Four Seasons

The pieces are chronicles of the year seen through the lens of appearance and fashion: what the season brings, what people wear and do, how taste and mood shift as the calendar turns. Colette had written them for Vogue, and they carry the ease and worldliness of magazine writing at its best, alert to surface without being shallow about it.

Its life on the shelf is unusual. Four Seasons was not published as an ordinary book; it was a private printing produced at the expense of Philippe Ortiz for his circle of friends. That makes the original a limited, occasional object rather than a trade edition — a point worth keeping when the title turns up in a bibliography.

The twelve pieces did not stay separate for long. Colette folded them into the heavily enlarged 1928 state of Le Voyage égoïste, or Journey for Myself, where they now mostly live. Four Seasons is best understood as a brief, elegant way-station on the road to that reworked book.

There is no plot. The book gathers twelve short chronicles that follow the turning year — dress, taste, invitations, travel, and the passing appearance of things — written in step with the seasons. The pieces first appeared in Vogue across 1924 and 1925.

Its form matters to its identity: Four Seasons was a private printing made for a patron and his friends rather than a trade book, and its twelve pieces were soon absorbed into the enlarged 1928 version of Journey for Myself, where they now mostly reside.