"Colette yearned to love and to believe in love, but always had the greatest trouble doing so. She was dominated too early and for too long by exploitative masters - first her mother, then her husband - both of whom lend certain features to Mama. She had split her own mother into two mythical figures, a beautiful, seductive princess whom she loves romantically, and a powerful, phallic, virago whom she feared. She believed this sorceress could read her thoughts, and so she armed herself - and much of her writing - with an inscrutable exterior.
The rivalry of her primitive anxieties - her father's indifference, her mother's romance with Achille, her feelings of exclusion - was one of Colette's strongest passions, if not her predominant one; and she couldn't avoid, indeed actively, perversely sought to reconstitute, the original love triangles of her childhood in most of her adult relationships and everywhere in her fiction. (343)."
"Content yourself, I urge you, with a passing temptation, and satisfy it. What more can one be sure of than that which one holds in one's arms, at the moment one holds it in one's arms? We have so few chances to be proprietary. (305).
"Colette's style is never purer than at the end of her career in fiction, and her artistic feat inspires the same hushed admiration that Gigi feels for the large square cut emerald her aunt got from a king, and which she slips onto Gigi's finger with the observation that "only the most beautiful emeralds contain that miracle elusive blue. (459)"
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