ABSTRACT
Published respectively in 1946 and 1949, L’Étoile Vesper and Le Fanal bleu are the last works written by Colette, at the age of 73 and 76 respectively. In them, she retails her daily existence, the visits she receives and the excursions on which she is taken, the comings and goings in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, memories from diverse periods, and memorial portraits of the close friends who have died. Even as a young writer, Colette was concerned with ageing, but if her fictional characters are worried by the fading of their charms, her own concern was determined by her physical capacity to earn her living in the theatre. 1 Her last texts are reflections upon the reduction of vitality and the shrinking social, spatial and temporal horizons of old age. In this sense, they are ‘auto-biography’ in a quite literal sense: they are not the story of a self, but of the bodily existence of the writer, which is both the very condition and the raison d’être of the writing, registered in the rhythms of its ways. They challenge the habitual search by literary scholarship for themes and structures — transitions between topics are either freely associative, or non-existent — the writing meanders, then fragments, apparently ‘sans buts ni desseins’ [without purpose or design] (L’Étoile Vesper, p. 769); they hold no secrets for the hermeneut.
