Colette's celebrated novels about an older courtesan and her young lover now in a new
translation and published in one volume. Colette’s Chéri (1920) and its sequel The End of
Chéri (1926) are widely considered her masterpieces. In sensuous elegant prose the two
novels explore the evolving inner lives and the intimate relationship of an unlikely couple:
Léa de Lonval a middle-aged former courtesan and Fred Peloux twenty-five years her junior
known as Chéri. The two have been involved for years and it is time for Chéri to get on with
life to make something of himself but he the personification of male beauty and vanity
doesn’t know how to go about it. It is time too for Léa to let go ofChéri and the sensual
life that has been hers and yet this is more easily resolved than done. Chéri marries but
once married he is restless and is inevitably drawn back to his mistress as she is to him. And
yet to reprise their relationship is only to realize even more the inevitability of its end.
That end will come when Chéri back from World War I encounters a world that the war has
changed through and through. Lost in his memories of time past he is irremediably lost to the
busy present. Paul Eprile’s new translation of these two celebrated novels brings out a vivid
sensuality and acute intelligence that past translations have failed to capture.
