned by the Catholic Church as immoral.
However, nearly all of her characters were Colette's own family, her
husbands her male and female lovers, her friends and others that she know.
It was her last novel, Gigi, that brought her the most international
success after its transition into the Lerner and Lowe musical film.
Colette Collage by
Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones
(who also wrote the Fantastics),
one of
the very few musicals about an author, covers Colette's early life (in the
first act) when she is forced to ghost-write the Claudine novels for
her husband, and the older, well-established author (in the second act) and
her love affair with a much younger man with two actresses playing the
younger and older Colette. Colette Collage has some of the most
beautiful music ever written for the stage.
Colette loved and wrote extensively about food passionately, and her
interest in food was celebrated with many eponymous recipes including
Oeufs Colette (poached eggs in a cheese sauce over smoked turkey,
Pheasant Colette,
and Truffles Colette (braised truffles in wine) which was
inspired by Colette's statement
"If I can't have too
many truffles, I'll do without truffles."
Glacé Claudine
(Claudine's Licorice Ice Cream).
| Special Equipment Ice cream maker |
Ingredients
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