Chapter One COLETTE'S FAMILY " Should I go back today, to Martinique ?" L'ETOILEVESPER A DELE EUGENIE Sidonie Landois, Colette's mother, was born on August 31, 1835. That year Halley's comet crossed the skies. "If in the month of October 1835, I kept my nurse awake, she may have contemplated the comet ... and since I was born with the sin of curiosity, maybe I have seen it too," wrote Sido to Colette. Addle was nicknamed Sido by her brothers, and this was the name her daughter made famous. (Although she signed official papers "Addle Landoy," for the sake of clarity we will refer to her as "Sido.") Less than two months after Sido's birth her mother died. Her father was devastated. For a long time he could not get over his grief, and was never able to love Sido. She remained a cause for pain and bitter remembrance. "As for me, I never was anything but sorrow for my father because my birth had cost my mother her life and I reminded him too vividly of that painful moment." Henri Marie Landois, Colette's grandfather, was born in Charleville on September 23, 1792. He was the son of Robert Landois, a wealthy mulatto from Martinique who had settled in 1787 in Charleville, a smuggling center of colonial goods between France and the Netherlands (see appendix: Regarding Colette's Black Ancestry). He was an epicier , a member of the powerful Spicer's Guild which had the exclusive rights to the trade in citrus, coffee, and chocolate. Robert married Marie Mathis, the daughter of a boatman who owned barges on the River Meuse. Henri was "a mulatto with pale eyes, ugly but well built ... and seductive." This is how Sido described him. She loved to evoke his impeccable taste, his grand manners, his dashing figure as a man of the world. She extolled his way of life. At twenty he had to join the army -- Napoleon's war machine was in constant need of soldiers. Thanks to his connections, Henri enlisted in the elite Second Regiment of Light Horse Lancers, created by Napoleon two years earlier. The emperor, who decked out his army in the most spectacular uniforms, gave the new regiment an even more splendid garb. They must have looked formidable when they rode into battle, each with a nine-foot-three-inch lance, saber and pistol, and carbine secured to the saddle. They became the favorite regiment of the French, who sang lancers' songs and danced lancers' quadrilles. They dazzled women. While the Lancers were stationed in Versailles, Henri seduced Sophie Chatenay, twenty-three, the daughter of the administrator of the Versailles clock factory. Their encounter was not entirely accidental, for Sophie's Delahaut uncles lived in Charleville; one was a prosecutor and captain in the National Guard, the other a draper. Henri's dark complexion must have added an exotic touch to the prestige of the dashing cavalier. Colette thought that Sophie Celeste Chatenay, all peaches and cream, must have been irresistible to this Othello: "No doubt her husband, who was colored , had been seduced by the clear complexion of this Parisian from Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle." (Colette was mistaken. Her grandmother was born in Versailles and later lived at 3 Cite d'Orleans, Boulevard St. Denis, in Paris.) Fair Sophie became pregnant; Henri Landois had no choice but to marry. He requested a leave, which was granted, and on April 29, 1815, Sophie and Henri's marriage was celebrated in Versailles. A few days later, on May 7, they signed a contrat de mariage and both spouses made a reciprocal donation of all their possessions. Monsieur and Madame Chatenay jointly gave the sum of four thousand gold francs to their daughter as an advance on her future inheritance. It was a substantial dowry. Using all the intricacies of the recently adopted French civil law known as the code Napoleon , the Chatenays took great care to protect their daughter's inheritance. It was specified that if Henri should survive, he would have only the usufruct of the estate. Should Sophie be the survivor, however, she would enjoy complete ownership of the estate. No sooner was the wedding party over than Henri was called to his regiment under the command of the ill-inspired Marshal Grouchy, whose misreading of the situation in the darkest hour of the empire allowed the Prussians to join forces with Wellington and crush Napoleon at Waterloo. Over forty thousand French were killed, but Grouchy managed to slip away and bring his men back to Paris without any casualties. It was a time of uncertainty for the soldiers. Napoleon was now in exile in St. Helena. In Paris the king was quick to disband what was left of Napoleon's army and encourage all citizens to rebuild the economy. Henri joined his father Robert in the spice business in Charleville. The guilds had been abolished but the democratization of the profession was slow. The epicerie business, having nothing to limit or hinder its expansion, entered a tremendous boom period. Henri prospered, and on November 26, 1815, Sophie gave birth to a son, Henri-Celestin, who died twenty days later. On October 17, 1816, she had a second son, Henri-Eugene-Celestin. The Landois then moved to a new house at 112 Rue du Petit-Bois. Two years later Paul-Emile was born (he died three and a half years later). In 1821 a fourth son, Jules-Hippolyte, lived only one day. But on July 31, 1823, a fifth son was born -- Jules-Paulin, known as Paul. By now Henri Landois was referred to as sieur in official documents, a sign of his wealth and influence, but business ventures kept him away from home. When Paul-Emile died, a Mr. Delahaut signed the death certificate. Henri was also not there in December 1825 to sign the legal separation of goods that his wife and in-laws had introduced in the district court of Versailles. He was ordered to refund the four thousand francs of his wife's dowry, and Sophie was released from any debts cosigned with her husband. This legal procedure was a way of sheltering her fortune. Henri was nowhere to be found; the judgment was served on him four years later on December 22, 1829. He had probably been trading in the West Indies along with his elder son Henri-Eugene (Sido's brother), who was to write in L'Illustration , "I was