What Paris Reads

CHERI--Colette--.A. & C. Boni-- ($2.50).

"Lea could remember Cheri as a baby ... by turns adored or forgotten, matured among blotchy maids and tall sardonic valets. . . ." At 14 Cheri fled from boarding school restraint, at 18 he was a miniature old man with black circles under his eyes, "a fussy little property owner with his nose in everything"--needlessly, for his mother was a well-paid harlot.

Lea, his mother's friend, was a cool blonde 24 years older than Cheri. When Lea invited the youth to come with her to the country he brought along his Renouhard runabout, saying, "I'll pay for the gasoline but youll pay for the chauffeur's meals." Through their subsequent seven-year amour, Lea remained in Cheri's eyes no more than a means to his own pleasure, unmixed with tenderness. Result: noticing Lea's age in her face after a short separation, he left her as he would a cage, returning to his young wife.

At its worst more artificial than sophisticated, at its best moving to a degree, especially if the reader can read vicariously, Cheri is a novel of pre-War Paris with naturalistic approach. Its value is enhanced by ten illustrations by Herman Post, lately of Simplizissimus (Munich political-satirical weekly). In France the novel, not new, is in its 95th edition, a total respectable even in France where "editions" are smaller than in the U. S.

Good wines come from Burgundy and so does Mme. Gabrielle Colette. Colette, who acted Lea in the 1925 dramatization of Cheri, is the onetime wife of "Willy" (Novelist Henry Gauthiers-Villars) and of Biographer Henry de Jouvenel (The Stormy Life of Mirabeau, TIME, Aug. 5). Now free and 56, she is short, wellrounded, long-eyed. She likes good food, the Mediterranean, the wildcats she keeps in her small but colorful Palais Royal flat. In literature Authoress Colette is distinguished for presenting the human side of animals, the animal side of humans.