ABSTRACT
Published in 1922 and written following a visit to the house at Saint-Sauveur, La Maison de Claudine was the first of Colette’s livres-souvenirs. It provides the reason for Philippe Lejeune’s exclusion of Colette’s personal writing from the genre of autobiography. Not ‘une autobiographie suivie’, 1 it is a collection of fragmentary narrative and descriptive pieces, inviting a random reading that selects and savours, rather than one that seeks a continuous story. Yet withal, the collection is arranged in a loose chronological order that allows the emergence of two life stories — one of Sido and the other, far sketchier, of her daughter. 2 Together these two stories project a temporal continuity across a cycle of two generations in which the second house repeats the pattern inaugurated by the first. It is as if that which has been scattered through death and dispersal has been gathered together in its second incarnation. ‘Où sont les enfants?’ [Where are the children?] asks the opening piece, 3 to be answered in ‘Le Veilleur’ [‘The Watcher’], in which three children — two boys, one girl — reappear with a mother.