taken at an early age from my native land. My adventurous boyhood was spent on many shores." In Eugene's prolific output as a novelist and journalist there are hints of the traumatic experience of a nine-year-old separated from a mother he adored. Henri and Eugene returned triumphant. As the financial situation was once more flourishing, Henri commissioned the renowned miniaturist Foulard to paint a portrait of Sophie. Colette inherited it, and it can be seen today at the Musee Colette in Saint-Sauveur. On this fragile ivory medallion Sophie looks the epitome of a romantic lady in her fashionable dress with its plunging neckline, large puffed sleeves, and tiny waist caught in a tight belt with a large buckle. Two pendant earrings, almost six inches long, bespeak her wealth. Her fair hair, done up in a high bun with curls over the ears, was dressed in the fashion of the day. She had large blue eyes, a smiling, rosebud mouth, and a clear rosy complexion. At thirty-eight, Sophie looked young, pampered, and happy. A daguerreotype of Henri Landois shows a fashionable man, his hair brushed up in short curls as if ruffled by a breeze, a romantic hairdo favored by poets and politicians. Henri's coat is beautifully tailored and his large tie slips into an elegantly pleated vest with careless grace. His eyes have a piercing, thoughtful gaze, his full lips are set in a haughty smile. The image is that of a clever, concentrated man, not handsome in a classical way, but interesting and attractive because of the awesome determination behind his features. Like his grandfather, Henri established his business at 35 Rue des Drapiers in Le Havre, an important harbor west of Paris, and traded mainly in coffee, cocoa, cotton, rum, and dye woods. Henri was now a negociant , a word coined under King Louis-Philippe for the entrepreneurs who dealt in wholesale trade. In 1834 he expanded his business under the name of Henri Pere et Fils at 4 Cite d'Orleans, Boulevard St. Denis in Paris. That same year in Le Havre, on the twenty-third of May, the Landois had a sixth child, Irma Celeste Desiree, named to reflect their joy in their first daughter. Shortly after her birth the Landois moved to their Parisian residence at 3 Cite d'Orleans. It was located above the mezzanine on what was known as l'etage noble -- the noble floor. The Landois had expensive tastes and the means to satisfy them. Their furniture was insured for the enormous sum of ten thousand gold francs. At the time of the empire imported exotic woods, particularly mahogany, had replaced the indigenous fruit-tree woods and were outrageously expensive. All the Landois' furniture was made from mahogany. Henri collected paperweights, as did Colette, who made it a fad in the thirties. He had one topped with a bronze poodle, another with a bronze horse, and a third with a bronze centaur; two were covered with Moroccan leather; three were of precious marble. He liked elegant writing instruments: his letter opener had a mother-of-pearl handle and on his desk was a portable writing table of gilt china with painted scenes and matching pens. Later Colette would brag of having the first fountain pen in Paris. The Landois were musicians and one of them played the guitar; they would also pass down their love of music to Colette. On the mantelpiece a clock priced at one hundred and twenty gold francs, a masterpiece of Sophie's father's manufacture inlaid with Brazilian purple woods, supported a group of figures in gilt copper protected by a glass dome; Colette saw it in her mother's drawing room. The Landois had a cabriolet, a two-wheeled horse-drawn vehicle with a hood, prudently insured for ten years. An insurance for fifty thousand gold francs covered the merchandise stocked at 4 Cite d'Orleans and the wines in the cellars rented from Monsieur Soupault at 5 Grande Villette and 50 Rue de Flandres. In the hall several fencing masks, two pairs of fencing gloves, and twenty-five swords were on display. This taste for weapons was inherited by Colette, who always carried a folding knife and a small revolver in her purse. White leather gear and a cartridge pouch from the National Guard give us a clue to Henri's social standing and political leaning. The National Guard was a militia organized at the outbreak of the French Revolution on the eve of the storming of the Bastille, with Lafayette as its commander in chief. The National Guard was bourgeois, had liberal ideas, and favored a representative government. It supported the constitutional monarchy and the rights and liberties included in the new constitution. When Charles X, swayed by ultraconservative ministers, curtailed those rights, the National Guard greeted the king with shouts of "Long live the constitution! Down with the ministers! Down with the Jesuits!" This anticlerical and liberal attitude was immediately punished and the guard dissolved. Liberals went underground and became extremely active in the secret societies that sprouted up in defense of liberty: the Society of the Friends of the People, the Knights of Freedom, the Society for Human Rights, and the Carbonari. Conservative King Charles x was replaced by his liberal cousin, Louis-Philippe. The National Guard was reorganized, and once more this middle-class armed militia supported the constitutional monarchy until it became too conservative for its liking. Under Louis-Philippe only men who paid real-estate taxes and could afford the costly uniform could enlist. That wealthy, liberal, bourgeois brigade counted among its ranks Marcel Proust's maternal great-grandfather, Nathe Weil, as well as Colette's grandfather. On December 4, 1835, after Sido's birth and Sophie's death, Henri Landois named as his general and special agent Philippe Dupuis, giving him full power of attorney to administer and manage Henri's personal estate as well as that of his four children. This notarized act mentions in detail an impressive number of goods, real estate, notes, loans, and mortgages on buildings. Henri Landois specified that his general agent was to receive all rents from tenants and farmers, do all necessary repairs, accept or reject all bids, pay all bills, receive all sums due, acquire or sell real