Novelists From France

"For us, a sorrowful generation consumed by visions and insulted by his angelic sloth, Musset is fourteen times worse! O the tedious tales and proverbs! O his Nuits! His Rolla, Namouna, La Coupe. It’s all so French, which is to say unbearable to the nth degree; French, but not Parisian. Another work by that odious genius who inspired Rabelais, Voltaire and Jean La Fontaine, with notes by M. Taine! How vernal, Musset’s mind! And how delightful, his love! Like paint on enamel, his dense poetry! We will savor French poetry endlessly, in France. Every grocer’s son can reel off something Rollaesque, every seminarian has five hundred rhymes hidden in his notebook. At fifteen, these passionate impulses give boys boners; at sixteen, they’ve already resolved to recite their lines with feeling; at eighteen, even seventeen, every schoolboy who can write a Rolla, does—and they all do! Some may even still die from it. Musset couldn’t do anything: there were visions behind the gauze curtains: he closed his eyes. French, half-dead, dragged from tavern to schooldesk, the beautiful corpse has died, and, ever since, we needn’t waste our time trying to rouse him with our abominations!"

"As all the perfumes of the vanished day Rise from the earth still moistened with the dew So from my chastened soul beneath thy ray Old love is born anew."

"Great artists have no country."

"Je ne puis;—malgré moi l'infini me tourmente."

"The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near."

"One of the most frequently quoted literary passages on lesbian relationship is that in which Colette's Renée, in The Vagabond, describes "the melancholy and touching image of two weak creatures who have perhaps found shelter in each other's arms, there to sleep and weep, safe from man who is often cruel, and there to taste better than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin, frail and forgotten [emphasis added]." Colette is often considered a lesbian writer. Her popular reputation has, I think, much to do with the fact that she writes about lesbian existence as if for a male audience; her earliest "lesbian" novels, the Claudine series, were written under compulsion for her husband and published under both their names. At all events, except for her writings on her mother, Colette is a less reliable source on the lesbian continuum than, I would think, Charlotte Brontë, who understood that while women may, indeed must, be one another's allies, mentors, and comforters in the female struggle for survival, there is quite extraneous delight in each other's company and attraction to each others' minds and character, which attend a recognition of each others' strengths."

"For brevity, for wit that began back in the observation of the eye which produced it; for the loving openness, almost transparency, of all the senses to the moment passing, its time and place; for a recognition of the essence of that tension (of whatever name or quality) existing between and among the human beings and sometimes the cat in a room together; for a recording of feeling as strict as a seismograph's; perhaps best of all for a real gaiety, a real laughing gaiety-for these things we will value, honor, study, and above all delight in Colette."

"I do admire Colette, her wonderful descriptions of flowers, trees and animals, animals especially."

"I am devoted to those who endured, like Colette. It is easier … to kiss the world a bitter goodbye than to go on working, writing, changing, enduring the slings & arrows of outrageous aging. Colette endured. And she wrote & wrote & wrote. Whenever I feel really depressed, I think of her & keep going."

"Here lived, here died Colette, whose work is a window wide open on life."

"I've felt that her perceptions, her feelings about food, gardens, the sea are beautiful. She was a peasant-that was her saving grace. And yet so elegant in her style. But I love the peasant in her, the one who delights in smells and tastes. I never tasted a of chocolate like her chocolate. And her matchless subtlety. Do remember the episode, I think it's so funny, when they were going to bring her into the Académie Française and they said, oh yes, she's a beautiful writer, a wonderful stylist, but she doesn't write about important things, only about love? She's only writing about love. She meant a lot to me."

"Toby-Dog: It seems to me that of the two of us it's you they make the most of, and yet you do all the grumbling. Kiki-The-Demure: A dog's logic, that! The more one gives the more I demand. Toby-Dog: That's wrong. It's indiscreet. Kiki-The-Demure: Not at all. I have a right to everything. Toby-Dog: To everything? And I? Kiki-The-Demure: I don't imagine you lack anything, do you? Toby-Dog: Ah, I don't know. Sometimes in my very happiest moments, I feel like crying. My eyes grow dim, my heart seems to choke me. I would like to be sure, in such times of anguish, that everybody loves me; that there is nowhere in the world a sad dog behind a closed door, that no evil will ever come... Kiki-The-Demure: And then what dreadful thing happens? Toby-Dog: You know very well! Inevitably, at that moment She appears, carrying a bottle with horrible yellow stuff floating in it — Castor Oil!"

"Kiki-The-Demure: Once when I was little She tried to give me castor oil. I scratched and bit her so, she never tried again. Ha! She must have thought she held the devil between her knees. I squirmed, blew fire through my nostrils, multiplied my twenty claws by a hundred, my teeth by one thousand, and finally — disappeared as if by magic. Toby-Dog: I wouldn't dare do that. You see, I love her. I love her enough to forgive her even the torture of the bath."

"If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles,"

"A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men... nine men out of ten are superstitious, nineteen out of twenty believe in the evil eye, and ninety-eight out of a hundred are afraid of spiders. They forgive us — oh! for many things, but not for the absence in us of their own feelings."

"Don’t ever wear artistic jewellry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation."

"Boredom helps one to make decisions."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: “It’s four o’clock … At five I have my abyss.”"

"Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave."

"Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette."

"Whether you are dealing with an animal or a child, to convince is to weaken."

"It’s nothing to be born ugly. Sensibly, the ugly woman comes to terms with her ugliness and exploits it as a grace of nature. To become ugly means the beginning of a calamity, self-willed most of the time."

"For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance."

"In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness."

"It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanisms of friendship."

"There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion."

"What a delight it is to make friends with someone you have despised!"

"It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change."

"You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly."

"As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow."

"On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us — ah! what a dream, to live in that! — the other stifles us at the first breath."

"The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time."

"To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one."

"The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before."

"But just as delicate fare does not stop you from craving for saveloys, so tried and exquisite friendship does not take away your taste for something new and dubious."

"We only do well the things we like doing."

"By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet."

"Total absence of humor renders life impossible."

"You do not notice changes in what is always before you."

"I love my past. I love my present. I'm not ashamed of what I've had, and I'm not sad because I have it no longer."

"If one wished to be perfectly sincere, one would have to admit there are two kinds of love—well-fed and ill-fed. The rest is pure fiction."

"My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved."

"Le monde des èmotions qu’on nomme, á la lègére, physiques."

"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm."

"Let’s go out and buy playing-cards, good wine, bridge-scorers, knitting needles—all the paraphernalia to fill a gaping void, all that’s required to disguise that monster, an old woman."

"It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place."

"Can it be that chance has made me one of those women so immersed in one man that, whether they are barren or not, they carry with them to the grave the shrivelled innocence of an old maid?"

"When she raises her eyelids it's as if she were taking off all her clothes."

"There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall."