4 COCTEAU, JEAN

Hampshire Press, 1978; Arthur King second marriage in 1912, this time to Henry Peters, d,lean Cocteau iJnd the Prench de Jouvenel, the editor-in-chief of the Scene, New York: Abbeville, 1984; newspaper LeMatin, to which she contrib- Fmcis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A BjOgraPhyIBoston: Little, Brown, 1970. utedanarticle aweek~was no than peter G. Christensen the first. For a time she abandoned both the stage and her writing career and gave birth to a daughter. World War I revived COLETTE(1873-1954) her journalistic bent, and she was sent as a French novelist. Born Sidonie- reporter to the Italian front. She also Gabrielle Colette in a small Burgundian composed a work entitled La Paix chez les village, she was the daughter of an army bdtes (1916],whichdepicts her withdrawal captain who had fought in the Crimea and from theworld of human relations into the lost a leg in the Italian campaign. Her intimate sphere of household pets. In 1920 whole literary career was to be marked by Colette published her masterpiece Cheri, memories of herrural childhood, in which whose male hero confronts LCa, a woman "Claudine's household" was a disorderly of fiftywho has not "abandoned her search but sensual ambiance, with a somewhat for happiness." eccentric mother, an assortment of pets, a In 1923 she divorced her second large garden, and all the sensations of the husband, and also published Le B16 en provincial countryside. But the lost para- herbe, whose serialization by Le Matin dise of her early years caused regrets later was halted so as not to offend the readers. on, when she said: "A happy childhood is By now a successful writer, in possession a bad preparation for contact with human of a villa at Saint-Tropez, "la Treille beings." In 1893 she mamed Henry Gau- muscatel" she issued one novel after an- thier-Villars, who under the name of Willy other on the theme of the eternal combat was a celebrity of the Paris boulevards, but between the sexes. In 1935 Colette mar- the marriage was ill-fated, as Willy soon ried Maurice Goudeket, her faithful ad- reverted to theways of a free-rovingbache- mirer, and settled permanently at the lor. This failure in her first marriage im- Palais-Royal in Paris. In her last years she pressed upon the young woman the dis- composed a few more important works, tance between love and happiness. among them Gigi (1945),while basking in Some notebooks that Colette had her reminiscences and her literary fame. filled with her childhood memories at Colette's work was more auto- Willy's behest were the starting point for biographical than anyone could have her first novel, Claudine 6 l'dcole (19001, admitted when it first appeared. The followed by a whole series with the same Claudine series features a tomboyish girl heroine which found its way to the stage. who at fifteen develops an intense crush The sequelwas Colette's slow conquest of on apretty assistant mistress, AimCe, who her marital and literary independence. In tutors her in English at home, but the affair 1906 she obtained a divorce and began to isintenvptedwhen thedomineeringhead- live alone in a modest apartment in Paris, mistress herself turns fond of the assis- soon "protected" by a strange creature, tant. AirnCe abandons Claudine to become Missy, the youngest daughter of the Due the pampered favorite of her superior. de Morny, who possessed money and a Claudine even eavesdrops one day upon an passion for the theatre. The two women intimate moment enjoyed by the two appeared on the stage in daring panto- women in their dormitory quarters while mimes, a period of her life in which Co- theirclassesarerunningwildintheschool- lette struggled to earn her livelihood and rooms. Later, the headmistress implies to whichsherecordedin La Vagabonde(l911) Claudine that she might have replaced the and L'Envers du music-hall (1913). Her junior mistress as her favorite. The second COLOR SYMBOLISM + volume of the series finds Claudine in her that it would be almost impossible to seventeenth year in Paris, where a long eschew them all. illness causes her hair to be cropped and According the poet Martial, sev- her contacts limited to her father's older eral colors were associated with effemi- sister and the latter's grandson, Marcel, a nate homosexuality in imperial Rome. He pretty and effeminate youth who is ab- limns an exquisite "who thinks that men sorbedin his own affairwith amaleschool- in scarlet are not men at all, and styles mate, which has already made trouble for violet mantles the vesture of women; al- them at the lycCe and provoked the wrath- though he praises native colors and always fulcontempt of Marcel's father. The series affectssomberhues, grass-green(galbinus) continues in the same vein with ho- are his morals" (I, 96). While scarlet and moerotic as well as heterosexual interac- violet were the traditional colors of ef- tion among the characters. feminacy, an off-green seems to have been Stella Browne, in a psychological the new, "in" wlor of the day. Martial study of women authors with lesbian even uses the galbinus shade metaphori- tendencies, mentions Colette as having cally to represent the lifestyle as a whole. been involved with two women, the film In late Victorian England, Robert Hichens' star Marguerite MorCno and an unnamed novel The Green Carnation (1894)helped foreign noblewoman, of whom character to revive the association. In 1929 an sketches drawn with great discretion fig- American physician, John F. W. Meagher, ure in Ces Plaisirs (1932).The entire set- statedflatly,"Theirfavoritecolorisgeen.~l ting of Colette's life work is the amoral, Whether it was or not, this assertion took sensual world of a coterie of Parisian lite- hold in the popular mind, and in the 1950s rati and rentiers in the years before World American high school students avoided War I--an ambiance in which homosexu- green on Thursday, reputed to be "Na- ality was a subdued, but certainly not a tional Fairy Day." Another color associ- major element. Colette herself enjoyed ated with the "decadent" 1890s was yel- the company of male homosexuals, espe- low, because of the London periodical that cially Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais, in her was almost synonymous with the aes- literary set during the years of her renown thetic sophistication of that era, The Yel- as one of the great living French authors. low Book. A current Russian term for agay man is golubchik, from goluboy, "blue," BIBL1OGRAPHY. Jeannette Foster, Sex evidently through association with the Variant Women in Literature, Balti- more: Diana Press, 1975j Sarde, "blue blood" of the aristocracy of the Old Colette, libre et entmvh, Paris: Stock, Regime. 1978. Probably the most enduringly Evelyn Gettone significant sector of the color wheel is, however, the red to purple range (as Mar- tial duly noted two thousand years ago). According to Havelock Ellis, one could not COLORSYMBOLISM safely walk down the streets of late-nine- In addition their aesthetic teenth-century New York wearing a red aspect/ acquire tie without being accosted, since this gar- which are culturally variable. In Western ment was then the universal mark of civilization blackis the color of mourning, male In gay slang this fashion while in some Asian societies white is. was referred to as Itwearing badge." Many men avoidwearinglaven- Because of the uscarlet woman," the great der or pink because of their "fruity" asso- Whore of Babylon of the Book of ciations. Yet Over the centuries so tion, that color has acquired a strong asso- hues have been linked '0 homosexual it^ ciation with prostitution and adultery (cf.