Word: goudeket
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CLOSE TO COLETTE (245 pp.)-Maurice Goudeket-Farrar Straus & Cudahy...
...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...
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...
Died. Sidonie-Gabrielle Claudine Co lette Gauthier-Villars de Jouvenel Goudeket (Colette), 81, called by Poet Paul Claudel "the greatest living writer in France" (Cheri, Gigi); of a heart ailment; in Paris. At 20, Colette married Henri Gauthier-Villars, a potboiling hack who won fame by publishing under his own name the novels he forced her to turn out, in turn did much to teach her a style as ruthlessly chaste as her heroines were unchaste. Colette depicted quietly desperate women in love and in bed, became the most honored female writer in France's history, first woman president...