Still, a reverence for glory and a love of art are certainly enough to get a literary career started. Colet was also a sharp exploiter of opportunity. When she approached Chateaubriand for a puff for her first collection of poetry (which just happened to include two poems in praise of the “Homer of Melancholy” himself), he replied rather cannily that his endorsement would not count for much, since “only poets can announce a poet.” Undeterred, she simply reprinted his letter as a preface (Chateaubriand, to his credit, does not seem to have taken offence). Sainte-Beuve largely resisted her literary charm, though applauding her novel Lui (in which he is given a cameo role as the wise “Sainte-Rive”). A more conspicuous failure was with George Sand, who always kept the younger writer at a distance; if we are to believe an anecdote in Lui, Sand once heard Colet recite her work at a salon and afterwards offered the following literary compliment—“Madame, you have the arms and shoulders of a Greek statue.” Still, Louise certainly had supporters enough at the start of her career, and knew how to play the Paris game. Victor Cousin, lover, protector, and high government official, used his influence to have Louise's pension tripled and Hippolyte 's salary doubled.
Louise was bold and melodramatic, impulsive and self-advertising, admirable yet faintly ridiculous. All these characteristics emerged in her celebrated attack on the satirical journalist Alphonse Karr. In 1840, when Louise was almost nine months pregnant, Karr wrote an article clearly insinuating that Cousin—a regular target of his—had used his official position to get Colet's pension raised (true), and was also the father of her child (which, if not necessarily true, certainly seems to have been believed by both parties at the time). The piece was indubitably caddish, and Louise straightforwardly decided that the journalist must die for it. What's more, it seemed to her self-evident that Hippolyte Colet should be charged with rectifying this insult to her honour.
Hippolyte was a slight and prematurely stooped professor of composition at the Conservatoire; Karr a bulky expert swordsman and one of the best shots in Paris. When Hippolyte “backed off,” as Gray puts it (and who can blame him?), Louise went round to Karr's lodgings with a kitchen knife: “To arm myself with a more elegant weapon,” she later wrote, “would have been theatrical. I only wished to act with simplicity, as is suitable to any great sorrow.” Heavily pregnant as she was, she stabbed Karr in the back, drawing a little blood. The journalist turned round, disarmed her, and (in his version) offered her his arm before calling her a cab.
Through the intervention of Sainte-Beuve, Karr promised not to sue Louise, and in the next issue of his magazine even applauded her “energy” and “courage bordering on nobility.” But the occasion was too lushly tempting for any journalist to resist. “I certainly would have been gravely harmed,” Karr went on, “if my attacker had struck me with a direct horizontal blow instead of lifting her arm high over her head in a tragedienne's gesture, surely in anticipation of some forthcoming lithograph of the incident.” Both come out of the drama well and badly; though Louise probably had more to lose, and did so. Karr kept the knife, and exhibited it in a glass case with the label: “Given to me by Mme Colet … in the back.”*
Louise Colet was a prolific writer: of fiction, poetry, biography, history, and travel. What still has life? Francine du Plessix Gray recounts a visit to the Provençal house—now a golf hotel—in which Colet was brought up. The estate's present owner, Paul Révoil, Louise's great-great-grand-nephew, sounds grumpily baffled at being badgered about his scandalous forebear: “You're the third person who's come around this year. Never read a word of hers—was she that good?” To which Gray revealingly replies that she is “awfully interesting.” Though her biography is heartfelt and impassioned about the woman, Gray makes no extravagant claims for the work. She seems keener to establish Colet as a pioneer feminist, a “nineteenth-century Erica Jong who splashed her life and loves across her poetry and prose,” than as a writer tout court; and when it comes to literary assessment, is inclined to quantify the percentage of feminism present and leave it at that.
Colet's novel Lui is probably her most enduring work (as well as her only one currently available in English). It was part of that small library of kiss-and-tell fiction set off by Musset's death in 1857. The poet had started it himself with Confession d'un enfant du siècle (1836), in which he described his Italian affair with George Sand. Two decades later she replied with Elle et Lui, Musset's brother Paul retaliated with Lui et Elle, the waggish Gaston Laval-ley joined in with Eux, and Colet completed the job with Lui. This transparent roman à clef stars Louise as the glamorous Stéphanie de Rostan, romantically beset by a pair of unsatisfactory suitors: Léonce, the obscure, cold-hearted novelist toiling away at his supposed masterpiece in Normandy; and Albert, the passionate, impulsive, tippling poet-aristocrat whose heart has been crushed by a painful affair with the famous writer Antonia, and who now seeks consolation and amatory rebirth with Stéphanie.