estate at the best price, obtain and give all titles, buy and sell bonds and shares, select brokers, check and sign all books, and settle the estate of Sophie Landois. Henri Landois left Paris with Henri-Eugene, Paul, and Irma and her nurse, and traveled to Belgium. It was a precipitous departure. Eugene was in trouble. Like many young romantics, he had joined one of the secret societies that were agitating against the government. The Society of the Friends of the People, a group led by Francois Raspail, advocated a vast program of political and social reforms ranging from total freedom of expression to a complete overthrow of the scientific establishment. Raspail was an avant-garde scientist. Politically he was a staunch liberal, a carbonaro who fought on the barricades during the Revolution of 1830. The citizen-king, Louis-Philippe tried to lure him to his side and appointed him head curator of all the collections of the museum, also awarding him the Legion of Honor. Raspail refused all gestures of appeasement and remained with the most radical wing of the Republicans. He lectured in political clubs and wrote blazing articles blasting the citizen-king. A hero to the young, Raspail gave them an outlet for their frustrations in the columns of his paper, Le Reformateur . Young Eugene Landois contributed to these, as well as to Le Figaro , then a satirical political newspaper. But the government finally found a way to muzzle Raspail. In July of 1835, during a celebration of the Revolution, the anarchist Fieschi exploded a complicated piece of machinery aimed at the king and his family. The royal family was spared but nineteen people died, and the police crackdown was harsh. Le Reformateur was fined one hundred and twelve thousand gold francs and had to fold. By the end of the year there was an exodus of liberals to the safe haven of Belgium. Among them were the Landois. Little Sido was left in the care of Philippe Dupuis. She had a wet nurse from Puisaye, a poor, backward region that shared with Brittany and the Morvan the dubious honor of being wet-nurse purveyors to the bourgeois urban class. Her nounou took Sido to Les Matignons, a hamlet near Mezilles, where her husband was a blacksmith. The 1837 census indicates that Adele (Sido) Landois, two years old, was still living with the Gullies. (Usually children were out to nurse for two to three years. Many died, and those who survived returned home with rustic manners and spoke the barbarous patois. Only during the Third Republic (1870-1940) was it made a requirement for every French citizen to speak French; previously the local patois were spoken, except among the educated classes.) Some of Colette's scholars have said that Sido remained in Mezilles until she was thirteen. This seems very unlikely, since Sido wrote an elegant French, played the piano, and was well read. In Paris Philippe Dupuis was faced with the arduous task of sorting out the Landois estate. He called for the family council, an institution recently created for the protection of the interests of minors. The council was composed of seven members, three from the mother's side, three from the father's, and was presided over by the local justice of the peace. Henri was represented by Philippe Dupuis, proprietor, Laurent Jousserandot, glass and crystal manufacturer, and a Landois who lived on Rue des Fosses Saint-Jacques. On March 28, the justice of the peace started reporting the inventory at numbers 3 and 4 Cite d'Orleans. This report was continued on April 2, 7, and 9, resumed on June 4 and 6, and finalized on June 14, 1836. It covers twenty pages, in the small handwriting of the clerk. Everything was meticulously reported, including the wines: Chateau Margaux, Saint-Emilion, Beaune, Frontignan, Sauterne, Chateau-Lafitte, Madere, champagne, l'Hermitage, Medoc, and Saint-Estephe. Sido was from a family of connoisseurs and had an inborn respect for fine wines. She told Colette that during the Prussian invasion of France one of the first things she did was to bury all her vintage bottles in her garden to save them from the enemy. The inventory gives us a hint of the Landois standard of living and of their precipitous departure. All the clothes had been removed from the drawers except for two baby bibs; there were eight empty jewelry boxes, two pairs of copper earrings, and an empty guitar case. Henri had left behind all his personal papers, including his military discharge, for he was traveling under an assumed name. When the clerk started to audit the 1835 ledgers of the company Henri Pere et Fils and Philippe Dupuis declared that all the doctors and funeral expenses had been paid for in full, he felt compelled to add that "the bad state of affairs of Mr. Landois had necessitated his departure to a foreign land some five months ago, and because of that the ledgers have not been kept regularly, not a single account has been checked and cannot be because of lack of exact documents." Since Sophie's estate was protected against any creditor's claims, the children inherited it. Sido had an income and was not a penniless orphan, as she was later described by Colette. In Brussels Henri Landois was again in the wholesale cocoa business. Somewhere along the way he started to manufacture chocolate, a trade for which Belgium is famous. In the newly created Belgian kingdom tariffs were not regulated, and soon the import of chocolate and tobacco made some traders very rich. Once again the Landois were riding the crest. They now spelled their name with a "y," although the old spelling appears in official papers. Possibly to hide from creditors, Henri now called himself Eugene. The Landoys lived in the Marolles district of Brussels "in a pretty white house three stories high." Eugene (the son) was homesick. "Away from civilization, sick and lonely, I sit on the marble windowsill and search in the distance for the wooded hills of the Ardennes where I spent such a happy and peaceful childhood." Less than two years after Sophie's death, Henri, now forty-five, married Therese Leroux, the thirty-nine-year-old widow of a chocolate-factory owner, and took over the management of his wife's business. Life around Henri was never