Chéri
Aging and renounced desire again — dramatized there in the demi-monde, meditated on here in the first person.
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Break of Day
by Colette
A woman past fifty, alone in a Provence summer, decides what a life no longer organized around love can be.
- 1928
About Colette
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeA hybrid of novel, memoir, and meditation, Break of Day is narrated by a writer named Colette spending a summer in a house on the Mediterranean coast. In her early fifties, she weighs a possible last love affair against the freedom of relinquishing it, and measures herself against the memory of her mother, Sido, whose letters run through the book. Published in 1928, it is one of Colette's central works of late self-writing — less a story than a reckoning with aging, desire, and what to want after desire. (What's inside is described below.)
The story, in more detail
Break of Day is one of Colette's deliberate blurrings of fiction and autobiography. The narrator bears her name and much of her life, sits in a house much like the one Colette kept at Saint-Tropez, and thinks aloud about the questions Colette was living: what a woman's life becomes when she stops arranging it around sexual love, and whether that relinquishment is a loss or a homecoming.
The book has very little plot. Its action is inward — a summer of self-assessment, garden and sea observed with Colette's sensory exactness, and a decision taken quietly rather than dramatized. A younger man is drawn to the narrator, and the book's real event is her turning away from the affair and toward a differently ordered life.
Threaded through the meditation are letters from the narrator's mother, Sido. Colette shaped and rewrote her mother's real correspondence for the book, so the letters are literature rather than transcription — Sido as Colette needed her, presiding over a book about how to grow old.
What's inside
The narrator — a writer named Colette — is spending a summer alone in a house on the Mediterranean coast, in her early fifties. The book is her account of that season: the garden, the heat, the animals, the neighbors, and above all the question of what she now wants. A younger man, Valère Vial, is attached to the household and drawn to her; a younger woman, Hélène Clément, is drawn to him. The narrator watches the possibility of a late affair open in front of her and considers, without hurry, whether to take it.
Around this runs the presence of her mother, Sido, quoted through letters that Colette reworked from the real correspondence. Sido becomes the book's measure of how to live and how to relinquish — a woman who loved the world's particulars fiercely and let go of them without bitterness. The narrator tests her own aging against that example. The result is less a plot than a meditation: on desire, maturity, solitude chosen rather than suffered, and the daybreak the title promises — the start of a life no longer organized around being loved.
Themes and analysis
The day begins in the garden
The garden's routines give the narrator a way to measure time without making a lover's arrival its central event. Young trees need watering, meals approach, and tomorrow's light promises another sequence of work and pleasure. Yet this order is not presented as effortless detachment. An old romantic grievance interrupts a waking thought about watering aubergines, and the second place setting recalls earlier dependence even as she distinguishes solitude from abandonment. The chapter makes change audible in these competing thoughts: attention is being redirected toward the material world, not emptied of memory.
A last love relinquished
The dawn conversation distinguishes refusing a relationship from becoming incapable of feeling. The narrator still responds to Vial's presence and worries about her own uncertainty; what she wants is a life whose happiness and distress no longer require romance as their explanation. Vial cannot readily accept that distinction, hearing possible encouragement where she seeks another kind of understanding. Their farewell remains awkward rather than triumphant. His departure leaves her cold and exhausted, turning toward ordinary bodily care instead of a grand declaration that the struggle with old habits is finished.
Why we recommend it
Colette's great book on growing old
It faces aging and the end of romantic love without either dread or consolation, and finds a daybreak on the far side of them.
Fiction and memoir, deliberately fused
One of her clearest experiments in autofiction, decades before the term — a narrator named Colette, invented and true at once.
Sido, at the center of the work
Her mother's presence, built from reworked letters, gives the book its measure of how to love the world and how to let it go.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
Colette (the narrator)
A writer named Colette, in her early fifties, spending a summer in Provence and deciding what to want after desire — invented and autobiographical at once.
Valère Vial
The younger man attached to the household and drawn to the narrator — the last love affair she considers and lets go.
Sido
The narrator's mother, present through reworked letters — the book's measure of how to love the world's particulars and how to relinquish them.
Bring it to book club
- The narrator is named Colette but the book is fiction. What does that fusion let Colette say that a straight memoir could not?
- Sido's letters are reworked, not quoted. Does knowing that change how you read the mother in the book?
- The narrator turns away from a last love affair. Is the book's daybreak a renunciation, a liberation, or both?
Timeline
July 1927
Colette rereads her mother’s letters while developing the book’s treatment of Sido.
1928
Break of Day is published, a central work of Colette's late self-writing.
1980
La Naissance du jour is adapted for the screen.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Flammarion
- 1928
Paperback
- Paperback
- Enid McLeod
Ebook
- Ebook
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
The Vagabond
The earlier first-person reckoning with independence, before age made the question different.
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Gigi
The Belle Époque courtship plot she could still write straight, set against this book's turn away from love entirely.
Read our takeBreak of Day: frequently asked questions
Who wrote Break of Day?
The French novelist Colette. La Naissance du jour was published in 1928.
Is Break of Day a novel or a memoir?
Both, by design. The narrator is named Colette and shares much of her life, but the book invents and shapes freely. It is best described as autobiographical fiction, or autofiction.
What is Break of Day about?
A writer named Colette, in her early fifties, spends a summer alone on the Mediterranean coast and weighs a possible last love affair against the freedom of giving it up. It is a meditation on aging, desire, and solitude more than a plotted story.
Who is Sido in the book?
Sido is the narrator's mother, present through letters. Colette built them from her real mother's correspondence, reworking the letters into literature rather than quoting them verbatim.
Is the narrator really Colette?
The narrator is named Colette and shares her circumstances, but she is a literary construction, not a straightforward self-portrait. The book plays deliberately with the line between author and character.
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Break of Day, its publication, and its place in literary history.
1Break of Day
NovelColette, 1928Used forThe primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
2La Naissance du jour — Ernest Flammarion 1928 edition
WebsiteWikisourceUsed forFrench primary text used for Chapter II's domestic and garden meditation and Chapter VII's conversation ending in Vial's dawn departure. The narrator is not treated as an independently verified biographical record; the existing illustration remains a symbolic reconstruction. No English-translation comparison is claimed.
3Société des amis de Colette — Chronology
WebsiteUsed forUsed to place Break of Day within Colette's published work and verify its bibliographic context.
4Bibliothèque nationale de France — The Worlds of Colette
Exhibition catalogueUsed forUsed for independent biographical, archival, or historical context surrounding Colette's career and the period in which Break of Day appeared.
5Library of Congress — Colette resource guide
WebsiteUsed forUsed to cross-check authorship, chronology, and the work's place in Colette's wider catalogue.
6Bibliothèque nationale de France — Colette: online resources
WebsiteUsed forUsed to verify Colette's bibliography and place Break of Day within the broader chronology of Colette's career.
7Colette — publication history of break of day
WebsiteSociété des amis de ColetteUsed forPublication and revision history used for the timeline.
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Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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