Word: goudeket
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...world masked by her "leafage"-until one day, on her 80th birthday, Vogue's Irving Penn took "a staggering photograph" that left France's greatest authoress "exposed before posterity" (see cut). As if really seeing her for the first time, Colette's husband, Maurice Goudeket, marveled at what lay beneath the leafage-"a huge, domed forehead, like Beethoven's . . . bare, vast, significant, the forehead of a genius...
This discipline, husband Goudeket shows, was always at hand when Colette required it. In all their 29 years together, there were no "scenes," there was no "betrayal"; only a diligent, equable harmony based on what Colette called "conjugal courtesy" and likened to the Briton nightly donning his dinner jacket in "a lost corner of Nepal." When she deemed the time had come for "passionate love" to give place to "more lasting sentiments," she quietly but frankly informed him of the fact. Goudeket never saw her in the morning before she had done her face, and when the Gestapo came...
Long before he ever saw her, Maurice Goudeket was determined to know the Colette behind the leafage. He first read a book of hers when he was 15 or 16, and she 31 or 32, and announced promptly: "I am going to marry that woman." In 1935, after ten years' intimate friendship with Colette, he did. Close to Colette has little to say about Colette's tempestuous youth, when she wrote her notorious Claudine books and danced with bared breast in a Paris revue. It is simply the story of her and Goudeket's 29 years together...
...Husband Goudeket shows how this unique "pagan love" operated in Colette's daily life. "There is only one creature! D'you hear, Maurice, there is only one creature!" she exclaimed to him once with "the intensity of a pythoness"-and from dawn to dusk she pursued the manifold forms of this one creature. First thing every morning, she must know just where the wind lay and the precise degree of humidity; around her bed were "a barometer, an outdoor thermometer . . . compasses . . . watches, chronometers, binoculars and magnifying glasses." After breakfast she would rush out into her garden like...
Love and Genius. What was it like, living with such a fleshly dynamo? As might be guessed, husband Goudeket never attempted to rival his earth-shattering wife, never disemboweled eclairs, covered his nose with pollen or caressed bees and wasps. "A man does not love a woman for her genius: he loves her in spite of her genius"-and Goudeket's love was as balanced and precise as a line of Colette's prose. For when his tempestuous wife sat down to write (for three hours every afternoon), it was as if some supernatural policeman appeared and took...