Chéri - Couverture souple

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 2702488714 ISBN 13 : 9782702488713

Editeur : Le Livre de Poche, 2004

Synopsis

Léa de Lonval, une courtisane de près de cinquante ans, est la maîtresse de Fred Peloux, surnommé Chéri. A mesure qu'elle éprouve le manque de conviction croissant de son jeune amant, Léa ressent, avec un émerveillement désenchanté et la lucidité de l'amertume, les moindres effets d'une passion qui sera la dernière. Pourtant il suffira à Chéri d'épouser la jeune Edmée pour comprendre que la rupture avec Léa ne va pas sans regrets. La peinture narquoise d'un certain milieu demi-mondain, l'analyse subtile de l'âme féminine, les charmes cruels de la séduction, l'humour un peu triste de la romancière, font de Chéri une des œuvres les plus attachantes et les plus célèbres de Colette.

A propos du livre

Biographie de l'auteur :

‘Me a feminist?’ She scoffed in 1910. ‘I’ll tell you what the suffragettes deserve: the whip and the harem’. Colette was an intriguing and flamboyant figure. Born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Burgundy in 1873 she moved to Paris at the age of 20 with her husband, the writer and critic, Henry Gauthiers-Viller (Willy). Forcing Colette to write, Willy published her novels in his name and the Claudine series became an instant success. She escaped her exploitative first husband to live by her pen and work in music-halls as a dancer. Colette had a lesbian love affair with Napoleon's niece, she married three times, had a baby at 40 and at 47, preferring ‘passion to goodness’, she seduced her teenage stepson. In the meantime she wrote stunning novels that were admired by Proust and Gide – Gigi, Sido, Cheri, and Break of Day. Colette lived to be over 80. She was the first woman President of the Academie Goncourt and was the first woman in France to be accorded a state funeral.

Revue de presse :

"Colette is a kind of corsetiere of love. This most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her and help her to be beautiful . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris . . . It's as if all the house fronts of Paris were cut away and we could see men and women talking, dressing, brooding, loving" (Anatole Broyard New York Times)

"Everything that Colette touched became human... She was a complete sensualist; but she gave herself up to her senses with such delicacy of perception, with such exquisiteness of physical pain as well as physical ecstasy, that she ennobled sensualism almost to grandeur" (The Times)

"Sumptuous" (Time)

"A perfectionist in her every word" (Spectator)

"Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France" (New York Times)

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Le Livre de Poche
• Date d'édition: 2004
• ISBN 10: 2702488714
• ISBN 13: 9782702488713
• Reliure: Poche
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 185