“He loved silence, and furtiveness, and never knocked at the door of the boudoir, which his wife, since the war, called her study” (147 168). “‘The boudoir will soon come to be known as the study, and no mistake,’ he thought” (140 158). The following quotations from the novella are selected to indicate Colette’s keen sense of aesthetics, particularly the subtle vulgarity of the post-WWI world. Pleasure would give way to productivity and men who were once worshipped for their beauty, money, and abundance of leisure time would become extraneous when usefulness and purpose took over. Life would never again be about a state of being it would be about doing. However you look at it, the move from such a world (pre-war) to the land of productivity and purpose that would arise out of World War I was drastic - a giant step into modernity. When the Pal leaves town for a while, Chéri lies in front of the photos and blows his brains out. He has her set him up in rooms where he can look at photos of Léa pinned to the wall and listen to the Pal reminisce. He is despondent.Ĭhéri runs into the Pal, another former courtesan who used to run an opium den. She is friendly but clearly has removed herself from everything resembling their former life. She has gained excessive weight and has short grey hair now. He at last goes to visit his ex-mistress Léa, at first not recognizing her. It becomes clear that there is an unspoken arrangement between himself and Edmée where they each ignore the other’s affairs. Desmond has become commercially successful and Chéri sees only crassness in his friend. Edmée is infatuated with a Doctor Arnaud but Chéri is indifferent to this, spending his time gravitating to oddballs such as the old Baroness de La Berche with whom he drives around pointlessly. The post-WWI years find Chéri alienated, first by his wife’s devotion to her hospital work. She was a complete sensualist but she gave herself up to her senses with such delicacy of perception, with such exquisiteness of physical pain as well as physical ecstasy, that she ennobled sensualism to grandeur. Everything that Colette touched became human….

The last of chéri