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...