La représentation de Paris à la « Belle Époque » chez Colette

Abstract

Paris holds a major place in Colette's work. An autobiographical narrative, appeared in 1944, Paris de ma fenêtre, in fact the confession. She remembers Paris of her youth that of the ""Belle Époque"" there, such as it existed before the World War I. His discovery of Paris in his life, leave of 1893, Colette told it in a way hardly veiled through the series of the Claudine; semi-autobiographical novels were published between 1900 and 1903. She also transposed this experience into most of her other romantic papers, up to the theater, in En camarades, a drama in two acts, created in 1907. It gets free of it a representation of complex Paris, the esthetics of which is widely borrowed from the World of show. In his narratives, indeed, Colette excels in taking ""plastic poses"" to resume the subtitle of his play, En camarades. She"" poses"", indeed, she adopts postures, agreed attitudes, she mimes her own role to produce effects and to seem what she is not really. It is one of keys of her, creative approach. What she says of Paris which she knew about the ""Belle Époque"" participates of this fundamental feature of her personality. Resting on this very theatrical character of his writing and by postulating that the descriptions which she gives of this place, this city of Paris in the ""Belle Époque"", would be as so many variations, manifestoes or hidden, of the same central, secret self-portrait, his clean, we tried to identify the presence and its representations associated with this favored place, Paris, in its work, and with the main male and feminine characters, the Parisians and the Parisians, that we meet there…