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This medal
has been minted in
This medal has been designed by the famous French medalist, Raymond CORBIN.
Colette (French: [kɔ.lɛt]) was the surname
of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle
Colette (28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954). She is best known for her
novel Gigi, the basis for
the film
and Lerner
and Loewe stage
production of the same title. Colette was nominated for the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1948.
av. The portrait
of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette; the signature of the medalist, R Corbin
rv. The symbolic motives from her novel; La
Maison de Claudine (1922) (translated as My mother's house)
diameter - 80 mm, (3¼ “)
weight – 302.80 gr,
(10.68 oz)
metal - bronze, mint patina
Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph
Colette and his wife Adèle Eugénie Sidonie "Sido" Colette (nėe
Landoy) in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye,
Yonne, in the Burgundy
Region of
Her first books, the Claudine
series, were published under her husband's pen name "Willy". Claudine
still has the power to charm; in Belle Époque
According to one writer, "Colette had a poor
relationship with her daughter, Bel-Gazou."
In 1906, she left the unfaithful Gauthier-Villars, living
for a time at the home of the American writer and salonist Natalie
Clifford Barney. The two had a short affair but remained friends
until Colette's death in 1954.
Colette went to work in the music halls of
In 1912, Colette married Henri de Jouvenel, the
editor of the newspaper Le Matin. The couple
had one daughter, Colette
de Jouvenel, known to the family as Bel-Gazou ("beautiful
babbling/chirping" in local
dialect). Colette de Jouvenel later stated that her mother did not
want a child and left her in the care of an English nanny, only rarely visiting
her.
In 1914, during World War I, Colette was
asked to write a ballet for the Paris Opera, which she
outlined under the title "Divertissements pour ma fille". After she
chose Maurice
Ravel to write the music, he reimagined the work as an opera, to which Colette agreed. Ravel
received the libretto to L'enfant
et les sortilèges in 1918, and it was first performed on 21
March 1925.
During the war, Colette converted her husband's Saint-Malo estate into a
hospital for the wounded, and was made a Chevalier
of the Legion of Honour in 1920. She divorced Henri de Jouvenel in
1924, after a much talked-about affair with her stepson, Bertrand
de Jouvenel.
In 1935, Colette married Maurice
Goudeket, an uncle of Juliet Goudeket, alias Jetta Goudal. After
1935, her legal name was simply Sidonie Goudeket. Maurice Goudeket published a
book about his wife, Close to Colette: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman of
Genius. An English translation was published in 1957, by Farrar,
After World War I, Colette's writing career blossomed
following the publication of Chéri (1920). Chéri
tells a story of the end of a six-year affair between an aging retired courtesan, Léa, and a
pampered young man, Chéri. Turning stereotypes upside-down, it is Chéri who
wears silk pajamas and Léa's pearls, and who is the object of gaze. In the end,
Léa demonstrates all the survival skills which Colette associates with
femininity. The story continued in La Fin de Chéri (1926), which contrasts Léa's
strength and Chéri's fragility and decline. Considered nowadays to be Colette's
masterpiece, Chéri was originally met with controversy because of its
setting — the demimonde
of the Parisian courtesans—and its portrayal of the hedonistic Chéri.
After Chéri, Colette entered the world of Modernism, with emphasis
on modernist
poetry and painting revolving around Jean Cocteau, who was
later her neighbor in Jardins
du Palais-Royal. Their relationship and life is vividly depicted in
their books. By 1927, she was frequently acclaimed as
Colette remained in
She spent her final years in a wheelchair cared for by
Maurice Goudeket, whom she called "a saint". In 1951, she attended
the premiere of a documentary
film about her life, and at the end, she was heard saying to
Goudeket, "What a beautiful life I've had."
By the time she died in
Her popular novella Gigi was made into a Broadway play in 1951,
starring Audrey
Hepburn and a highly successful Hollywood motion picture of the same name,
starring Leslie
Caron, Louis
Jourdan, and Maurice Chevalier. Colette
is directly credited with the discovery of a young, unknown Audrey Hepburn, whom the
elder chose on sight to play the eponymous Broadway lead in Gigi. According to
Hepburn herself, she was garrisoned with the 1952 film production company of Monte Carlo Baby at a
hotel in the south of
A pre-Broadway production of the musical, newly adapted
by Heidi Thomas (Call
the Midwife, Cranford, Upstairs Downstairs) and directed by Eric D. Schaeffer (Follies,
Million Dollar Quartet) is planned to run at the Kennedy Center in
January 2015.
A controversial figure throughout her life, Colette
flaunted her lesbian affairs.
She was a member of the Belgian Royal Academy
(1935), president of the Académie
Goncourt (1949) (and the first woman to be admitted into it, in
1945), and a Chevalier (1920) and a Grand Officier (1953) of the Légion
d'honneur.
During the German occupation of France during World War II,
she aided her Jewish friends, including hiding her husband in her attic all
through the war. When she died in
Singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash paid
tribute to the writer in the song, "The Summer I Read Colette", on
her 1996 album 10 Song
Demo.
Truman
Capote wrote a short story about her (1970) called "The White
Rose".
The Colette Study Centre in
In 2014, SUNY Press published Shipwrecked on a Traffic
Island and Other Previously Untranslated Gems (translated by Zack Rogow and
Renée Morel), a collection of sketches, mini-essays, radio talks,
reminiscences, and journalistic pieces written by Colette. This was the first
new work by Colette to appear in English in half a century.