ABSTRACT
Mes apprentissages has proven to be a somewhat problematic text in recent Colette scholarship, lending itself to more or less questionable uses in biographical work rather than to the more agile and searching questions of textual criticism. It purports to purvey the facts of Colette’s marriage to Willy. Were we to read it from Colette’s point of view, it would tell us a cautionary tale of which Colette is the victim, but most recent uses of the text find its account unconvincing, 1 sometimes self-serving and untrustworthy: Willy, now dead and unable to defend himself, is the victim of a somewhat unappealing text and of its author. 2 At the time of its publication, 1935–1936, 3 the book was widely and sometimes enthusiastically reviewed by some of the best critics in the business. 4 A note in Gide’s Journal (quoted in Pichois and Brunet, Colette, pp. 359–60), admires the discretion of Colette’s portraits and her compositional skills, then passes judgment on the ‘hideous’ milieu that she depicts (and by which, he worries, she has perhaps been contaminated). It is representative of the kind of interest it elicited.
