Cornucopia

By Patricia Blake

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF COLETTE

Edited by Robert Phelps

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 605 pages;

$19.95

One hundred collected stories by Colette make for a sumptuous display, rather like a table spread with the fruit and wine she celebrated in her books: "Late-ripening cherries, rosy peaches, thin-skinned Marseilles figs, misty hothouse grapes and champagne shuddering in carafes of heavy crystal."

Editor Robert Phelps has made the most of Colette's sensuous prose. Thirty-one stories in this volume have never before appeared in English, and 29 others have received fresh translations. Devotees of Gigi, Cheri and The Vagabond will encounter some of the author's familiar characters as she first conceived them: ravishing courtesans, indolent young gigolos and harried music-hall artists.

Colette's preparatory sketches for her masterworks Cheri (1920) and The Last of Cheri (1926) show how hard she labored to achieve an effect of lapidary simplicity and ease. The fledgling gigolo Cheri made his first appearance as a runny-nosed boy called Clouk. "When I gave birth to this beautiful young man," the author later recalled, "he was ugly, something of a runt, and sickly, suffering from swollen adenoids." He bored her. As a result, "Clouk awoke from a few months' sleep, cast off his pale little slough like a molting snake, emerged gleaming, devilish, unrecognizable." The creature that resulted from this metamorphosis was soon to make himself at home in the bed of another of Colette's celebrated characters, Lea, the retired courtesan. Upon reading the final version of Cheri, Andre Gide wrote the author that he had devoured her short novel "in a single gulp." His verdict: "From beginning to end, not a weakness, not a redundancy, not a commonplace."

The collection also includes two novellas that rank as classics, not only in Colette's canon, but in all of 20th century French literature. The Tender Shoot is the story of a singularly nasty middle-aged roue's pursuit of a 15-year-old peasant girl. Upon this squalid tale, Colette lavished her most lyrical language and poetic fancies, heightening the sense of evil.

Here, the seducer savors the girl child: "So much beauty, with no adornments except cotton underclothes ... no scent except the slightly russet fragrance of the hair.

When she was violently excited I could breathe in the smell of that plant... what is its name? ... one of the pea family, with pink flowers ... that blondes give out when they sweat." For the child's seducer, even the surrounding countryside seems suffused with his desire: "I was listening to the noise of the wind which ... was sobbing under the doors and bringing us through the open windows--it was very mild--a poignant smell from the terrace outside--the smell of dampness before rain, of flowers when the season of flowers is over."

Still, as Colette remarked of her writing, her "great landscape was always the human face." No work demonstrates this better than The Kepi, the portrait of a doomed 46-year-old woman in love with a 25-year-old French lieutenant. Sexually aroused for the first time, she awakens with a "fevered glitter," then grows plump with contentment. The fatal moment comes after lovemaking, when her hand, "straying over the bed," happens upon her lover's kepi, the round French officer's cap, laden with gold braid. "She yielded to one of those all-too-typical fem nine reflexes; she sat up in her crumpled chemise, planted the kepi over one ear, gave it a roguish little tap to settle it, and hummed: 'With bugle and fife and drum/ The soldiers are coming to town.' " Appalled, her young lover takes flight, having suddenly perceived under the absurd headgear all the ravages of age, "the slack breasts ... the leathery, furrowed neck, the red patches on the skin below the ears . . . that groove, like a dried-up river that hollows the lower eyelid after making love, and that vinous, fiery flush that does not cool off quickly enough when it burns on an aging face."

That devastating scene was written when Colette was 70. The Kepi was to be her last major work, though she lived on, bedridden and stricken with arthritis, until her death at 81 in 1954. Did she despair, like her last heroine? Not at all. To the end she insisted, "Love has never been a question of age. I shall never be so old as to forget what love is. "

-- By Patricia Blake