Chéri and The Last of Chéri by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

First published:Chéri, 1920 (English translation, 1929); La Fin de Chéri, 1926 (English translation, 1932)

Type of work: Psychological romance

Time of work: From 1913 to 1919

Locale: Paris and the French countryside

Principal Characters:

• Cheri (Frederic Peloux), an immature but beautiful young man
• Lea de Lonval, who has been Cheri’s mistress for six years
• Charlotte Peloux, Cheri’s mother and, like Lea, a former courtesan
• Edmee, the lovely daughter of another courtesan, who becomes Cheri’s wife at the age of eighteen
• Desmond, Cheri’s friend, a nightclub proprietor
• The Pal, a friend of Charlotte Peloux in whom Cheri confides

The Novels

Even though Cheri and The Last of Cheri were published six years apart, they form one continuous love story. The two books relate the love affair between Lea, an aging courtesan, and extremely handsome but also extremely dependent Cheri; the two lovers’ ages differ by twenty-four years. Together, the novels form a structurally perfect duet.

The liaison began in 1906, as Colette recounts in a flashback: Lea was forty-three to Cheri’s nineteen when they found themselves alone, exchanged kisses out of boredom and curiosity, found their desires aroused, and became lovers. In the first novel’s opening scene, set six years later, Lea is the gracefully protective mistress, Cheri the moody, petulant, narcissistic taker of her tenderness. Cheri will soon be married to Edmee, a beautiful, wealthy young woman; the young couple will then leave Paris for a six-month honeymoon journey.

Paying a social call on Madame Peloux during Cheri’s absence, Lea is repulsed by the presence of an overdressed, wrinkled, ridiculous seventy-year-old woman with her seventeen-year-old Italian lover—a startling omen of what she and Cheri might become. Lea determines to heed the cautionary experience and to exit with dignity from Cheri’s life before her beauty vanishes entirely. She leaves Paris for the winter.

Cheri returns from his honeymoon, tense and irritable; the marriage is going poorly. Lea is not yet back in Paris. He leaves Edmee, moves into a hotel with his friend Desmond, frequents an opium den, and awaits Lea’s reappearance. When she comes back in late spring, he bursts into her bedroom and admits his love for her. Against her reasoned judgment, Lea yields to his beauty and need on that first evening.

With morning, however, the Dionysian ecstasy is replaced by Apollonian clarity. Cheri, pretending to sleep, stares at his middle-aged mother-mistress: “Not yet powdered, a meagre twist of hair at the back of her head, double chin, and raddled neck, she was exposing herself rashly to the unseen observer.” Heroically, Lea takes the initiative in ending the relationship. She renounces her claim on Cheri, aware that he has discovered her to be an old, no-longer-desirable woman. She sends him back to his wife: “Quick, quick, child, run off after your youth!” She then sees him walking away from her apartment “like a man escaping from prison.”

So ends the first novel. The Last of Cheri continues the action, in the summer and fall of 1919, against the background of a changing postwar Paris, where young people frantically dance, drink, fornicate, and speculate. Cheri, now thirty-two years old, is unable to cope with what he regards as the artificial, frenetic busyness of his wife and mother as administrators in a military hospital. He has survived a battle explosion in which a comrade’s dead body saved him, but he was left “indignant and resentful,” unable to take hold of life, apathetic, empty, idle. During a bitter talk with his mother, he tells her that people are “rotten” and that he is “nearly at the end of [his] tether.” Madame Peloux thereupon phones Lea in Cheri’s presence, clearly inviting her son to resume his former relationship.

Cheri returns to Lea, in the book’s most significant scene. She is now fifty-six, and he finds her a corpulent, sexless, grey-haired woman, her mouth gold-filled, “with sagging cheeks and a double chin.” Lea has put eroticism behind her, no longer bothers even to make up her face, and is enjoying a healthy, carefree late middle age, “jovial as an old gentleman.” Desperately, Cheri seeks to rediscover the romance of her rose-colored bedroom, but Lea instead advises him to take better care of his kidneys and get his urine tested. She is impatient with his melancholy: “A certain kind of sickness of the soul, my child, of disillusion, is just a question of stomach.” Cheri clings to his memory of Lea as his mother-mistress, refusing to accept the inevitability of natural changes. “This old woman is hiding her from me,” he laments to himself.

The listless, disgusted Cheri now enters the antechamber of his disintegration and death, moving closer and closer to suicide. He runs into “the Pal,” an old, opium-smoking friend of both Lea and his mother, with whom he can reminisce about the glorious years of his romance with Lea. Through her numerous anecdotes, the Pal feeds Cheri’s hunger for his less demanding past. He gazes at the photos of Lea in her younger years that line the Pal’s apartment walls. He suggests to Edmee that they have a child; she scornfully rejects Cheri’s offer—having one child (her immature husband) is more than enough for her. Cheri thereupon spends most of his evenings in the Pal’s apartment, cultivating his nostalgia for Lea. One day he picks up the Pal’s revolver and fatally shoots himself in the temple.