Most of the book consists of Albert/Musset recalling in great detail his affair with Antonia/Sand. This made commercial sense—few, in 1859, would have been interested in a roman à clef about Flaubert—but it was also strategically risky. Here was Colet, a former mistress of Musset, giving the dead poet a voice to lament his earlier maltreatment by George Sand (who was, of course, still alive). Despite professions of admiration for Sand's work-rate and reputed kindness, the portrait is not just unsisterly, but disobliging and envious. In her own voice Stéphanie/Louise pulls sartorial rank (“I think wearing men's clothing had hurt her shape”); while through Albert we discover a woman who is bossy and domineering, insincere in bed, and heartless in dismissing lovers, who tainted the purity of her children by behaving licentiously in front of them, and who betrayed Musset with the very Italian doctor brought in to save him from his deathbed. Not surprisingly, Sand told Flaubert that she thought the novel a “chamberpot of a book into which she [Colet] excreted her causeless fury.”
Lui still entertains, though largely for non-artistic reasons. It is talky, lush, and hot-breathed, with both the allure and the weaknesses of the roman à clef. On the one hand, the thrill of being given the inside dope; on the other, a sense of aesthetic concerns being placed in neutral gear. In a roman à clef the reason something happens is generally that it actually did happen, or happened a little bit differently, or might have happened had the author's wishes been grantable by life as opposed to literature. Early on, for example, Albert takes Stéphanie to the zoo. Why the zoo, we might naïvely wonder, and why are we spending so many pages there? Is some parallel being set up with caged passions, with wild nature restrained behind bars? But no: sometimes a zoo is only a zoo. It features because that's where Musset used to take Louise; besides, he once wrote a poem to her about the zoo, and she wants to quote it later on in the novel.
And are we getting the inside dope in Lui? Musset is ardent yet essentially ridiculous;* Sand a worthy bluestocking; Flaubert a glacial manipulator. But Stéphanie? What still rings out from the book like a hunting horn is the vanity of Colet's self-depiction. She ups herself socially to a marquise temporarily fallen on hard times; she prefaces the novel with a chapter whose main function is to give a (swiftly vanishing) narrator the chance to praise Stéphanie's serene wisdom and ravishing beauty. With Léonce the marquise suffers nobly; with Albert, she tries to rekindle his genius while politely but firmly fighting off his attentions and staying true in her heart to Léonce. This is a distinctly glamorized version of events. Musset was clearly unsafe in a cab at any speed, and as Flaubert sardonically reminded Louise, “Convention has it that one doesn't go for a moonlight drive with a man for the purpose of admiring the moon.” But Louise went for many moonlight drives with the poet. Musset would turn up drunk and imploring on her doorstep, and—such being her reverence for glory—he eventually got into her bed. Lui shows us the relationship ending in the heroic mutual renunciation of two cauterized hearts: “We'll see each other again, but as friends, never again as lovers in waiting.” However, Colet
's private Mementoes dish the real dope on Musset, the clef to the clef. “His one sensation,” she recorded (an entry apparently indicating erection but no orgasm). Other comments include: “Impotent!”; “Oh Gustave, Gustave, what a contrast!”; and “Certain that he is nearly impotent or that he has only very transient painful erections.”
Colet's chief mode was of romanticizing confessionalism; and she wrote with celebrated haste. In their different ways Béranger, Hugo, and Flaubert all gave her sensible advice: to slow down, to be more realistic, to be less vindictive. But sensible advice, whether personal or literary, was something of which Louise was always splendidly heedless: she had the turning circle of a supertanker. In Flaubert's case there is something almost comic about the ultimate hopelessness of his counsel: here was the young devotee of form and priest of the impersonal seeking to redirect a poet who was his polar opposite. In a way, they both knew best: he knew she was working in a sluggish, moribund tradition; she knew that you must write as you can and will, not as anyone else thinks you should.