peaceful; he was a restless man. At some point he had little Sido brought back from La Puisaye to give her an education. When she was eight, her father -- "all the women were falling for him" -- brought home a newborn baby girl and her nurse. He told Sido, "Bring her up, she is your sister." Sido knew that Henri liked long, aristocratic fingers; having noticed that the baby's hands had plump, tiny ones, she decided to mold them to her father's liking. She longed to be loved and thought that if she could reshape her sister's fingers, her father would be pleased with her. A doctor was called in to find out what caused the swelling of the baby's hands, but Sido did not volunteer a clue. She herself had beautiful hands, which she always displayed artistically in her photographs. Later she taught Colette to do the same. Sido grew up with Eugene, Paul, Irma, her newborn sister, and a pet monkey named Jean. As in Paris, the Landoys' house was filled with expensive furniture and paintings, most notably a painting by Salvatore Rosa, a seventeenth-century Italian painter famous for his military scenes and fantastic landscapes. Sido acquired her father's expensive taste for clothes, furniture, and food. Later, in her letters to Colette, she kept asking for exotic foods, chocolate, teas from Rebattet and Hediard, fresh citrus shipped from the French Riviera. At seventy she maintained that she had never been able to drink out of a glass not made of crystal or a cup not of bone china. Sido's liberal ideas and the education she gave her children (which shocked so many people later in Saint-Sauveur) came from her brothers. In Brussels Eugene had quickly become a noted political commentator for L'Emancipation , a liberal, highly political newspaper that supported the struggle for an independent Belgian state and for the freedom of the press. Eugene was still in touch with the Carbonari. He continued to collaborate with Le Figaro in Paris and its director, Alphonse Karr. Karr's other journal Les Guepes (The Wasps) was relentlessly attacking the political, literary, and artistic establishments. Eugene admired Karr so much that he took "A Wasp in Exile" as one of his pseudonyms, and the Landoy home became a refuge for "any French-speaking Wasp" who "had to flee from an angry master." Well-established as a political journalist at L'Emancipation , Eugene started a successful publishing press at 67 Rue Longue. He cleverly exploited two new markets: the expanding railroad and the health spas. His Guide to Belgium (1840) ran to at least forty-two printings and The Indispensable Travelers Guide to Belgian Railways (1844) was a must for the many visitors and immigrants from all over Europe who flocked to Belgian cities. They could find practical tips and useful articles peppered with cartoons and jokes in Le Moniteur des Chemins de Fer, Journal des Touristes et des Flaneurs , which was sold in the railroad stations. But the liberal was never far from the businessman. As soon as it was released in Paris, Eugene published Raspail's The Family Doctor (1843) and The Health Directory . These books by the radical French scientist had a lasting impact on Sido, who adopted his revolutionary precepts on hygiene. Raspail startled the medical establishment by stating that most diseases were triggered by air pollution and bad assimilation of food, tobacco, alcohol, or any toxic substance, including any medicine with side effects; he also noted psychological traumas as a cause of bad health. A strong advocate of healthy living and preventative medicine, he tried to spread notions of hygiene and moderation among the poor by operating free clinics. In the spring of 1848 winds of change were sweeping through Europe. In Paris, Republicans were marching in solidarity with Poland, which was occupied by the Russians. Liberals were rallying around Arago, Lamartine, Cabet, and Raspail, who was jailed for participating in the march for the liberation of Poland. Eugene Landoy, thirty-two, and Sido, thirteen, were in Paris. Whether Sido came with her brother or was staying with her tutor on Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle is not clear. But in the midst of the growing unrest, she was sent to the safety of Mezilles, where she stayed for a while. She appears on the Mezilles census of 1848. Her visit started the rumor, still in circulation in Saint-Sauveur, that Sido was brought to the village by Freemasons. At thirteen Sido had a strong, independent personality. "I adore storms and have always loved them. When I was still in Mezilles, every time I saw a storm brewing, I would run to the highest mountain, my hair in the wind." Sido was a guest at the Chateau du Fort, a country manor owned by Monsieur and Madame de Vathaire, who had two daughters about her age. She remained friends with the sisters, who moved a few years later to a newly built manor, Le Chateau des Gouttes in the township of Saint-Sauveur. Back in Brussels Eugene Landoy, wasting no time, published a History of the French Revolution of 1848 , which was released the same year. In melodramatic prose, Eugene declared: "The government of the people by the people is the law of God, the only divine right. The governments of an ambitious oligarchy, of an aristocratic nobility, of an insolent and self-centered bourgeoisie, of a dictator who assumes a monstrous power, all those forms of government which drained the people for the sole benefit of a hateful and immoral power or for the satisfaction of a few private interests have been imposed upon mankind so it would better appreciate the value of freedom and happiness." Following a romantic view of history, Eugene contended that God was leading humanity step by step through an ascending spiral, and that on its way up humanity would shed all forms of tyranny. For Landoy the 1848 uprising tolled the bells of "all the oligarchies, of all the monarchies on the surface of the earth." Among the participants in this historic moment was a young cadet just expelled from Saint-Cyr -- France's most prestigious military academy -- Jules Colette. When he later embarked on a political career, he bragged about those days, and his flamboyant style impressed his