I was asked by a friend if I could have any apartment in Paris and I had two answers. One, if I could only have an apartment I'd chose Colette's apartment at the Palais Royal. Two, if I could have a building I'd chose the British Embassy, but then I shouldn't be greedy.
I found this video, which is a close look at Colette's apartment, currently inhabited by Jacques Grange, the interior decorator and artist. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to embed, but you can view it here.
Colette's historic apartment is in the Palais Royal, home of many a scandal when it was occupied by the Duke of Bourbon (by scandal I mean it was a brothel and gambling house). I love that Jacques Grange preserved much of the house and most of Colette's spirit. If you watch the video he even calls her "Madame Goudeket", which is quite some deference for someone who spent most of her life on a first name basis with the world.
I have a number of books full of photos of Colette and inevitably her apartment where, later in life she spent a vast majority of her time due to ill health. What cemented my decision beyond the history of the Palais Royal and Colette herself was she was a woman after my own heart when it came to her desk and a little story of my own.
I found this video, which is a close look at Colette's apartment, currently inhabited by Jacques Grange, the interior decorator and artist. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to embed, but you can view it here.
Colette's historic apartment is in the Palais Royal, home of many a scandal when it was occupied by the Duke of Bourbon (by scandal I mean it was a brothel and gambling house). I love that Jacques Grange preserved much of the house and most of Colette's spirit. If you watch the video he even calls her "Madame Goudeket", which is quite some deference for someone who spent most of her life on a first name basis with the world.
I have a number of books full of photos of Colette and inevitably her apartment where, later in life she spent a vast majority of her time due to ill health. What cemented my decision beyond the history of the Palais Royal and Colette herself was she was a woman after my own heart when it came to her desk and a little story of my own.
In Robert Phelps' "Belles Saions, A Colette Scrapbook", there are multiple quotes about Colette talking about her desk. The little pot of pens she kept on her desk and her massive paper weight collection. How she liked to look out her window and when she became ill, the historic society in charge of the preservation of the Palais Royal, even with all their rules replaced the wooden panels on Colette's windows with glass so she could continue this favorite pass time. Later on in life, when she couldn't sit at her beloved desk, she took to writing in bed surrounded by the last of her pets and covered in a mink blanket where she ate cherries and received her beloved friends.
Among the writers I admire, Colette (born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) has a special meaning to me. She was one of the most successful writers of her time and is still one of the most successful female writers of any time. She was bold and brash and theatrical and scandalised conservative French Catholic norms with not only her words, but also her life. This is why I'd chose her apartment over all others no matter how much bigger or how much more grand other apartments might be. I always think if I could just sit in her window with paper and a pot of fresh pens, I might string my sentences together as if each word were its own pearl with the same practiced hands as Madame Goudeket.
Like Colette I grew up reading everything I could get my eyes and hands upon, but unlike Colette I grew up in many countries were women weren't allowed to read. Since reading was already such a taboo pleasure, I talked myself out of the idea that one day I might write a book of my own.
One day there was a rain storm, the kind you can only have in Africa where the rain is so powerful it threatens to cave in the roof in order to get to the ground. There it amasses another type of force entirely. It collects quickly and moves like liquid lightning taking everything that crosses its path along with it.
That day was no different. I stood in the window and watched hoping we would have to climb up on to the roof for safety. If only the water would get high enough we could be stranded up there for days. The house would become a sort of island or maybe a ship. I wondered if the house were not actually a ship. I desperately wanted to believe that just before the potential catastrophe would hit that the house would transform into a massive steam ship and kept looking at the chimney for any sign of smoke.
A few hours later life had gone back to normal. I was completely dry having not been allowed to even open the window just enough to put my hand outside to feel the rain fall upon it. The house was just a stupid house and not a ship at all. I became highly suspicious that the chimney was just an ordinary chimney, but why should it be? What was a chimney doing in Africa anyway?
Discontented I remember going outside into the yard where the earth was already begining to dry. A massive amount of silt and sand had been deposited in the flower bed by the temporary river the rain had caused. Little worms, some bloated and some lifeless and others optimistic and trying to burrow back under the dirt made our yard look like a battlefield and I hadn't the inclination to save the ones who were merely wounded, though this was a particular favorite game of mine and I considered myself an expert amateur Worm Rescuer and even had a special bucket I used for this sole purpose.
Without thinking I picked up a stick and began to scribble in the dirt. I wrote a story about a ship that could turn into a house, but it was a stupid ship and it'd forgotten how to turn itself back into a ship again. I wrote until I grew bored with scribbling in the dirt and went inside to find my papa.
He was as always in his study, which was a place not forbidden to me as long as I didn't disturb his desk or knock over the tall stacks of leather bound books they give to lawyers even if they have good memories like my father. I navigated them as cautiously as if they were landmines and the softest touch might set them off and all those things my lawyer parents talked about at the supper table would come bursting out of them and then I'd go to jail because as far as I knew lawyers made people go to jail when they did something wrong and upsetting my father's work was considered a criminal offense.
I stared at my papa for a really long time. My feet started to hurt from standing in the same place so long and so I started to sing softly in the hopes of getting his attention. When this didn't work I squirmed my way under his long arms and then stared at him right in the eyes and even though I knew I could be in big trouble I told him that I was going to be a writer one day. Not right away because first I wanted to be a nuclear physicist and then maybe build a robot, but eventually I'd get around to it.
I told him my story and my papa laughed and lifted me up to sit on his desk even though it was full of papers and I knew that he knew I really was going to be a writer.
A few months after my papa passed away I found a letter he'd written me long after our closeness had evaporated like the rain in the heat of the African afternoon. It was sandwiched between pages of Colette's La Fin du Cheri and what it said was almost nothing. It mostly a blank page except for a little scribble near the bottom in my father's handwriting that said "write".
I dream about having a desk like Colette's to write my stories and all the blank pages I will one day fill, but this page remains wedged between the pages where I found it and it's message - no it's command - was enough to inspire me to write.
