In the Crowd

The book gathers sixteen short pieces, all new when it appeared, and its interest is the throng — the movement of people through the city, the momentary faces and habits a watchful writer can catch in passing. Where Colette's memory-writing turns inward, these chronicles turn outward, to the anonymous social world and the small comedy and pathos of the crowd.

Its relative obscurity is partly a matter of its publishing history. Unlike some neighboring collections, In the Crowd was never reissued as a separate commercial volume, though it was later reprinted intact within Colette's collected works. That is one reason it is less read than the books around it, and one reason a full account of Colette needs it.

It belongs with the wartime and post-war chronicles — The Long Hours and The Lighted Room — in which Colette was working out the observational manner that her later, more famous books would carry.

There is no plot. The book collects sixteen short chronicles, all previously unpublished, on the life of the crowd — passing faces, social types, and the flux of the city street. Colette watches the anonymous public world and catches its momentary figures, with the eye of a practiced newspaper chronicler.

The emphasis falls on the outward and the impersonal rather than on memory or the self. The book was never reissued as a separate volume, though it survives intact within Colette's collected works, which is part of why it is less known than the collections around it.