daughter Colette. The French Republic was short-lived. Napoleon III crushed all dreams of liberty. This dampened Eugene's faith in a divine ascending spiral, and his style lost its heroic tone; he cultivated thereafter a gentle and elegant irony. After forty years of success, he would say that his only defense had been a velvet shield. In 1851 he became editor in chief of L'Emancipation and reviewed theatrical and musical events for the weekly Journal de Gand in a very popular column that he signed "Bertram." He wrote sporadically for the French magazine L'Illustration , for La Revue des Deux Mondes , and for L'Annuaire des Deux Mondes , using several pseudonyms: "Marc Lebreuil," "A Wasp in Exile," and "Bertram," which became his most famous and lasting one. An amateur painter, for several years he published a series of books titled Salons , which he signed "A Wasp in Exile." Many painters came to the Landoy home. Among the regulars were the Stevens brothers. Joseph, the elder, was a painter of animals and Alfred, a society painter famous for his portraits, was one of the best of the realists along with Millet and Courbet. Sido recalled a trip to Ostende with Alfred Stevens and Eugene. On the beach they saw a pretty English girl -- "slender, blond, delicate ... with a Great Dane at her feet. It was a scene for a good painter. Alfred Stevens wanted to make a sketch of the group but it was difficult to ask the young lady to agree to it." Paul Landoy also started working as a journalist for L'Independance Belge, Le Constitutionnel de Mons , and Le Telegraphe de Bruxelles . But after twenty years as editor in chief, he became head of the Fine Arts Administration, then director of the Kursaal, a fashionable Ostende casino. Back from Mezilles, Sido found the Landoys living in a hotbed of radicalism. Every day new exiles poured into Belgium to escape the imperial police, since Belgium remained a haven for free expression. Until World War I anything from the political to the sleazy that was censured in France was printed in Belgium, which had a booming publishing business. At the dawn of the twentieth century this small kingdom boasted five hundred dailies and six hundred weeklies. After 1848 the banished members of the French Assemblee Legislative flocked to Belgium. Some of the most radical thinkers of the century visited the Landoy household: Schoelcher, the Lincoln of the West Indies, a representative of Martinique and Guadeloupe who fought to abolish slavery; Edgar Quinet, who fought for the separation of church and state; Ledru-Rollin; and Etienne Arago. But the theorist who would most profoundly affect Sido was the lifelong friend of the Landoys and standard bearer of Fourierism, Victor Considerant, probably the most brilliant mind of the group. Victor Considerant, more than any other social thinker, shaped Sido's personality and through her, Colette's, who constantly referred to her mother as "the leading character in my whole life." Sido's influence went beyond the education of her daughter -- she provided Colette with a philosophy, an ethic rooted in Charles Fourier's philosophy of voluptuousness. In The Break of Day, Sido , and The Pure and the Impure , Colette, then over fifty, reflected on her mother's principles and asserted that her mother's philosophy was her own. Love was at the center of Fourier's society. "Passions," he said, "are the mistresses of the world." Around this concept he constructed a social system based on mutual attraction and an economic one devised to promote health, luxury, and peace. Social harmony, he believed, sprang from universal passional affinity. He claimed that sexual repression was at the root of all the evils of civilization. In his utopian society, harmony , the passions -- labeled vices in our Western civilization, or deadly sins in Christianity -- would be put to use sagaciously. Instead of smothering them, Fourier would increase their intensity and through gratification reach the social harmony that constraints destroy. Before Freud he denounced the ravages caused by sexual inhibitions and the pathological or even criminal forms displayed by repressed passions when they boil over. Fourier, however, was against anarchy; he did not want to let raw passions run loose but proposed instead to channel them from antisocial to social behavior. Fourier's code of social harmony was based on a sexual revolution of such audacity that he overstepped the most daring sexologists of the twentieth century. Compared to his radicalism, Freud's, Wilhelm Reich's, or Kinsey's theories seem shy. His primary concern as a psychologist was to analyze all the sexual drives and integrate them into a new social order. The most important vehicles of social integration were Les Series Passionnelles, passional groups that acted as melting pots. Individuals would associate and regroup themselves according to their driving passions. His new world order was based on the premise that human beings were not created equal, that there were natural diversities in character and intelligence. An individual's place in society was not determined by gender or race but by individual differences. Fourier did not believe in an egalitarian system; personal value determined the place of the individual. "Inequality, so much maligned by the philosophers, is not displeasing to man. Only if he lacks what is necessary does he begin to detest his superiors and the rules of society." Fourier attacked the liberal conception of freedom as empty and formalistic and argued that there was a cruel irony in the concept of "the sovereignty of the people" if the individual was "a living automaton" locked up in psychological slavery. In his enormous body of work Fourier asserted that he had found a way to ensure humanity's emotional equilibrium, without which there could be no freedom. Every passion being part of an immense orchestra, each one should be finetuned to reach perfect harmony. Homosexuality, called unisexuality (a term Colette uses in The Pure and the Impure ), any type of polygamy for man and woman, abolition of marriage, and unfettered sexual drive should all be encouraged, since nature desires variety in its pleasures. However, the