Colette, an artist who scandalized her time and who ended up as an “apotheosis of respectability”

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One breast. Sometimes two. On the stage of the Apollo Theatre, Colette Willy warms up the atmosphere of this November 1907, performing half-naked in "La Chair", a pantomime. With a helmet of brown curls and fresh blackberry eyes, the artist exhibits herself, seduces and scandalizes. She is used to it. This success with its sulphurous scent, she has known it since her beginnings, since the publication of her first book, "Claudine at School", seven years earlier. A rewriting of her childhood memories in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, in Burgundy (Montigny in the novel), to which, on the advice of her husband, Willy, a shrewd literary entrepreneur, the debutante has infused a touch of "childishness" , a hint of "ingenuous perversity" , imagining a sapphic affair between the school principal and her assistant, and some cajoling between young girls. What is less common is to applaud a writer who performs in the nude. As Emmanuelle Lambert playfully notes in "Sidonie Gabrielle Colette" (Gallimard, 2022), a wonderful biography in images of the author of "Chéri" (1920), Colette is "without doubt the only author published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade to have performed partially naked on stage."

Because yes, the little country girl without a diploma, the music hall actress, the lover of men and women, the genius stylist who spent part of her life claiming she was not a writer, ended up written down on bible paper, admired, celebrated, honored. It was her great friend Cocteau who, in his "Journal," probably best summed up the about-face trajectory of this "modern classic" of the early ^20th century: "She completes her existence…

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