Ces Plaisirs…
One of 125 copies on colored simili-japon paper, this one green.
Signed presentation inscription: “à ma chère Liette, un livre assez sombre, mais sur fond d'azur, avec ma très fidèle affection. Colette.”
Colette, who once claimed that writing was lying, here signs one of her most sincere books. Begun during a cruise on Henri de Rothschild’s yacht in August 1930, the text was completed in November 1931. Between these two dates, her correspondence is eloquent: “I am struggling with difficult things and working like an ant; I hoist something up, then throw it back down, and start again.” Though Colette admitted to the harshness of this labor, and cursed it as she wrote the final word, it would become a text of which she was proud. Revised ten years later, Ces plaisirs… would revert to its originally intended title: Le Pur et l’Impur.
This copy was presented to Juliette de Serres, known as Liette to her intimates. Wife of the composer Louis de Serres, she was above all the mistress of Willy, Colette’s husband, from 1900 onward. After the couple’s divorce, the two women joined forces against Willy, notably during the lawsuit that Juliette de Serres brought against him: the spurned lover had lost at gambling a substantial sum of money that Liette had lent him. He was ordered to repay it.