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Chéri
  • Published: 2 November 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099422761
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $22.99

Chéri

Formats & editions
Paperback
17 Oct 2023
EBook
4 June 2026
EBook
30 Apr 2011
Paperback
2 Nov 2001
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A sumptuous belle epoque tale of a courtesan and a lover half her age. Chéri is considered Colette’s finest book.

A vivid, believable love story between an older woman and a younger man.

Léa de Lonval is a magnificent and aging courtesan facing the end of her career. She has devoted the last six years to the amorous education of the exquisitely handsome and spoilt Chéri – a playboy half her age. When an advantageous marriage is arranged for Chéri, Léa reluctantly decides their relationship must end. But neither lover can foresee how deeply they are connected, or how much they will have to give up.

First published in 1920, it was instantly greeted by Marcel Proust and André Gide as a masterpiece.

‘I devoured Chéri at a gulp. What a wonderful subject and with what intelligence, mastery and understanding of the least-admitted secrets of the flesh’ André Gide
  • Published: 2 November 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099422761
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

About the author

Colette

Colette, the creator of Claudine, Cheri and Gigi, and one of France’s outstanding writers, had a long, varied and active life. She was born in Burgundy on 1873 into a home overflowing with dogs, cats and children, and educated at the local village school. At the age of twenty she moved to Paris with her first husband, the notorious writer and critic Henry Gauthier-Villas (Willy). By locking her in her room, Willy forced Collette to write her first novels (the Claudine sequence), which he published under his name. They were an instant success. Colettte left Willy in 1906 and worked in music-halls as an actor and dancer. She had a love affair with Napoleon’s niece, married twice more, had a baby at 40 and at 47. Her writing, which included novels, portraits, essays and a large body of autobiographical prose, was admired by Proust and Gide. She was the first woman President of the Académie Goncourt, and when she died, aged 81, she was given a state funeral and buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
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Also by Colette

Claudine's House
The Vagabond
Chéri and The End of Chéri
Gigi
Moab Is My Washpot
Gigi and The Cat
Chance Acquaintances and Julie De Carneilhan
See all

Praise for Chéri

I devoured Chéri at a gulp. What a wonderful subject and with what intelligence, mastery and understanding of the least-admitted secrets of the flesh

André Gide

Her writing is as sensuous and acute as it is unsentimental... Very beautiful and subtle... I feel more alive when I read her

Helen Simpson, Guardian

Colette is a kind of corsetiere of love. This most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her and help her to be beautiful . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris . . . It's as if all the house fronts of Paris were cut away and we could see men and women talking, dressing, brooding, loving

Anatole Broyard, New York Times

Everything that Colette touched became human... She was a complete sensualist; but she gave herself up to her senses with such delicacy of perception, with such exquisiteness of physical pain as well as physical ecstasy, that she ennobled sensualism almost to grandeur

The Times

Sumptuous

Time

A perfectionist in her every word

Spectator

Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France

New York Times

The paradoxes of great literature are those of human nature, and Colette is nothing if not human . . . Accessible and elusive; greedy and austere; courageous and timid; subversive and complacent; scorchingly honest and sublimely mendacious; an inspired consoler and an existential pessimist—these are the qualities of the artist and the woman. It is time to rediscover them

Judith Thurman, biographer of Colette

She has been compared to a 20th-century female Montaigne, and it is true that her books offer a manual on how to live fearlessly and joyfully – greedily alive to every sensation and experience

Lisa Allardice, Guardian

A perpetual feast to the reader. Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful

Raymond Mortimer

Vintage has republished this classic from Colette that was first published in 1920 and it still sparkles and teases

The Connexion