In the mid-1850s Colet planned an ambitious six-poem cycle on the subject of Woman, only half of which she completed. The first, “La Paysanne,” is one of her more surprising works: a touching yet brutal tale of parted lovers, emotional impoverishment, and rural destitution. Flaubert praised it wholeheartedly and spent a good twenty pages of the Pléiade Correspondance close-correcting the poem.
Even though Colet resisted his characteristic urging to be “Shakespearean, hideously truthful and cold,” the poem has a modern toughness to it: the peasant girl Jeanneton shares a distant kinship with Félicité in Flaubert's much later Un Coeur simple. The second poem in the cycle, “La Servante,” sees Colet self-indulgently regressing (or wisely returning) to her natural mode. If Flaubert, as self-appointed adviser on “La Paysanne,” was like a driving instructor trying to grab the handbrake while his pupil insists on pointing at the view, with “La Servante” Colet threw away the highway code he was pressing on her. He told her to recast the poem, and in particular urged her not to include a transparent attack on Musset; then expanded his objections into forty pages of notes. Rarely among the writings of Flaubert sent to Louise Colet, this last document has completely vanished (and there are not many suspects in this particular case).
“La Servante” is the intertwined story of two peasant girls who come to Paris: Mariette, virtuous, lectorally aspirant, inflamed by the notion of love, and Théréson, pragmatic and corruptible about the ways of the world. Both tangle with the debauched Lionel, a poet-aristocrat based on Musset: but while Théréson handles him professionally and survives, Mariette lavishes on him the full dose of doomed Romantic love. After Lionel's death, Mariette goes mad, and is incarcerated in the Salpêtrière. The poem is a mixture—rather like Louise herself—of the charming, the irritating, the dogmatic, the instinctual, the observant, the egocentric, the heartfelt; it has both banality and élan. Calling it “vehemently feminist” as Gray does and passing on is like matronizingly awarding it stars for good conduct: the twentieth century applauding the past for being on the right side. In fact, for much of its length “La Servante” seems to look a century back rather than forward: it is moralizing, pictorial, and instructive, more Greuze than Greer. Thus the wicked aristo Lionel is ethically counterbalanced by the good miller Julien, who asks Mariette to marry him early on, and later turns up (in one of the poem's several extravagant coincidences) to save her from drowning. Mariette, in rejecting Julien's dusty hand and following her awakened heart, is seeking her Gothic-Romantic fate. She is destroyed not by any particular action of the cold-hearted and largely indifferent Lionel (we are not in the Marquis de Sade's territory) as by the exigencies and false expectations of her own heart.
The closing scene, in which Mariette stands, mute, loose-haired, and strait-jacketed among the mad and abandoned inmates of the Salpêtrière, certainly gives us a stern and rebuking image of woman destroyed. But does it make sense to call “La Servante” “vehemently feminist”? It is in places denunciatory, the literary equivalent to Colet's own cry in her later years of “How base men are.” But one of the poem's complications is that the women in it who, unlike Mariette, have some control of their lives, some access to money and power, are the women of pleasure, the “actresses” who consort with corrupting figures like Lionel rather than oppose them. And while on the one hand it is Théréson and her kind who most openly denounce men, they are in turn denounced by Colet. She presents them as irredeemably vile and vulgar. Modern debauchery has lost its former voluptuous glory, and become something cold, neurotic, and drab.
Is this a rich ambiguity, or an authorial confusion? The palm prints of Louise's own life are all over “La Servante,” and it seems likely that behind such frosty distaste there lies a personal agenda: a response and a specific rebuke to Flaubert. She was working on her poem in the second half of 1854; in June of that year she had finally persuaded the extremely reluctant Flaubert to show her his travel notebooks from the Orient. It is, of course, always a mistake for any writer to let his or her lover see their diary; and one of their more lurid quarrels duly ensued. For a start, Louise didn't find sufficient entries devoted to herself. “I was thinking about you often,” Flaubert plaintively responds, “often, very often.” Worse, she discovered rhapsodic descriptions of his encounters with women of pleasure. (And here Flaubert's defence was pretty jesuitical: since the women with whom he dealt had all suffered clitoridectomy, they couldn't feel anything sexually and therefore, he argued, Louise had no grounds for anxiety.) Beyond jealousy, however, there was a fundamental divide of taste, of aesthetic. What Louise found most disgusting—for instance, the bedbugs Flaubert recorded during his famous night with the dancer Kuchuk Hanem—Flaubert found most enchanting. He had been fascinated by prostitution from an early age: he loved it as a complex, bitter, and luxurious point of human intersection; he loved the lack of emotional contact, the muscular frenzy, and the clink of gold. “And it makes you so sad!” he enthused to Louise in a letter of June 1853. “And you dream of love so beautifully!”
