| Acknowledgment | ix |
Chapter 1 | Why Colette? she Invented an Alphabet | 1 |
Chapter 2 | Life or Works? | 17 |
| From Saint-Sauveur to Willy: An Initiation | 25 |
| Vagabondage and Social Success: Missy, Sidi, Bel-Gazou | 39 |
| From Mother-Son Incest to the Consecration of the Mother: Bertrand de Jouvenel and Sido | 48 |
| A Continual Rebirth | 55 |
| Two Sides: Money and Writing | 57 |
| The Idol Cornered by History | 62 |
Chapter 3 | Writing: Tendrils of the Vine | 74 |
| The "Large-Limbed" Need to Write | 74 |
| Tendrils of the Vine in Seven Movements | 85 |
| Metaphors? No, Metamorphoses | 95 |
| Two Narrative Registers | 100 |
| The Imaginary as the Right to Lie | 106 |
| The Solitude of Music and of Crime | 110 |
Chapter 4 | Who Is Sido? | 123 |
| A Slow Apparition | 123 |
| The Child and the Enchantments: Melanie Klein and Colette | 127 |
| The Incestual Mother with "One of [Her] Children" | 133 |
| What a Character! | 140 |
Chapter 5 | Depression, Perversion, Sublimation | 155 |
| Freud's Way: Pere-version or Mere-version | 155 |
| Idealization: Latency and the Superego | 159 |
| Genitality or Neoreality? | 164 |
| Succeeding Where the Pervert Exhausts Himself | 168 |
| Psychopathia Sexualis and Melancholy According to Colette | 172 |
| Pain, or Colette the Father | 184 |
Chapter 6 | The Metamorphic Body: Plants, Beasts, and Monsters | 194 |
| "... My Old Subtle Senses" | 194 |
| "O Geraniums, O Foxglove ..." | 209 |
| The Animal, or an Unused Love | 213 |
| "... If 'Mme Colette' Is Not a Monster, She Is Nothing" (Jean Cocteau) | 224 |
| From the Death Drive to Decapitation | 238 |
Chapter 7 | Men and Women, Pure and Impure | 241 |
| A New Mystic? | 241 |
| Love Expresses Itself Only in Metaphors | 246 |
| ... Or, How to Wrest Oneself Away from Love | 248 |
| From the Woman-Object to Objectless Love | 254 |
| A Queen of Bisexuality | 260 |
| Precocious Maturity, or Delicacy According to Mitsou and Gigi | 267 |
| "... Those Men that Other Men Call Great" | 274 |
| The Femine Ideal Includes Its Negative | 283 |
| Mother and Child | 287 |
| The War Between the Sexes | 294 |
| "Those Pleasures Thoughtlessly Called Physical ..." | 297 |
| The Infantile Revisited from the Direction of the Impure | 310 |
| Which Couple? Or, the Triumph of the Imaginary | 315 |
Chapter 8 | A Little Politics all the Same | 322 |
| An Antifeminist | 323 |
| The Occupation, or the Politics of the Gourmand Ostrich | 326 |
| Living the Image: From Illustration ... | 341 |
| ... To Cinema: In Praise of the Imaginary | 348 |
Chapter 9 | Still Writing, Between Balzac and Proust | 358 |
| "Balzac, Difficult? He? My Cradle, My Forest, My Journey?" | 358 |
| Proust? "As in Balzac, I'm Awash in It ... It's Delicious ..." | 368 |
| Memory and Worthiness | 379 |
| "Because Writing Leads Only to Writing" | 391 |
Chapter 10 | Is There a Feminine Genius? | 403 |
| Simone de Beauvoir: "Situation" and "Individual Opportunities" | 404 |
| The Two-Faced Oedipus | 408 |
| Intersections | 419 |
| Notes | 429 |
| Bibliography | 483 |
| Index | 487 |