The Music Hall Years

On a winter night in 1907, the Moulin Rouge was packed to capacity. Word had spread through Paris that tonight's performance of "Rêve d'Égypte" would feature something unprecedented: Colette, the former Madame Willy, literary sensation and society scandal, would appear nearly naked on stage, playing a mummy who comes to life and falls in love with an archaeologist—played by her current lover, the Marquise de Morny, dressed as a man.

Backstage, Colette applied the last touches of kohl to her eyes. At thirty-four, her body was still magnificent—years of physical training had given her the muscles of an acrobat, the grace of a dancer. She had shocked Paris by leaving her husband, the notorious Willy, who had built his reputation on her novels. Now she was shocking them again by earning her living with her body as well as her pen.

"Five minutes, Madame Colette," called the stage manager.

She looked at herself in the mirror—no longer the provincial girl from Burgundy, no longer the naive wife whose husband had locked her in a room to force her to write. She had become something new: a woman who owned her sexuality, her talent, her life. The scandal sheets called her shameless. She preferred to think of herself as free.

As she walked toward the stage, nearly naked under her transparent veils, she thought of her mother, Sido, who had taught her to observe everything—the way a cat stretches, how morning light changes the color of leaves, the exact smell of rain on warm earth. These music hall years weren't a descent but an education. Here she learned about desire stripped of bourgeois pretense, about bodies and their honest needs, about the democracy of pleasure that made a duchess and a shopgirl equal in the dark.

The curtain rose. The audience gasped—at her beauty, her audacity, the sight of two women embracing on stage. Tomorrow the newspapers would be full of condemnation. But tonight, in this moment, Colette felt the intoxication of absolute presence. She was her body, her body was her art, and art was the only morality that mattered. Later she would return to writing, create masterpieces about love and loss and the natural world. But she would never forget these years when she learned that the flesh, too, could be a form of wisdom.