7.45 Colette — Sido — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the opening of Colette's Sido , a portrait of her mother written when Colette was in her fifties. Follow a prose that works through the senses: smell, colour, the weather, the taste of spring water. Recognise the voice of the mother in direct speech, sharp, funny and categorical, and the voice of the daughter remembering. See how a whole village is drawn through its gardens and its sounds. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English En vraie provinciale, ma charmante mère, « Sido », tenait souvent ses yeux de l’âme fixés sur Paris. Like a true provincial, my charming mother, Sido, often kept the eyes of her soul fixed on Paris. une pureté obligatoire des mœurs, a compulsory purity of morals, Je frissonnai, et crus frémir de jalousie, I shivered, and thought I was trembling with jealousy, Une visite banale, parfois, la laissait cramoisie et sans force aux bras du grand fauteuil capitonné, An ordinary visit sometimes left her crimson and drained in the arms of the big padded armchair, Que me parle-t-on de la méfiance provinciale ? Why talk to me of provincial distrust? Courtoisie, aménité de potager à « fleuriste » et de bosquet à basse-cour ! Courtesy, kindness from kitchen garden to flower garden, from grove to farmyard! Prerequisites : 7.44 — this reading follows 7.44 Reading . The literary and archaic forms of 5.28 Vocabulary will help with Colette's occasional imperfect subjunctive, and the nature vocabulary of 5.10 Vocabulary with her plants and birds. About this text Colette, born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873–1954), grew up in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in Burgundy. Her mother, Sidonie Landoy, whom the family called Sido , is present in much of her work. Sido , first published in 1929 and 1930, has three parts: the mother, the father ( Le Capitaine ), and the brothers. It is short, and for many readers the most perfect of Colette's books. This lesson gives about 3,200 words from the first part, without omissions: Sido's opinions on Paris and the provinces, her visits to Paris, her judgements on the neighbours, the gardens of the village, the storms, the child's dawn walks, and the mother calling across the walls to the invisible neighbours. The text is that of the Hachette edition reprinted in the Livre de poche in 1961, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Colette died in 1954, and her works entered the public domain in France in 2025. Reading Colette The senses. Colette remembers through smell and colour before ideas: the smell of her mother's fur coat, a scent she calls châtain clair , light chestnut; the red of geraniums and foxgloves; the taste of two springs, one of oak leaf and the other of iron and hyacinth stem. Notice how often a memory begins with a smell. Sido's voice. The mother speaks in sharp, confident sentences, often comic: Parisian cashiers who adorn only their head and bust, a young husband with des pouces d'assassin , pansies that look like Henry VIII. The father's Pan ! applauds her verdicts. Her judgements are quick, unfair and usually right. The gardens. The village is described not by its streets but by its back gardens, which tell each other everything. From the family garden the child hears the neighbours to the south, north and east, and her mother calls across the walls to people she cannot see, as if speaking to the four winds. Child and adult. The text moves between the child who lived these things and the woman who remembers them. When the adult speaks, the sentences lengthen and the tone becomes elegiac: Il y avait dans ce temps-là de grands hivers, de brûlants étés. Reading it a second time, part by part Paris and the province. Sido teases her daughter, now a married Parisian, and judges a Parisian visitor at a glance. Visits to Paris. Every two years she goes to Paris and comes back loaded with chocolate, fabrics and theatre programmes, and with the smell of her fur coat. The neighbours. She comes back red from tiring visits; she judges a newly married couple severely, and her daughter's wish to wear ankle socks like a Paris girl. The house and the garden. She dislikes housework and is happiest in the garden, where she lifts roses by the chin to look at them. The village of gardens. Every house has a back garden; the gardens are joined by shared walls and pass on the news. Winters and summers. The storms from the West, the snow her mother studies with a magnifying glass, the red flowers of summer, and the child's walks at dawn to the vegetable gardens and the two springs in the woods. The voices. Sido calls across the walls to a neighbour about her cat or a garden line, and the answers come back from invisible mouths. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Sido "And why should I stop belonging to my village? Don't count on it. Look how proud you are, my poor Minet-Chéri , because you have lived in Paris since your marriage. I can't help laughing when I see how proud all Parisians are of living in Paris, the real ones because they treat it as a title of nobility, the false ones because they imagine they have gone up in rank. By that reckoning, I could boast that my mother was born on the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle! And you, there you are like a louse standing on its hind legs because you have married a Parisian. And when I say a Parisian... Real Parisians by birth have less character in their faces. It is as if Paris rubbed them out!" She would break off and lift the tulle curtain that veiled the window: "Ah! here is Mlle Thévenin parading her cousin from Paris in triumph through every street. She has no need to say it, that this lady Quériot comes from Paris: a great deal of bosom, small feet, and ankles too fragile for the weight of the body; two or three neck chains, the