Colette
Lived here · 1916–1926
Colette's Auteuil home for a decade, through the end of her marriage to Henry de Jouvenel (divorced 1924); she left in 1926 for the rue de Beaujolais.
69 boulevard Suchet
Demolished
Outside only
A modern apartment building
Colette's long Auteuil home through the end of her second marriage — the address just before the Palais-Royal.
- 69 boulevard Suchet, 75016 Paris
- 1916–1926
No photograph survives
The place, briefly
Colette and Henry de Jouvenel moved into a private mansion at 69 boulevard Suchet, in Auteuil, in November 1916. She kept it for ten years, her longest and most settled Paris home before the Palais-Royal. Here she wrote Chéri, her novel of an aging courtesan and a much younger man, published in 1920.
These were also the years her second marriage came apart. Around 1920 Colette, then in her late forties, began a relationship with her stepson Bertrand de Jouvenel — Henry's son from an earlier relationship, about sixteen at the time. Henry de Jouvenel left the house in 1923, and the couple divorced the following year. Colette stayed on alone, paying for the house with her writing and her stage work, until 1926.
Her daughter, Bel-Gazou, spent these years largely in the care of a governess and at the family's country house in Corrèze. In 1926 Colette gave up the boulevard Suchet mansion for a small apartment in the Palais-Royal, on the rue de Beaujolais — low, dark rooms she called her "lair," in the neighbourhood she would keep for the rest of her life.
The mansion no longer stands. A modern apartment building, numbered 69–75, occupies the site today.
Key facts
- 69 boulevard Suchet, 16th arrondissement
- Colette, with Henry de Jouvenel until he left in 1923
- 1916–1926
- Her long home before the Palais-Royal, where she wrote Chéri and her second marriage ended
- Demolished; a modern apartment building (69–75) occupies the site
In images
Timeline
Colette and Henry de Jouvenel move into the mansion on the boulevard Suchet in November.
Chéri is published; around this time Colette begins a relationship with her stepson Bertrand de Jouvenel.
Henry de Jouvenel leaves the house.
Colette and Jouvenel divorce.
Colette gives up the mansion and moves to her first apartment at 9 rue de Beaujolais, in the Palais-Royal.
On the map
Writers who knew this place
Within walking distance
The Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.