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No other writer appears to have told so much about herself as Colette, to have plundered so markedly her own life in each of its stages in order to create her different fictional aliases: Claudine, Renée Néré, Léa, Julie de Carneilhan. The first person, her favorite narrative stance especially in the early part of her career, deceives; the lyrical outbursts seduce and seem to deliver her to her readers in all her intimacy. And the facts of her life, at that time scandalous and even now intriguing, have tended to attract not only biographers' but also critics' attention. Like Rimbaud, she has become something of a legend and indeed was already partly so while she was alive: Colette the author and model of the Claudines and at the same time the last lyric writer; Colette the mime and dancer who appeared on stage scantily clad; Colette who was stranger to no sensual pleasure, including lesbian affairs and the seduction of her stepson as well as the scoffing of truffles; Colette, eventually, the wise old lady, a sort of Mother Earth who "knew all about" men and wine and animals; and finally Colette the great writer, whom even Proust called "maître."
What remains incontrovertible behind all the scandal and the anecdotes and her eventual adulation by some as a cult figure is the ample evidence of Colette the writer.
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