exception was as useful as the rule as long as it neither vexed nor harmed anyone and created multiple social bonds. Fourier thought that it would take three centuries to transform our civilization into harmony , his ideal social order. Sido lapped up these theories. She used to say, "evil and good can be equally resplendent and fruitful." She wrote to Colette in 1909, "I have always been a little crazy but not so much as you think. This is the fact: I came into this world three hundred years too soon and this world does not understand me." Fourier's utopian ideas are the undercurrent on which Colette's ethic rides; they are the essence and philosophy of The Pure and the Impure , her essay on love. Like Fourier, Considerant believed in the fundamental harmony between mankind, the environment, and the cosmos, but he recommended practical deviations from pure Fourierism, arguing that society was far from ready to accept and implement Fourier's code of social harmony. He championed the concept of total female emancipation. He was the only senator in the Parliament who fought to include a provision in the constitution guaranteeing women's political and legal equality. His wife Julie, who came from an aristocratic family, was a staunch disciple of Fourier, and his mother-in-law, a famous beauty and woman of letters, dedicated her salon exclusively to the study of Fourier. Sido lived in a Belgium buzzing with ideas. Considerant's friend Alexandre Dumas, who was not trying to escape the imperial police but his own creditors, polarized the socialites while Victor Hugo polarized the intelligentsia. The banished poet immediately adopted the life of an outlaw. Though none of his property had been confiscated and his royalties were still pouring in, he took a room in the frugal Hotel de la Porte Verte, 31 Rue de la Violette, a run-down place from which he wrote: "I lead the life of a monk." Hugo was followed by another giant, Raspail. When his wife died in March of 1853, over one hundred thousand people attended her funeral. The message was not lost on Napoleon III, who commuted Raspail's jail sentence to exile in April. Raspail, who had once proclaimed "God and country" now declared that freethinkers should be born without priests, marry without priests, and die without priests. This credo was to have a lasting effect on Sido, now eighteen. She became an atheist and took every opportunity to attack religion. Only once did she ally herself with her parish priest, "to protest against the municipality which denies the right to march to the Catholic band. I found that unfair." She was a freethinker and remained such. At sixty-one she wrote to Colette: "Mine Hardy ... she is a doctor's widow from here; well, we are getting along very well, I, an atheist and she, very religious. The dear woman has decided to convert me. She absolutely wants me to read the two fat books written by Father Bommard! Can you see me reading that?" In January of 1854 Henri Landoy died in the city hospital in Lyons, France. His death certificate states that he was "an ex-merchant from Brussels" and is signed by two clerks, which indicates that no family member was present. He probably died in the plague epidemic that killed thousands of people in Marseilles and Lyons. Soon after his father's death, Eugene married into an aristocratic French family, the Cuvelier de Trye. Caroline was a wealthy heiress, daughter of the now forgotten but once immensely successful playwright Cuvelier de Trye, who staged grandiose historical shows famous for their battle scenes on horseback. Caroline was an accomplished hostess, fluent in several languages, well read, and a talented musician -- the charmed circle that gathered in her salon found her an admirable interpreter of Chopin. She was a beauty with raven black hair and sea green eyes. Colette, who saw her several times, described her as Tante Coeur (Aunt Heart) in Claudine at School (Claudine a l'Ecole) : "Like the Empress Eugenie, she had an aristocratic nose, the heavy bandeaux with a touch of gray, a slightly condescending smile and arched eyebrows a l'espagnole ." The first time she visited her, she was intimidated by Caroline's extremely polished and elegant French. But what impressed her even more was the contrast between her aunt's Victorian looks and the art nouveau decor in which she lived. She found her uncle handsome and imposing with his flowing white mane. Eugene was a womanizer and marriage did not change his ways. Sido admired Caroline's sophisticated and cool approach to her husband's numerous affairs. "My sister-in-law paid off her husband's mistress or mistresses. My brother was rather handsome and always in love, but so what?" He had at least one known illegitimate daughter with a Mrs. Deleau, whom Colette later met in Brussels. Sido was happy in that sophisticated, liberal milieu. "Nothing supplanted in my mother's heart the beautiful Belgian cities, the warmth of their refined and gentle life, epicurean and enamored of the things of the mind." He Was Ugly ... More or Less Retarded But He Was Rich In 1856 Sido was twenty-one, fair, slender, and strong -- "not very pretty but charming ... with a wide mouth but a delicate chin, a free young girl accustomed to living uninhibited among men, her brothers and their friends, the youthful Bohemia of French and Belgian painters, musicians, artists." Her eyes were gray, the "color of rain," "fluttering" when she tried to conceal her willful, lusty, and defiant nature. "In her eyes could be seen a sort of smiling frenzy, a universal contempt, a boiling scorn." At moments, her true nature would surge out into wild facial expressions; then she appeared "free of obligations, of charity, of humanity," but people seldom realized it, so caught up were they by her sensuous charm. She could boast of her graceful hands and small feet. She walked gracefully with her toes turned out, barely putting any weight on her heels. Her voice "was a shaded soprano ... a shimmering voice, full of nuance, vascillating at the slightest emotion." A daguerreotype of Sido taken when she was eighteen shows a slim girl in a stamped velvet dress with a large lace collar and flowing lace cuffs. She