This last paradox was no doubt especially provoking to Colet. Simon Leys has deftly summarized Flaubert's erotic bifurcation thus: “While the beloved incarnates the reality of love, and is thus fatally destined to disappoint, the prostitute for her part offers a representation of love, that's to say an aid to reverie.” During her time with Flaubert, Louise Colet suffered a rare and unenviable pincer movement of jealousy: threatened by both the deeply imagined, in Emma Bovary, and the deeply carnal, in Kuchuk Hanem. In 1869, fifteen years after the lovers broke up, Colet was commissioned by Le Siècle to cover the inauguration of the Suez canal; on her journey up the Nile she tried to seek out Kuchuk Hanem in Esna. How should we read this: simple curiosity, masochism, an attempted purging, a heroic if belated attempt to confront a rival? Their encounter would have made a fine—indeed, Flaubertian— moment in a novel. But the courtesan's name meant nothing any more to the locals, and with the lapse of two decades Louise could find no house to match Flaubert's description.
As she grew older, Louise Colet eschewed mellowness. “Poor Maman,” her daughter, Mme Bissieu, would later recall, “had a character which made everyone suffer.” She became more difficult, more irascible, expert at squandering old friendships. Infuriating, but often admirable: when Victor Cousin died, she renounced a legacy rather than bargain away the philosopher's letters. What can seem, in a literary celebrity and salon beauty, mere gilded egotism, grew into a rather splendid doughtiness. She worked, she travelled, she kept her political principles; and she refused to go quietly. As Gray shows, she championed the cause of Italy, helping Mazzini, hymning Garibaldi, covering the independence celebrations. She remained fiercely anti-clerical, and got one interview away from giving the Pope a good dressing-down. During the Franco-Prussian war she took to public speaking with sudden success. She unequivocally supported the Commune (odd that famous painters tended to back it much more than famous writers), and remained
true to her liberalism in almost all areas except that of sex, where she became increasingly puritanical and moralistic, denouncing Queen Christina of Sweden as a “debauched strumpet.” She judged harshly, and was harshly judged herself: George Sand, who after Lui had no reason to love her, compared Louise's old age to that of Mme Flaubert, and found it “even worse, because it has degenerated into malice … She's mad.”
She was certainly incapable of matching the stoicism of her glamorized alter ego, the Marquise Stéphanie de Rostan. In Lui the marquise reflects sagely from a plateau of emotional wisdom upon her “finest hours,” with all their tears and torments, and finds the following exotic comparison: “Doesn't the navigator propelled by fate into the glaciers of Greenland remember fondly some balmy, blooming beach in Cuba or the Antilles?” Colet herself found little consolation in beach memories, and was always particularly unforgiving towards Flaubert. In 1859 she denounced Madame Bovary in a poem as “a travelling-salesman's novel whose foul stench makes the heart retch.” Though she praised Salammbô to Mme Edma Roger des Genettes in 1862, she couldn't help adding her opinion that its author was “ugly, common and as far as I am concerned profoundly evil.” Mme Roger des Genettes did not convey all of this to Flaubert, and was rebuked by Louise for her tact: “If you passed on my praise to the author, in all truthfulness you should also let him know the absolute disdain I have for his character and the incredible repulsion I feel for his premature decrepitude.” In 1872, eighteen years after their liaison had ended, Flaubert brought out a posthumous collection of verse by Bouilhet (with whom Louise had also had an affair); she sent him an anonymous verse letter calling him a “charlatan thumping the big drum over the grave of his flat-footed friend.” Flaubert, by contrast, showed “no bitterness, no resentment” towards Colet (according to the Goncourts in 1862); and when she died he displayed a melancholy, regretful spirit to Mme Roger des Genettes—“I have trampled on so many things, in order to stay alive!”