Books: Regarde

THE BLUE LANTERN by Colette. 161 pages. Farrar, Straus. $3.95.

The last word uttered by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette on her deathbed in Paris in 1954 was “regarde.” To her, it meant to look, feel, wonder, accept, live. For all her 81 years she obeyed that injunction with an immense, daylight sense of reality and a pagan delight in the sensuous experiences that delivered the world to her mind and to the blue note paper on which she recorded it. The Blue Lantern, written between 1946 and 1948 and now translated into English for the first time, is Colette’s last major work—a moving but unsentimental record of how it was with a poet of the senses whose senses were failing.

As she became progressively crippled with arthritis, Colette saw her world shrink to the dimensions of the cone of blue light thrown across her bed by an electric bulb shrouded in blue paper. She notices that the voices of the children outside in the Palais-Royal garden are not as loud as they once were. Her constant companion is pain—”pain ever young and active, instigator of astonishment, of anger, imposing its rhythm on me, provoking me to defy it”—but she will not blunt it, for pain, too, can be a boon to one with an “instinct for the game of life.”

Scratched Belly. What is fascinating in The Blue Lantern is the way Colette’s belief in the unity of all tangible things served to enlarge her shrunken world. Even the fire in the grate becomes “my guest and the work of my hands; like every other animal it enjoys having its belly scratched from underneath.”

During those years beneath the blue lantern, Colette held court much as Proust did in his cork-lined room. Her blue eyes ringed with kohl, her curls carefully brushed over her immense forehead, she received friends sitting up in bed, nibbling garlic and sipping champagne. But she no longer wished to meet the young: “I dread them. It is in the course of nature for declining strength to be scared of up-and-coming new forces. The children who write me letters lay claim to great timidity. But it is for those of my age to feel timidity, almost to the point of painful intensity.”

Joyful Cry. As in her best books—Colette’s bedside world in The Blue Lantern seems paradoxically always in motion, and she ends her remarkable book with a characteristic yes to her dwindling life: “I am still going to write; for me there is no other destiny. But when does writing have an end? What is the warning sign? A trembling of the hand? I used to think that with the completed book you raise the joyful cry ‘Finished!’ You clap your hands, only to find pouring from them grains of sand you believed to be precious. That is the moment when, in the figures inscribed by those grains of sand, you may read the words ‘To be continued . . .’ “