In “La Naissance du jour” 🌅, Colette draws a parallel between herself at the age of 55, living at ‘La Treille Muscate…’

In “La Naissance du jour” 🌅, Colette draws a parallel between herself at the age of 55, living at ‘La Treille Muscate’ near St-Tropez, and her mother Sido following the Captain’s death. The common thread is that they both turn away from a man 💔 who might love them and, in doing so, Colette implies that they are turning away from one last love.

The narrative is punctuated here and there with extracts from Sido’s letters to her daughter 💌, and we know that Colette rewrote entire passages in her own way, to make her say what she wanted, as she wanted. In this way, the daughter reinvents her mother and crafts a fictional character.

The book also contains passages in the present tense within a narrative set in the past, as well as annotations that refer to her own writing 📔. In 1928, Colette was searching for a ‘new alphabet’. This brings to mind the ‘conversation with Maman’ and the theoretical reflection on literature from which Proust, twenty years earlier, had conceived his initial project, “Intermittences du cœur”: time lost, time regained.

🖋️ “Why should I stop my hand from moving across this paper, which for so many years has recorded what I know about myself, what I try to hide, what I make up and what I guess?”

#Colette #proustagram #LaNaissanceduJour #RTP #LeTempsretrouvé #MarcelProust #Sido #JeanneWeil