Colette's CHÉRI & THE END OF CHÉRI (Tr Rachel Careau, Narr Gabrielle de Cuir)

A sort of anti-love love story in two phases, Colette's Chéri and the End of Chéri takes very seriously an affair of the heart that was never allowed actually to reach those hearts involved. 

It would be easy to dislike young Fred "Chéri" Peloux, a "beauty who has everything and is only the more wretched for it, " raised in cold opulence by the servants of his courtesan mother, spoiled, impatient and demanding -- but Colette is too incisive a dissector of character to let us off that easily. As his lover, the much older "ghoul who only wants fresh flesh" (as she'll rather exultantly describe herself later in the book), Lea, falls in love with him despite herself but would never admit it, we wind up kind of admiring his monstrous qualities, or at least forgiving them; Lea is herself a courtesan, a life-long colleague and frenemy of Chéri's mother, and watched him grow up and never took him seriously as a possible love interest until she found herself kissing him. She has known all his flaws from the start, may be a little bit at fault for some of them, and so intimately understands why he is the way he is, and shares that understanding with us. 

We first encounter this pair five or six years into their relationship, with Chéri all but demanding a long pearl necklace that is something of a trademark of hers. He argues somewhat successfully that it looks better on him but grudgingly leaves it with her when she finally chases him out to go see his mother, Madame Peloux, whom they call the Harpy. Lea, left in peace, models the necklace for herself in a mirror and sees all the ravages time is taking on her beauty and finds that the necklace that used to set off her best features now makes them look shabby. Much later her now-married-but-not-to-her lover will encounter a woman his own age wearing a similar necklace of imitation pearls and finally realize that Lea has meant more to him than an Oedipal-ish crush but it's already far too late. 

But now that he's worn the real thing, fake pearls will never do. 

Lea is highly marginalized for all that she's had a celebrated career, because unlike her rival/friends, Madame Peloux and Marie Laure, she never had children. While she enjoyed wealth and comfort in relative solitude, her the other two made plans to marry their children to one another and settle them with a considerable fortune. Thus Chéri has always been destined to marry Marie Laure's lovely daughter, Edmée, only 19 to his 25 (and Lea's 49). It is thus implied, but never explicitly stated, that Madame Peloux drafted Lea simply to break the boy in and teach him how to be a decent lover for Edmée. Very much a frenemy move, if I've ever seen one.

At any rate, for all that both Chéri and Edmée are born out of wedlock children of courtesans, they and their futures count in a way that Lea does not; they are above her in the estimation of their little wannabe-bourgeois society's values. At least as expressed and embodied by her erstwhile colleagues in a community that is exceptionally interdependent because envied and despised by the greater world; if you have no solidarity, you have neither security nor hope. And the years when Lea wielded enough personal power (via her lovers) to provide her own security and hope are fast leaving her behind; Lea has to go along with her colleagues' treatment of her, whether she even realizes it or not.

But meanwhile, oops, no one ever bothered to let the kids get to know each other or in any way facilitate a relationship between them once their mothers have decided. And like I said, no one ever spelled out what Lea's expected role was supposed to be, to her or to Chéri. 

So anyway, before long Lea, six months or so later, receives belated gossip that Chéri left his wife and is living in a Paris hotel, prompting Lea's maid Rose to observe that "the divorce will be happier than the marriage" and that everyone was "so gloomy" at the wedding. Before Lea can even agree, Chéri is, in fact, at her door once again and it looks like they might resume their prior idyll. But will they?

I mean, would a story like this be famous if it had a happy ending?

All of this takes place in the first novel, Chéri, set in France's Belle Epoque right before World War I. Six years after its publication, Colette took up these characters again for The End of Chéri and allowed an identical span of time to elapse. When we meet Chéri again, he is a war veteran, now returned to civilian life and, while unscathed compared to most Great War veterans of literature, still very much at odds with that life. He is still well off thanks to his mother's machinations but that just frees him of the need to earn a living; it doesn't tell him what to do with his life.

Meanwhile his wife and his mother have discovered charity work and between them seem to be running every aspect of a hospital from Chéri's well-appointed home; Edmée is even under consideration for high civic honors for her work. She and Madame Peloux are sure Chéri will eventually come around and start playing the role they've cast him in as the gracious host at their events and the masculine figurehead for their efforts, but he'd rather hide out in his bedroom when Edmée has committee members over for a working luncheon.

What's a still-beautiful boy to do but go look up old girlfriends, since his marriage, which Colette encapsulates in an early scene with him strutting around in front of his wife in just his underwear "more as a rival than as a lover" because he considers himself the more beautiful of the pair,  is still a wreck?

Ah, but six years has merely taken him deeper into his prime at age 31; Lea is now in her mid-50s in 1926 Paris, when Bright Young Things are running amuck and beauty is more important than ever. Those pearls become her even less well than they did in the first book. She has not only committed the sin of aging, but she has also gained weight -- and won't let him deny, in front of one of her friends when he shows up again uninvited at her home, that they were lovers once. She forces him to look at her as she is now, dumpy and grey haired in her "sexless dignity" and think "I used to hit that."

And worse, Lea finds this funny. And calls him out over the vanity and self-centeredness this exposes even as he still, in his head, is making it all about him; she must have come to this from grief over losing him. When she reveals that she's all but reading these thoughts and laughs aloud, it is, as they say, *chef's kiss.* Oh no, she's had a life of her own all along! It is here and now that he decides how the novel will end, if not on the details.

Was anything in his life real? Bitterly he wanders Paris, watches his wife and mother succeed, passes time with old friends whom he still considers beneath him; at novel's end we discover we were right to dislike him, but he has one last claim on our compassion because Colette was a damned genius. Ah, me.

Now I guess I'm going to have to take a look at the 2009 Stephen Frears film with Michelle Pfeiffer as Lea and Kathy Bates as Madame Peloux. I mean, the casting alone...!