Prologue
feminists. Her work, nonetheless, was held high in the pantheon of French writers. I had decided that the focus of my work would be on Colette’s literary style, in particular the way she used imagery. I was interested in the power of metaphor and symbol in literature, and was fascinated by her use of colour and the way she used images to create a concrete representation of an idea, feeling or state of mind. For me, Colette succeeded in making the abstract become real, using the physical world of the senses to reveal the inner world of the mind. ‘Between the real and the imagined,’ she wrote, ‘there is always the place taken by the word, magnificent and larger than the object.’ During my first year in Paris I lived in student digs at the Cité Universitaire, near Parc Montsouris in the south of the city. In the afternoons, after studying at the Bibliothèque nationale, I would walk from the library along the river and up the boulevard Saint-Michel to take the train home from Luxembourg station. The walk across the Pont des Arts, as the setting sun lit up the domed silhouette of the Institut de France, made my heart glow with the joy of being in Paris. Then my student life changed. I married an Australian lawyer. We had met at university and had travelled to Europe together—he to London to do a master’s degree in international law and me to Paris. We were young and in love, and Paris was such a romantic city. When a position came up for an international lawyer in Paris, it was almost like it was meant to be. We were married, and moved into a tiny apartment just off avenue Mozart in the 16th arrondissement. Living as a student, eating in student restaurants in the Latin Quarter and hanging out with other students, had been great fun, but now my Parisian life was different—rather than strolling across the Pont des Arts, I was going to the markets on my way home from the library, learning to cook in the French style, hosting dinner parties, going to exhibitions and concerts, being part of a different rhythm of Parisian life. I still spent most days at the Bibliothèque nationale, in the beautiful old reading room with its domed ceiling. It was just a couple of minutes’ walk from the Palais-Royal, where Colette had lived for the last twenty years of her life. The gardens of the Palais-Royal were a quiet and peaceful place to sit in the sunshine when I needed a break from the books. I would often look
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