L'Amour

By James Atlas

BELLES SAISONS: A COLETTE SCRAPBOOK

Assembled and with commentary by Robert Phelps Farrar, Straus & Giroux;

302 pages; $15

The story of any love affair, Colette once claimed, can be told in a few words: "He loved me. I loved Him ... Then He stopped loving me and I suffered." Her own novels proved otherwise. Passion, in Colette's experience, dominated life, and she made her theme the pursuit of love, the treacherous ambiguities of sex. The Pure and the Impure, Cheri and The Ripening Seed pulse with an intensity unknown in French literature since Flaubert's letters to Louise Colet or Swann's obsession with Odette in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

That she possessed a worldly knowledge of her subject is evident from the photographs in this charming album. Feline, with almond eyes and "reddish, frizzly, rather African-looking hair," in Truman Capote's recollection, Colette radiated a sensual elan that captured France for half a century.

The story of Colette's life is in her books: her childhood in a remote provincial village; the willful, vivacious mother evoked in Sido; her marriage at 20 to Henri Gauthiers-Villars (known as Willy), a shrewd, cosmopolitan literary journalist who divined her talent and sat her down to write the books that made him famous -- Willy published them under his own name. Not that their secret went entirely undiscovered; "Willy ont beaucoup de talent, "remarked one critic -- Willy are very talented. Colette was 33 before she left her oppressor and began to publish on her own.

Colette embarked on a career as a music-hall mime in order to support her self and acquired an aristocratic lover, the former Marquise de Belboeuf, a transvestite who "dressed in a mechanic's over-alls." Later on, Colette took to the legitimate stage, wrote screenplays, founded a line of cosmetics and managed a career in journalism as well. A versatile reporter, she produced features and music reviews and even covered a few notorious crimes. "She brought to courtrooms," Chronicler Robert Phelps observes, "the same unsentimental yet empathic watchfulness which she brought to plants, animals, weather, lovers, and her own psyche."

Unsentimental? Hardly. Colette's self-portraits were coy, her prose humid with nostalgia; but Phelps ignores these failings. Belles Saisons is a gesture of hom age, not a work of criticism. This is not the first Colette album; only three years ago, Yvonne Mitchell published Colette: A Taste for Life, a generously illustrated biography that reproduced many of the photographs included here, and with a far more comprehensive text. But Co lette was inexhaustibly photogenic. "There were no more beautiful eyes in the world," declared her last husband, Maurice Goudeket, "nor any which knew better how to see. "

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