From My Window

The book grew out of the column Colette wrote for women during the Occupation, on subjects she noted men dismissed as not their concern: how to stay warm, how to make do, how to hold a household and a mood together as the city went short of everything. She writes as a public counselor, plain and steady, and the practical advice is part of the historical record the book preserves.

But the window is the book's real device. From it Colette watches children, cats, the theater, the street, and lets memory carry the view back into other years. The fixed frame concentrates her attention: confined to what one vantage can see, she sees closely. The result is a portrait of occupied Paris built from small, exact observations rather than from events.

From My Window belongs with Colette's other wartime writing, especially Looking Backwards, and shares its method of meeting a dark time by recording it steadily. She later enlarged the book, and it appeared in expanded form under the title Paris de ma fenêtre.

There is no plot. The book collects short wartime chronicles Colette wrote after returning to Paris in 1940 — originally a weekly newspaper column for women. Many pieces are practical: how to endure the cold, the shortages, and the restrictions of the Occupation, and how to keep up morale and a household under them.

Woven through the practical writing is everything Colette watches and remembers from her window — children, cats, the theater, the street below — with memory carrying the fixed view back into earlier years. The window works as both frame and method, concentrating her attention on what one vantage can hold. Together the pieces form a close, ground-level record of ordinary Parisian life under the Occupation. An enlarged version was later published as Paris de ma fenêtre.