wears a richly bejeweled bracelet. Since she always felt that her father had rejected her she needed to attract attention and quickly learned how to become the center of interest. She had "an intolerant way of discussing, of refuting an argument," which she practiced in Caroline's salon. Sido had inherited one fourth of her mother's estate and had independent means, but this was not considered a large dowry. News came from Mezilles that the Bourgoin family was searching for a bride for their forty-two-year-old bachelor cousin. They invited Sido to spend some time with them. As was the custom in those days, Sido would stay several months with her hosts and ample occasions would be provided for her to meet with her proposed husband, the wealthy landowner Claude Jules Robineau-Duclos. "A well-mannered man, most of the time. Of his forgotten patrician ancestry, he kept the haughtiness, the politeness, the brutality and a taste for domination. Sido found herself a pawn in a family plot: Jules Robineau-Duclos's only sister, six years his junior, had tried to have him declared legally incompetent, a scheme strongly opposed by some of Jules's first cousins, who felt it was an insult to the family name. For centuries the Robineaus had been glassblowers; glassmakers belonged to the nobility as long as they carried on their trade. The creation of the Manufacture Royale de Saint-Gobain put them out of business, but the Robineaus were still regarded as gentry in La Puisaye. Jules Robineau-Duclos, born in February of 1814, grew up, according to one of his neighbors, "like a wild beast" -- to which he bore a striking resemblance, having grown a double row of teeth. When he turned sixteen, he agreed to have fourteen teeth pulled out all on the same day, an operation either performed by the local barber or by some traveling so-called surgeon, with iron pliers, a bottle of spirits, and sheer strength. This feat of dentistry left a strong impression on the folks of Saint-Sauveur, who talked about it long after the fact. Jules "was frightfully ugly." Frequent intermarriages between cousins had bred a streak of melancholy, if not outright madness, in the family. His uncle and mother were both committed to an asylum. Jules was educated near Paris in the College of Fontenay-aux-Roses. He was fifteen when his mother was placed in the asylum, where she died seven years later. That same year his father divided the estate between his two children, emancipated his daughter (who was still a minor), appointed a Monsieur Givry as their tutor, and died. The tutor promptly married his son to the heiress. At twenty-two, Jules inherited farms, fields, wooded lands, cattle, and a vineyard that produced fifty-six hundred liters of wine and brandy, worth about five hundred thousand gold francs. Dressed in boots for most of the day, he would ride through his woods and fields, watching the crops and checking the charcoal made in his forests and the sale of his lumber. What the land lacked in productivity was offset by its large acreage. Jules Robineau was a traumatized introvert afraid of the dark, who could not bear to be left alone at night. One of his servants, Marie Miton, a miller's daughter, became his mistress. In 1843 she bore him a son, who was registered as Antonin Miton. His birth certificate bore the words "father unknown." Marie lived well in the master's house; all the other servants addressed her as "Mademoiselle Marie," and for twenty years she managed everything. Marie's relationship with Jules was a stormy one. Lucien, a stable boy, remembered that around midnight, Marie Miton came to the stable in her nightgown, woke him up, and ordered him to carry her son to her sister's house. "I came back to Robineau-Duclos's home, I went back to sleep in the stable next to the donkeys. ..." Robineau-Duclos walked in. He asked Lucien to follow him into the kitchen, put two bottles of white wine and one bottle of brandy on the table and told him, "my little donkey, we are going to drink that, then go to bed." "I drank with him, then followed him to his bedroom and slept in his bed, not to offend him, because when he sleeps alone, he gets very frightened. He was angry, I was scared, I did not sleep much but daybreak came soon enough." Jules drank so much that he started to experience periods of delusion and was treated for behavioral disorders. He was afraid of being poisoned and refused to take any medicine. When forced to do so, he became violent and threatened to shoot anyone around. After he tried to kill his gamekeeper, his servants hid his hunting guns. In 1855 he had another fit of madness. He wanted to shoot two of his maids in order to use their corpses as bait for crawfish. The two girls barricaded themselves in the barn. They heard one shot. Jules shot at the door, then went away singing, "Pick up your guns, citizens, let's march with young girls at our side, a bottle in our hand," to the tune of La Marseillaise . He went to the police station, where he complained that all the women had fled and that his house was now full of soldiers from the African regiments. At this point his sister, Louise Givry and her husband tried to have him declared legally incompetent. A judge investigated the case. Friends and relatives split into two camps, the Givrys' supporters against those who saw Givry himself as an adventurer who, having married the heiress, was now after her brother's fortune. For three days twenty-eight witnesses testified. Escorted by his cousins, Doctors Carreau, Robineau-Desvoidy, and Lachassagne, and Victor Gandrille, who kept him sober, Jules appeared in court. The judge noted that his slouching attitude and tired looks made him look much older than his forty-two years. He spoke haltingly and his intelligence "seemed very slow." Doctor Rocheux, appointed by the judge, called him "an overgrown child" and said that his weird behavior came from excessive drinking. Jules's cousins counterattacked. "They say that Robineau-Duclos is insane, that is false. He is simply surrounded by wicked people." The most wicked of them all, they felt, was his brother-in-law Givry, who was always meddling in his affairs. The mere sight of Givry could