“At seventy-one dawn still found her undaunted, if not always undamaged.” (Colette, My Mother’s House)

/ madamebibilophile

Although I mentioned in my previous post that I rarely write about memoir, here is another post on the same genre, as I thought it would be perfect for Mother’s Day (today in the UK). A short while ago I picked up a little hardback which had Colette’s meditations on her mother in one volume, My Mother’s House and Sido (1922/1929 transl. 1953 Una Vincenzo Troubridge and Enid MacLeod/Enid MacLeod).

Image from here

Colette clearly adores her mother and admits in the preface the limitation of what she is attempting in these volumes:

“I am not at all sure that I have put the finishing touches to these portraits of her; nor am I at all sure that I have discovered all that she has bequeathed to me. I have come late to this task. But where could I find a better one to form my last?”

My Mother’s House is a series of vignettes which have an energetic immediacy, while Sido perhaps has more of a sense of the older Colette looking back, split into Sido (her mother) The Captain (her father) and The Savages (her siblings).

Colette is the youngest child of her mother’s second marriage, born to parents who adore one another. My Mother’s House is formed through a series of brief chapters, intensely readable, as Colette evokes the late nineteenth-century Burgundy landscape of her childhood beautifully, with a love of the natural world she inherited from her mother Sido.

“I shall never be able to conjure up the splendour that adorns, in my memory, the ruddy festoons of an autumn vine borne down by its own weight and clinging despairingly to some branch of the fir-trees. And the massive lilacs, whose compact flowers — blue in the shade and purple in the sunshine — withered so soon, stifled by their own exuberance.”

Sido is shown as a woman intricately bound with her surroundings, tending her garden with love and knowledge.

“She was already out of sight, but her voice still reached us, a brisk, soprano voice full of inflections that trembled at the slightest emotion and proclaimed, to all and sundry, news of delicate plants, of graftings, of rain and blossomings, like the voice of a hidden bird that foretells the weather.”

She is also a hard worker, running her house and rearing her children.

“Why did no one ever model or paint or carve that hand of Sido’s, tanned and wrinkled early by household tasks, gardening, cold water and the sun, with its long, finely tapering fingers and its beautiful, convex, oval nails?”

There’s nothing saccharine in Colette’s fond reminiscences, and Sido emerges as a feisty, determined character. There’s a very funny chapter on her run in with the locate curé where it’s not totally clear who has emerged victorious (Sido is a non-believer) and I also enjoyed how she dealt with the upset which the precocious Colette experiences by reading beyond her years:

“There’s nothing so terrible as all that in the birth of a child, nothing terrible at all. It’s much more beautiful in real life. The suffering is so quickly forgotten, you’ll see! The proof that all women forget is that it is only men—and what business was it of Zola’s anyway?—who write stories about it.”

Colette’s father is also written about with love, particularly in The Captain section of Sido:

“And he would fasten on his chosen one that extraordinary, challenging, grey-blue gaze of his, which revealed his secrets to no one, though sometimes admitting that such secrets existed.”

These two volumes are just gorgeous: gentle, loving, funny, real. Colette’s parents are portrayed as strong individual characters, brought together by a deep and enduring love, raising a family in circumstances that are not always easy.

My favourite aspect of Colette’s writing is always her evocation of the natural world and there is so much to savour here. However, I’ll end with this mention of how Colette the writer started to emerge, under the sceptical eye of Sido:

“Beautiful books that I used to read, beautiful books that I left unread, warm covering of the walls of my home, variegated tapestry whose hidden design rejoiced my initiated eyes. It was from them I learned, long before the age for love, that love is complicated, tyrannical and even burdensome, since my mother grudged me the prominence they gave it.”

To end, a track from the CD I bought my mother for today (yes a CD, she is 82 and while she embraces much of modern technology streaming music would not go down well 😀 ):

18 thoughts on ““At seventy-one dawn still found her undaunted, if not always undamaged.” (Colette, My Mother’s House)”

  1. What a lovely and very fitting post for the day! I very much enjoyed savouring again those delicious, sensuous, evocative quotes. I discovered Colette’s beautiful writing late in life (rather to my shame but all thanks to the enthusiasm of book bloggers!). My Mother’s House and Sido were the first books I read; I immediately read more but I felt none of them moved me quite as much as those.

    I really hope your Mum enjoys listening to her CD (and you too if you happen to share her taste in music). BTW, I still buy CDs for myself rather than streaming music, and I haven’t even got the excuse of being 82! 😊

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    • So glad you enjoyed the quotes! her writing in these volumes is wonderful, I can see why they are your favourites.

      I like the tangibility of CDs too, but I try and limit it due to space! But I read somewhere that Gen Z like CDs and DVDs, and in my beloved charity bookshop which also sells these things, I’ve noticed more teenagers scouring the shelves. In fact I recently overhead one teen disagreeing with her mother, who had said “You can just stream these?”, only to be told “It’s not the same!”

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      • Your social observation is spot on as far as the one in my household is concerned. We have acquired more CDs of my son’s choice in the past few years than in the years before he was a teenager. Charity shops have proved very happy hunting grounds. We also struggle with space though as CDs have to compete with books!

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  2. The Offspring and I have a long-standing agreement that we don’t do Mother’s Day (in May, here) but he is free to give me presents any other time. Last Friday at dinner for his birthday I discovered that a mystery copy of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey was from him! It arrived ages ago, but he’d sent it direct from the bookseller and there was no indication who it was from. I thought it was from a publisher who’d sent it on spec, and I just put it aside, thinking that eventually a publicist would reveal all.

    I think your mother will love that music, I do!

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    • That’s wonderful Lisa, what a great present!

      Funnily enough Mum and I have the same agreement, but interpretations of medieval drone music was so perfect for her that when this was released a few weeks ago I couldn’t resist! I’m so pleased to hear you enjoyed it too.

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  3. My mother died years ago but one of the things I think about the most when I think of her is her hands and how brown and capable and warm they were so I was delighted to see that quote, thank you!

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  5. Lovely review Madame B, and perfect for this day. Colette wrote so beautifully about her mother, and I’ve revisited this one over the years – probably more than some of her fictions! I totally agree with what you say about her writings about nature too, which are always wonderful. I’ve just been on a bit of a Colette binge myself and you’ve made me want to carry on with it!!

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