Gigi

Colette wrote Gigi in 1942, at the height of the German occupation, and wartime paper shortages sent it abroad to be printed: the first edition appeared in Lausanne in 1944, from La Guilde du Livre, in a small run. The first Paris edition followed in 1945. In France it arrived among other stories — the collection Gigi et autres nouvelles gathered it with L'Enfant malade, La Dame du photographe, and Flore et Pomone — and English readers later met it in an omnibus with two other Colette novels, translated by Roger Senhouse in the early 1950s.

The story's later fame came almost entirely from the stage and screen. A French film directed by Jacqueline Audry, with Danièle Delorme in the title role, appeared in 1949. Then, in 1951, Anita Loos adapted it for Broadway — and Colette, watching filming on the Riviera, picked the unknown Audrey Hepburn for the lead, a role that introduced Hepburn to American audiences. The 1958 MGM musical, directed by Vincente Minnelli with Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan, and Maurice Chevalier, won all nine of its Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and made Gigi Colette's most familiar title outside France.

That fame carries a hazard worth naming. The songs, the narrator Honoré, and the number 'Thank Heaven for Little Girls' belong to the 1958 film, not to Colette's book. The novella is shorter, has no music, and turns on a single quiet reversal that the musical keeps but surrounds with spectacle.

The setting is Paris around 1900. Gigi lives with her grandmother, Madame Alvarez, a former courtesan who is raising her in the family profession, and is sent regularly to her great-aunt Alicia, a more successful retired courtesan who teaches the finer points: how to eat ortolans and lobster, tell a first-water diamond from a flawed one, and manage the men who would pay for such things. Gigi is bright, unpolished, and mostly bored by the lessons.

Into the household comes Gaston Lachaille, heir to a sugar fortune, a family friend who is rich, restless, and tired of the public affairs the newspapers track. He is fond of Gigi as a child is fond — cards, games, teasing — until he is not. The women recognize the opening and begin negotiating the terms under which Gigi would become his mistress: the settlement, the arrangement, the discreet economy their whole training exists to serve.