The Cat by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

First published:La Chatte, 1933 (English translation, 1936)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The early 1930’s

Locale: Neuilly and central Paris

Principal Characters:

• Alain Amparat, the son of a wealthy manufacturing family
• Camille Malmert, the woman who marries him
• Saha, his Russian Blue cat

The Novel

The Cat is a short novel about the rapid decline of a marriage. Both the young people involved, Alain Amparat and Camille Malmert, come from prosperous manufacturing families. The novel opens a week before the wedding at Alain’s spacious but run-down old house at Neuilly, where he lives with his widowed mother and some ancient servants. Part of the house is being converted and modernized for the young couple. Until it is ready, however, they plan to live in a small studio at the top of a new nine-story apartment block. The apartment, lent to them by a friend, conforms to Camille’s taste for everything up-to-date, but it offends Alain’s fastidious and conservative nature.

It soon becomes evident that although Alain and Camille are physically attracted to each other, their engagement has more to do with family expectations than with a meeting of minds. Alain watches Camille nervously and is privately critical of her uninhibited manners and loud voice. He finds solace in the company of his beloved cat, Saha, a magnificent Russian Blue.

On the morning after the wedding, Alain, waking up in the ultramodern studio bedroom, is embarrassed to see Camille flitting about in the nude. He is nonplussed when she counters that he, too, is nude above the waist. This small incident is an early portent of the gap which is to widen between them. Later that day, Alain returns to Neuilly under the pretext of checking the building’s progress. Camille teasingly accuses him of going to visit her rival, the cat. Taking her seriously, Alain protests that Saha cannot be her rival because there is nothing “impure” about his relationship with it.

During the hot summer months, they make love frequently, always at Camille’s initiative. Alain becomes revolted by her open sensuality and longs for the sheltered security of his childhood home and for his cat, which is pining for him at Neuilly. Camille is annoyed when he brings the cat to live at the cramped top-floor apartment. Alain, however, lavishes all of his attention on the cat.

One day, Alain overhears Camille grumbling about that “filthy swine of an animal,” which sparks a quarrel. At a restaurant that evening, Alain notices that Camille has put on weight and wonders with alarm if she is pregnant. Camille tells him that the owner of the studio will soon be coming back. She dreams aloud about the family they will rear when they return to Neuilly and she proposes redecorating his old room for the child.

Alain is aghast. His revulsion for her becomes crystallized into a single determination: On no account must she be allowed to share his childhood home. He tries to persuade his mother of this, but she prefers not to listen. Camille is deeply hurt when Alain takes to leaving their bed in the small hours and stretching out on a bench in a corridor, the cat lying on his chest. She makes it a point of honor not to complain, but instead tries to woo him back with her body—which only makes the situation worse.

Matters come to a head when Camille, waiting for Alain, plays a silent and menacing game with the cat. She forces it to jump from one part of the parapet to another. Suddenly, on impulse, she pushes it off the parapet. Camille expects Alain to accepts its death as an accident. The cat, however, is not dead. Its fall was broken; it is shocked but unhurt. Alain brings it upstairs in his arms, ministers to it lovingly, and asks Camille to feel its head for bumps. As soon as she stretches out her hand to it, it lets out a savage snarl and leaps away from her. Alain draws his own conclusions.

In the ensuing quarrel, Camille accuses him of loving the cat instead of her. He again insists that Saha is not her rival, but she continues the accusation: “I have seen you lying cheek to cheek....” Alain forces her to admit that she tried to kill Saha. Then he installs the cat in a basket and tells Camille that he is—“we are”—leaving. Camille conceals her despair and, with a few sarcastic parting words, lets him go.

The following day, Camille arrives at the house in Neuilly with a suitcase of Alain’s clothes. She finds him in the garden, disheveled, in torn pyjamas and in a state of near delirium. She tries obliquely to draw from him a hope for the future, but he is relentless. He calls her a monster for trying to kill a beautiful and defenseless animal. She replies that he is a monster to leave a woman for the sake of an animal. He does not deny it. Camille walks away and Alain is left—as he had contrived to be left—in the garden of his childhood, with his mother, his servants, and the cat.

The Characters

To emphasize the incompatibility of husband and wife, Colette created them in sharp contrast to each other. Both are outstandingly attractive: Alain is blond, delicate, and introspective while Camille is dark, easygoing, and uninhibited. Alain comes from a highly respected manufacturing family. Fatherless since childhood, he has been spoiled and mollycoddled by his mother and by the servants, who refer to him as “the young Master.”

Camille is every inch a “modern girl” in the 1930’s mode. She drives fast cars, dresses immaculately, smokes to excess, and uses coarse language. Alain is wholly conservative, locked in the habits and emotions of his childhood.