The Characters

Cheri begins and remains a pampered, inarticulate, spoiled, childish young man, self-absorbed, unstable, beautiful, wealthy, indolent, and lacking both intellectual depth and moral purpose. Lea is at once a degraded and exalted mother for him, a full-blooded woman with whom he can fuse the tender and sensual drives of his sexuality. Colette portrays Cheri as unloved and neglected by Madame Peloux, who has had him reared by indifferent servants and grim boarding schools. It is no wonder that he insults her, demands substantial amounts of money from his estate, and refuses to work.

Cheri never makes an adult, masculine adjustment to life, never finds a satisfactory career or other outlet for his energies. His tie to Lea is essentially incestuous: She loves him and is more charming, perceptive, stylish, attractive, and stable than is his true mother. Lea weaves around him a magic world of matriarchal understanding and indulgence, in the process encouraging him to remain the selfish, impatient Narcissus to her motherly, patient Demeter. He is her unruly, willful infant; she is his nurturing guide and unconditionally accepting lover. Their affair, while sexually grounded, primarily addresses complementary psychological needs.

Lea is one of Colette’s strongest, most memorable female characters in a fictive world in which strong women invariably dominate weak men. She is ultrafeminine, yet sensible; worldly, yet vulnerable to sexual magnetism; humorous; solid; sadly renunciatory, yet ultimately adaptable to inevitable losses. She knows that Cheri’s departure also means the departure of her alluring eroticism, but she accepts that fate with stoic wisdom, efficiency, and honorable grandeur. Colette invites the reader to consider Lea as archetypal Woman.

Critical Context

The most important influence on both Colette’s life and her writing was her mother, Sidonie, known as Sido. Sido had enormous energy, dignity, warmth, instinctual wisdom, and charm. What most fascinated her daughter was Sido’s serene, pagan sensibility: She accepted whatever came her and her family’s way of joy and sorrow as natural rather than supernatural, inevitable rather than miraculous. For her, as it later was for Colette, nothing in nature was evil, and all experiences merited attention, curiosity, and, if possible, love. Sido’s sensitivity to the world’s colors, odors, sights, sounds, and touches was passed on to her daughter. Both Lea’s character and Cheri’s urgent devotion to an ideal mother constitute tributes to Sido.

Unlike most French writers, Colette had few literary connections orphilosophic-aesthetic interests. She did admire Marcel Proust’s work and like him remained devoted to memories of childhood and youth. Nevertheless, she differed from Andre Gide and Andre Malraux, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, in feeling no estrangement from the universe, no sense of anxiety or dread, forlornness or despair. Like these men, she accepted the world as godless but did not thereby feel forsaken or discarded. Rather, she delighted in natural objects and regarded life as the opportunity to explore and enjoy, endure and survive. Metaphysical angst was foreign to Colette’s vocabulary.

Cheri and The Last of Cheri have evident flaws: Cheri’s marriage is given scant attention, and Edmee is a cardboard figure. Cheri’s shallow mother and her friends are grotesquely out of scale with Lea’s sophisticated tastes, and Lea ages all too rapidly, with her looks in the second novel more appropriate to a dowager in her seventies than to a beautiful woman in her late fifties. Such weaknesses pale, however, beside Colette’s achievement: These two novels constitute a diptych dramatizing unforgettably both the paradisiacal and infernal regions of love.

Bibliography

Cottrell, Robert D. Colette. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974. This general work is particularly useful because it treats each of Colette’s major works separately. Argues that Colette is not a feminist in the contemporary meaning of the term.

Dormann, Genevieve. Colette: A Passion for Life. Translated by David Macey and Jane Brenton. New York: Abbeville Press, 1985. A chronological discussion of Colette’s work designed for general readers. Focuses on the relationship of her biography to her fiction.

Eisinger, Erica, and Mari McCarty, eds. Colette: The Woman, the Writer. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981. This thoughtful collection of scholarly essays is primarily feminist in orientation. Of particular interest is McCarty’s article “The Theater as Literary Model: Role Playing in Chéri and The Last of Chéri,” which argues that the theater dominates all Colette’s novels and analyzes the Chéri novels in this light.

Marks, Elaine. Colette. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960. An excellent introduction to Colette’s life and work. Marks emphasizes the difficulty of separating Colette’s personal biography from her fiction. She believes there are humorous aspects to Chéri, but few critics agree with her on the point.

Massie, Allan. Colette. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1986. A popular biography, rather than a scholarly work. Its strength is the sociopolitical context, particularly that of the Third Republic, in which Colette and her writing are analyzed.

Sarde, Michele. Colette: Free and Fettered. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: William Morrow, 1980. An almost adulatory biography written from a feminist viewpoint. Despite the book’s poor documentation and sweeping generalizations, it is worth reading for Sarde’s enthusiasm for her topic and her intellectually challenging method of presenting some rather unorthodox ideas.

Stewart, Joan Hinde. Colette. Boston: Twayne, 1983. One of the best books written about Colette, especially in its argumentation and its scholarly discussion of her literary works. The book’s only serious weakness is its failure to include a substantive discussion which views Colette’s work in its sociohistorical context.