send Jules into raving fits of anger. On the Givrys' side was the eighteenth witness, Lucien Breuille, a laborer, age thirty-two, who had worked for Jules for six years. He said that once when a cow had broken a leg, Jules Robineau-Duclos came to the injured animal with a whip to beat it, then stabbed it with his knife. Jules had had to be dragged away. During that period Jules used to seize a meat skewer and brandish it, screaming, "This is my baton , I am a field marshal." He would hang his cap on the doorknob of the dining room and a rag on the doorknob of the drawing room and say that they were sentries. He instructed Breuille to let no one in until the sentries were relieved of their duty. Jules's eccentric behavior could take a political turn. At the dawn of the Second Empire, when Napoleon III and Queen Victoria declared war on Russia, Jules ordered an enormous lunch to be prepared by Mr. Bord, the caterer, to host the Russians, "who were coming." This lunch ordered for the enemies by one of its promiment citizens scandalized Saint-Sauveur. Several young servants, one barely thirteen, testified that he chased them around or asked them to scratch his legs. They said that Jules went several months without changing his shirts and underwear. Their testimonies were rejected as "mere gossip" by the twenty-first witness, a schoolmate of Jules and the mayor of Saint-Sauveur, who had been directed by the prefect to monitor the situation. In his weekly visits, he said, he had found Jules, sometimes drunk, and sometimes busy with the management of his farms. He had never noticed that Jules should change his linen, and he did not see him as very odd. In his opinion, Jules Robineau-Duclos's farms were very well managed. At these dismal proceedings, the long array of witnesses produced by Givry were servants, field hands, and stable boys. The star witnesses in favor of Jules were the mayor of Saint-Sauveur and a retired lawyer. The judge found no reason to deprive Jules of his rights and place his fortune in the care of his brother-in-law. The scandal started by the Givrys smeared everyone in the Robineau clan and resentment knitted the cousins together. The Bourgoins, the Lachassagnes, the Gandrilles, and the Bourgneufs decided that the only way to protect Jules was to get him married, but finding him a wife was not simple. In the French bourgeoisie, few marriages were love matches, and little stood in the way of a marriage except madness and consumption, but after the scandal a local bride was not to be found; the Robineau clan looked elsewhere. The Bourgoins's candidate was Sido. She was willful and well educated; she could manage Jules; and more importantly, she would owe her fortune to the Robineau family -- through her they could control Jules. One of the cousins, Doctor Lachassagne, traveled to Brussels to discuss the terms of this marriage with Eugene Landoy. Sido, he felt, would protect Jules from a conniving mistress, an unscrupulous sister, and a greedy brother-in-law. The offer was tempting; at almost twenty-two, Sido's chances for a wealthy match were dwindling. She came to Mezilles. When sober, Jules was a gentle, well-mannered man, and he was enchanted by Sido's charm. They all went back to Brussels, Jules escorted by his cousin, Doctor Thomas Lachassagne, who monitored him every step of the way. On January 7, 1857, they signed a contract in the office of the attorney Jacques Langendries, stating that both fiances being French, they would be married according to the French code under the joint estate provision. But they added three clauses. Neither one of them would be responsible for any debts made before the marriage. Sido's debts would be paid by her or by her brothers, an indication that Sido was outspending her income. In case of death, the surviving spouse would receive a sum of ten thousand francs in money or furniture before the estate could be divided between their heirs. The last item stated that as proof of their mutual affection, the future spouses would give all the proceeds of their joint estates to the survivor. (This third clause would be at the root of a feud between Sido's children.) The two-page contract was signed by Jules Robineau-Duclos, Adele Landoy (Sido), Eugene and Caroline Landoy, and Doctor Thomas and Hortense Lachassagne. There was little doubt in their minds that Jules would be the first one to die; if he did not produce an heir, the estate would remain in the Robineau family, but as long as she lived, Sido would receive all its proceeds. This marriage gave Sido the means to maintain the standard of living to which she had grown accustomed and enjoy the luxury she so craved. In 1922 in My Mother's House ( La Maison de Claudine ), Colette wrote her own version of her mother's first marriage. She nicknamed Robineau-Duclos "the Savage" -- a term of endearment Sido liked to use for her children. While visiting his farms on horseback, he saw the fair Sido, who met his glance "without batting an eyelid and without a smile," and dreamed of her. Sido became a maiden of eighteen impressed by a man who had "the pale complexion of a refined vampire," a black beard, and a horse as "red as a heart cherry." He begged relatives and friends to plead his case with Sido's brothers. Sido, playing with her blond curls, could only "accept her luck and thank God," for the man was wealthy. Colette's tale reads like a richly embroidered legend from a medieval ballad. She had turned Robineau-Duclos, "the slouching alcoholic," into a romantic hero. On January 15, 1857, Sido's actual marriage took place in Schaerbeek, a fashionable suburb of Brussels where the Eugene Landoys were now living with their infant son, Eugene II. It was the end of January when Sido and Jules, escorted by Doctor Lachassagne and his wife, undertook the trip back to Saint-Sauveur. It was a long journey through the lugubrious mining towns of Belgium and northern France. They changed trains in Paris, then went on to Auxerre. From Auxerre, a horse-driven carriage took them to Saint-Sauveur, sleepy in the winter cold. [CHAPTER ONE CONTINUES ...] Copyright © 1998 Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier. All rights reserved.
