At Hand

At Hand belongs to the last phase of Colette's publishing life, when her longtime companion and editor Maurice Goudeket was gathering her scattered late prose into collectible, well-made volumes. Rather than a book conceived and sold on its own, this collection took shape as one section of the large collected edition of her works — a distinction worth keeping, because the title can otherwise be mistaken for an ordinary trade book.

The prose itself is characteristic late Colette: short, exact pieces that turn appetite, memory, travel, and small objects into occasions for description and reflection. The recurring note is gourmandise in the widest sense — a relish for food, places, and things — carried by a writer who by now trusted the concrete detail to do the work. Titles later drawn from it, such as 'Moi, je suis gourmande' and 'Le Miracle d'Auray,' point to that mixture of appetite, relic, and regional recollection.

For readers building a full picture of Colette, the collection matters as much for what it is as for what it says: an example of how her final prose reached print — first inside the collected edition, then mined for later selections. Nine of its pieces were carried into the posthumous 1961 anthology Découvertes.

There is no narrative. At Hand is a gathering of late short prose — brief pieces on appetite and food, memory, travel, objects, and the provinces of Colette's childhood. The mode is descriptive and reflective rather than fictional, and the pieces are unified by a sensibility, above all a wide gourmandise, rather than by a plot.

Its bibliographic form is part of what the page records. The collection first appeared as a named section within Volume XIV of Colette's Œuvres complètes (Le Fleuron, 1950), not as a standalone book, and nine of its texts were later selected for the posthumous 1961 anthology Découvertes — among them 'Moi, je suis gourmande,' 'Tentations,' 'Reliques,' 'Le Miracle d'Auray,' and 'Province.'