The biggest contrast between them concerns their attitudes to lovemaking. Marriage gives Camille the freedom of legitimized sex (denied to single women of the period), and she wants to take full advantage of it. Alain, who has had casual affairs in the past, is repulsed and perhaps frightened by Camille’s open sensuality; he retreats from it into his relationship with the cat. The distance between the couple remains under the surface most of the time, emerging in the form of an occasional repartee.

Although Alain has the weaker personality, his self-absorption makes him more manipulative. He uses Camille’s crude attempt to get rid of the cat as an opportunity, rather than as a reason, for leaving her. Camille has no inkling of the way she is being manipulated. She takes things at face value. Bold and outgoing, she is too proud to show any outward signs of disappointment. “I sometimes wish...,” she begins to say, but she cannot finish the sentence. Her only strategy for regaining Alain’s affection is to tempt him physically, which she cannot resist trying even at their final parting: “She was going away, carefully avoiding holding out her hand to him. But under the arcade of clipped trees, she dared vainly to brush against him with her ripening breasts.”

Colette’s description of Saha’s feline movements and behavior is so vivid that it gives the animal the force of a third character in an eternal triangle. Throughout the book the cat is referred to as “she,” and there are incidents in which it does, indeed, appear to have its own free will. The cat is not only a “character” but also a symbol—to Camille, a symbol of an unfaithful husband and to Alain, of the privacy and serenity of a childhood which he hated leaving and to which he finally retreats.

The other characters are sketched impressionistically, with a few swift strokes. Madame Amparat emerges as an intelligent but preoccupied woman who would like to be relieved of the responsibility of an emotionally retarded son. The aging servants are obsequious to Alain and insolent to Camille. Emile, the butler, walks a fine line with double-talk which enables him to tear down Camille’s character while apparently praising it.

Critical Context

Colette’s main characters are usually female, with the men in subordinate roles. Three remarkable exceptions are the eponymous hero of Cheri (1920; English translation, 1929) and La Fin de Cheri (1926; The Last of Cheri, 1932), Phil in The Ripening Seed, and Alain in The Cat. Although these male characters have very different personalities, they are all pampered, highly sensitive, and emotionally immature young men, exemplifying Colette’s consistent rejection of gender stereotypes.

Colette’s personal experiences and preoccupations are readily traceable in The Cat: her devotion to animals, her yearning for the trees and flowers of her childhood, her experience with the destructive force of jealousy, and her two broken marriages.

The novel was given a mixed reception when it was first published. “A fine talent demeaned by a ludicrous theme,” wrote a reviewer in La Gazette de Paris. Even in 1953, a review in The Times Literary Supplement of a then-new translation called it “a brilliant piece of writing, but a vile story.” Edmond Jaloux, the distinguished Paris critic, however, recognized its qualities at once and called it “a masterpiece of art of classic perfection, told with the maximum of truth, of intelligence, and of poetry,” an evaluation which has since become widely accepted.

Bibliography

Cottrell, Robert D. Colette. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974. One of the best general works on Colette. Cottrell emphasizes the superiority of Colette’s women, but he argues that she is not a feminist in the contemporary meaning of the term.

Crosland, Margaret. Colette: The Difficulty of Loving. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973. A good introductory work because it emphasizes the connection between Colette’s writing and the events of her life. Although some of her arguments are dated, this book contains some excellent insights into Colette’s work.

Eisinger, Erica, and Mari McCarty, eds. Colette: The Woman, the Writer. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981. Most of this excellent collection of scholarly essays are feminist in orientation, but the work includes a number of approaches to a wide variety of topics concerning Colette. The book’s introductory article, written by the editors, argues that Colette’s primary importance for women’s literature is that she wrote from a woman’s point of view and created independent female characters.

Marks, Elaine. Colette. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960. Still an excellent introduction to Colette’s life and work, recognizing her achievements specifically as a woman writer. Marks emphasizes the difficulty of separating biography from fiction in her works. She is one of the first critics to understand that many of Colette’s female characters view men as sex objects in the same way that much traditional French literature views women.

Sarde, Michele. Colette: Free and Fettered. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: William Morrow, 1980. An interesting, though overly adulatory, biography written from a feminist point of view. Sarde presents her arguments in a thought-provoking manner despite her tendency to oversimplify.

Stewart, Joan Hinde. Colette. Boston: Twayne, 1983. One of the best books written about Colette, especially in its meticulous argumentation and well-written, scholarly discussion of her literary works. Stewart’s literary analysis is much stronger than her biographical discussion of Colette.

Ward Jouve, Nicole. Colette. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. This perceptive and interesting interpretation of Colette and her works is written less from a scholarly than from an intuitive point of view. It is dangerous to accept Ward Jouve’s conclusions without further documentation.