Colette (1979)

foreign [Music] loathed sacrificing flowers to the dead she who was the most generous of women would refuse a request for them to Adorn a hearse or a grave [Music] she bristled at the very idea knitted her brow what my most roses and a corpse worried unthinkable [Music] three-quarters of a century later on August 8 1954 her daughter Gabrielle Sidney Colette or simply Colette as the world they knew her was buried him in a very luxurious of flowers with Pomp and Circumstance the only woman in France ever to receive a state funeral nevertheless Colette herself had written death doesn't interest me no not even my own [Music] she had been born in a small village in burgundy and died at the age of 81 having written more than 60 volumes and won a place of eminence in the world of letters hers was the story of a born Watcher we look but never closely enough never long enough and never with enough passion never the terms she used was regard but by that she almost certainly meant also to wonder feel experience to penetrate that no man's land between the senses and emotions it was her insistent theme her light Motif as far back as her earliest youth [Music] of those days she wrote our garden bed in a yellow light was tremulous with Reds and violets but I couldn't tell if those red those violets acquired their magic from my perception of them at the moment or from some happiness recollected [Music] [Music] ah those Summers reverberating in the warm yellow gravel the sun piercing The Weave of my wide brim Straw Hat those Long Summers that were almost without night [Music] though I was born into a family of modest means I was never taught any professional trade I knew how to climb whistle run but no voice borrowed the sound of the wind to whisper in my ear the advice to write and write and by writing to dim my thrilling and tranquil perceptions of the living universe can anyone understand what it was like to have gone from a small village to the life I was to lead in Paris after my first marriage was it not an adventure so Extreme as to bring a young girl of 20 to despair to despair or wild intoxication [Music] as for my wedding has there ever been one more modest or conventional till there was something strange about it the bride dressed in white muslin looked nice but rather pale exhausted after having spent the afternoon in her garden exploring an ant hill foreign The Poetry of my youth had been of solitude Independence preoccupation with my family with nature but from that day on everything changed [Music] the man she married was considerably older than herself his known to plume was Willy and he employed a core of Ghost Riders it was at his insistence that she wrote her first novel Claudine at school a fictionalized account of her childhood and an instant success but it was Willie who listed himself as Soul Arthur as he did of her three Claudine sequels vaguely I became aware of a Duty toward myself to write about something other than Claudine the day I was given a little money in exchange for the pages I had written I realized that I would have to write every single day slowly submissively patiently and that behind the voluptuous novel there would be a sober-minded stay-at-home writer that was 33 when she was divorced from Willy one can get used to living alone but the language alone in a fever alone always alone till I don't pity myself even as I tremble before the rain lashing my windowpane I have no regrets [Music] how just was the criticism of one of my husbands again to write about anything that isn't about love adultery semi-incestuous relations and an ultimate separation [Music] laughs yet what I really want to write about are things sad and pure bucolic Landscapes flowers sorrow human dignity and the innocence of animals threatened by man [Music] all her life Colette attempted to bridge the gulf between men and animals cats especially after all what does one Risk by the companionship of cats but the chance of enriching one's own self is it not out of self-interest that I have been seeking their company for half a century but her sympathies embraced all animals that escaped the domination of man [Music] one can't love animals and men at the same time with each passing day I become more suspect to my fellow creatures but if they were indeed my fellow creatures would I be suspect to them her curiosity led her along many paths besides being a novelist and short story writer she was a sometime actress mime dancer journalist film scenarist drama critic musical Entertainer and more few modes of expression left her indifferent the theater especially played a prominent role in her life several of her Works were adapted for stage and Screen the most famous of which being Gigi [Music] state was one World in which she could take instant Refuge another was friendship that loving friendship which was to her the essence of femininity it is not out of passion that Fidelity between two women is engendered but out of a feeling of kinship I say kinship when perhaps the word should be a likeness this sensuality has no need of consummation but only the joys of sympathetic plants is exchanged The Gentle Touch of a hand the emotion aroused by hair smelling a warm weed the comfort of an habitual presence of Pleasures shared these are what ensure Fidelity between them [Music] laughs why does pride so fasten itself to my heart that it will allow only certain people to reside there [Music] my own daughter in fact how I recall my own self-mistrust when I learned of my pregnancy I was fearful of motherhood perhaps of an incapacity for love Colette who in life and literature played so many parts was also a witness to her times and her vignettes of her contemporaries the great and near Great the Obscure the famous and Infamous are memorable [Music] of Prost she wrote I used to meet Marcel proust at the salon of Madame Aman the Cavalier we were both young then Swan's way what a Triumph that was the Labyrinth of childhood and Adolescence revealed re-examined here was everything one would have wanted to write everything one didn't dare to write or knew how to write thank you a commitment to life never waived even when racked by arthritis and can find hopelessly to the bed she called her raft [Music] there are no harvests she wrote but in Autumn perhaps that is also true of love but nothing obliterates the past it is I who am adrift still I don't despair I know that life is an open sea not a desert and that is enough to sustain me in my affliction with humility I am going to go on Rising for me there is no other Destiny but when does one stop writing what warning is there when the hand begins to tremble once I thought that riding was like any other task you lay down the tool and joyfully exclaimed finished then you clap your hands and find raining down from them grains of sand you thought precious it is then that you read in the outlines traced by those grains of sand the words to be continued to be continued for it was even to the end of her life even at 80 they remained with her that same unflagging curiosity that had shaped her work from its beginning [Music] together [Music]