Chéri and The End of Chéri

by Colette

“To receive happiness from someone,” she reflects, more like herself, in The Pure and the Impure, “is it not to choose the sauce with which one wants to be eaten?”

An utterly foolish hope, of the kind that occurs to people as they’re falling from a tower, glimmered between them and evanesced.

I do gain some advantages from my failings, and nothing scares me.

and, because the evening air was cooling down and the memory he’d taken away with him was shrinking, like a traitor, into the inmost depths of his being—there to assume its definitive power and scale—he believed he’d forgotten all about it, and he felt happy.

Extreme beauty elicits no sympathy; it doesn’t belong to any homeland; it only grows more austere with time.

The servants and Chéri dreaded in Edmée what they sensed was more vulgar than themselves.

He left behind an entry hall filled with a mist of suspended tobacco smoke, the strong perfume of women and flowers, and the toxic, bitter almond scent of cherry brandy.

He was squeezing his past to infuse one last drop of juice into his barren present;