Imagine a young girl in the country, very young, very fresh, sensitive to the finest degree, upright, credulous, and doubtless dainty as a daisy; imagine her in the flower of her youth married and carried off to Paris--to the decadent Paris of the nineties--by a man of the world, who is also a man of letters and a man of science, intelligent, corrupt, and cynical as Mephistopheles himself. No, I am not telling you over again the story of ‘Madeleine Jeune femme’; I am telling the history of Madame Colette, and it ends differently. There is, it seems, an amusement in elaborating the sentimental education of a young bride, in complicating it with excursions into vice and into art; brief, the gifted and immoral author who chooses to be known as ‘Willy’ was pleased to make over his wife in his own image. She was an artist to the ends of her finger-tips, and they wrote books together--the famous series of _Claudine_--hailed with delight by all that is least strait-laced in Paris (and, in those days especially, there was very little screwing about the moral waist of one sort of Paris!). For Colette Willy realised a personage, always charming to the man about town in its candid perversity, that of the innocent wanton, or (to quote the title of one of her stories) _L’Ingénue Libertine_. One day I bought one of these Claudine books; it was called _Claudine en Ménage_. I opened it and thought it delightful. What an admirable style, firm and free, full of nature, full of grace, and the character of the girl, at once shrewd and naïve, pleased me immensely ... and then I began to wonder.... And then I did not know what to do with the book! I would not place it on my shelf, I could not leave it lying on the table. Finally, remembering a certain lyric of Robert Browning’s, I took it out into the forest and dropped it deep in the hollow trunk of a tree. There, among the pale wood-lice, and the centipedes, and the fungus, Claudine in her seclusion, finds audience fit though few. One day it must have dawned on Madame Colette Willy that all men were not made on the same pattern--that there was fresh air somewhere in the world even for a married woman--that a man might be a support, and a comfort, and an example--or perhaps, more simply, that one might do without one altogether. Anyhow, Madame Colette Willy became Madame Colette; she divorced her collaborator and began her ascent out of Avernus. She was, in these new conditions, obliged to earn her living, and, mindful of the prices paid for even a successful book, she complicated her profession as woman of letters with the career of a Variety Artist.