Colette à la guerre
"Twin concerns dominated her pieces: winter cold and the paucity of good nourishment. Colette suffered from an arthritic hip that kept her inside her apartment. She could barely navigate the steps down to the shelter during air raid warnings and rarely ventured into the Metro because of the stairs down to the tracks. Yet she maintained, at least in her columns, an optimism that would, a friend said after the war, be seen as a sort of heroism, keeping one's sangfroid during difficult times. She repeated her commonsensical mantra: despair, sorrow, and penury teach us to live better than do joyous moments, and things would get better. 'I have known happy Paris too well to worry about unhappy Paris.'"
From Chapter 3: Minuet 91940 - 1941)
J'aime Paris et Colette.
ReplyDeleteDid you ever read Truman Capote's story when he met Colette?