La Vagabonde is, by far, the only book I’ve read from the
French writer Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette. Although I have come across several of her literary outputs I never got the ‘temptation’ to sit and read them just as I think I should considering this book has caught my interest and instantaneous mania for her. It’s short and uncomplicated, verbose yet not to the extent of enervating and intimidating plain readers like myself. It’s intimate and devoid of prolix complications and it does not require a profound philosophical understanding. La Vagabonde, as novelist and critic Remy de Gourmont says, “ is not a work of art, it is a treatise of feminine psychology”. It reveals a conflict between heart and head, domesticity and career, between shared existence and the guarantee of freedom. I have extracted lines that I think have lyrical energy as only Colette might have directed them:
“ "She is dying of grief; she has died of grief,” they say. Do not believe it. A woman does not die of grief. She is too strong, too tough a beast to kill in such a way. Do you believe affliction preys upon her? Not in the least. Delicate and sickly she may be in nature, but grief will ripen her, will give her nerves of cast-iron, pride that is inflexible, the faculty of patient waiting and dissimulation, though it will earn for her also the contempt of the happy.
“" She is made of steel,” they cry; but be sure that grief; jealousy hidden, patiently borne, has matured and sharpened and hardened her. She is a woman—and that is enough.
“I think it is far more likely that I attract and hold the sad, the lonely, all those vowed to seclusion or a roving life—like myself.”
“A vagrant I am, so be it, but resigned like my colleagues and brethren to touring in a circle, to revolving on a pivot. True it is departures that sadden yet elate me. Something of my personality clings passionately to all I pass through – new lands, clear or cloudy skies, rain-clouds of pearly grey falling on the sea! Behind me, I leave thousands upon thousands of tiny ghosts of myself; they are tossed on the waves, cradled on the leaves, scattered in the clouds. But the last small phantom, the one most like me, sits dreamy and wise beside my hearth, and bends over the book it forgets to read”.
