Colette's "la vagabond"

I didn't know it was the day before Colette's Birthday when I started to read this again. Well, Happy Birthday Dear Colette! She would've been 140 years old.

I was quite lucky that during my late teenage years I became friends with people whose choices in literature had a lasting influence in me. Works by writers Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Laura Esquivel, Oscar Wilde, Herman Hesse, Milan Kundera, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (to wit a few) were amongst that brought  joy to a little table shared by 2 or 3 other people, breathless over what book at lunch or quick breakfasts at the school cafeteria. There were also nights spent sipping coffee our meager college allowance allows until the early hours of dawn. These were cheap joys, pocket-sized memories that never fail to cheer me up especially at times when I brood over a boring or exhausting day at work. When one comes across something: a song, a poem, a book, a thin ribbon of scent, a work of art, a photo that marked a moment some number of years ago, one can't help but wish for a secret passage to those rare, rare times. But I'm getting sentimental, again. 

But it is just as so while I read Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's "The vagabond" again. One of the books I had the instance of sharing with my like-minded friends. It was actually my literature teacher (who I became close chums with up to now) who lent me her own copy then one of my professors in grad studies offered her own as she assigns the very book to discuss in class (which I did a horrible job at). Over the years I never own a copy of it and though I found a collection of her short stories during my visit to the Philippines in 2007 (?), I had to give it away as a present for a dear friend. However, during my visit last year (December 2013), I came across the very book sold at P154 (around 5 BND) in Robinson's Booksale. So here, again, what must've been my 4th or 5th rereading of this literary gem which I find was and still is a delightful, charming and fascinating little book.

    

Miracle and Colette ( I gave as a present)

The story is about Renee Nere, 33, who earns here way into life as a music-hall artiste ( and once as a writer). She then meets an admirer, the rich Maxime Dufferein-Chautel who woos her despite her obvious disregard for the fellow. It's interesting how their relationship turned sweet somewhere in the middle of the book, but what's more interesting is the prose itself.

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      To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play around a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy. 

     To write is to sit and stare, hypnotised, at the reflection of the window in the silver-ink stand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one's cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then the orgy of inspiration  from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed and laden with treasures thst one unloads slowly on to the virgin page in the little round pool of light under the lamp. 

     To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it-- and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in the dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower. 

     To write is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to not and to describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double pointed nib, the many-hued, fugitive, thrilling adjective . . . The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar. 

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     A vagabond, maybe, but one who is resigned to revolving on the same spot like my companions and brethren. It is true that departures sadden and exhilarate me, and whatever I pass through, new countries, skies pure of cloudy, seas under rain the color of a grey pearl --- something of myself catches on it and clings so passionately that I feel as though I were leaving behind me a thousand little phantoms in my image, rocked on the waves, cradled in the leaves, scattered among the clouds. But does not a little phantom, more like me than any of the others, remain sitting in my chimney corner, lost in a dream and as good as gold as it bends over a book which it forgets to open?