For a Flower Album

The book has an unusual origin. Confined to her room, Colette could not observe flowers growing in their setting, so the pieces are written from memory and imagination as much as from the bouquets in front of her. That distance is the making of the book: unable to describe a flower 'in context,' she reaches for association, recollection, and metaphor, and the flower portrait keeps turning, quietly, into a self-portrait.

The twenty-two pieces move across a wide garden — 'La rose,' 'Lys,' 'Tulipe,' 'Anémone,' 'Muguet,' 'Pavot,' and more, down to the difficult and the strange. Each is short and exact, and together they show how much Colette could make of a single object by the end of her life, when the world had shrunk to what could be brought to her bedside.

For a Flower Album belongs with the late books written from the same immobility — The Blue Lantern and The Evening Star — and shares their method of turning a narrow vantage into abundance. It was translated into English under this title by Roger Senhouse.

There is no plot. The book is a sequence of twenty-two short prose pieces, each a portrait of a single flower — the rose, the lily, the tulip, the anemone, the lily of the valley, the poppy, and others. Colette wrote them in 1947, largely bedbound, in answer to the bouquets her publisher sent her over a year.

The pieces are not botanical description. Unable to observe the flowers growing in their setting, Colette works from memory and association, so each portrait drifts toward reflection and, often, toward self-portrait. The pleasure of the book is watching a late writer make so much of so small an object.