Julie de Carneilhan

Colette wrote Julie de Carneilhan in her late sixties, and it has the hardness of her best late work. Julie is an aristocrat by birth and temperament — proud, horse-loving, plain-spoken — but her fortune is gone and her Paris life has narrowed to a small flat and smaller means. She has kept her bearing and lost almost everything else, which is the tension the novel lives on.

Her ex-husband, Herbert d'Espivant, is the engine of the plot: seductive, unscrupulous, and now dependent on the wealth of his current wife, Marianne. Ill and scheming, he reactivates his old hold on Julie to help extract money, counting on a loyalty and desire that outlasted their marriage. The novel watches Julie be tempted, used, and finally clear-eyed about exactly what she is to him.

It is a book about pride as the last possession of someone who has lost the rest. Colette gives Julie the dignity of refusing to be reduced to a tool, and the novel's power lies in the coldness with which it measures love against self-respect. It is often paired with the novella Chambre d'hôtel, published in English alongside it.

Julie de Carneilhan, divorced and living on very little in Paris, keeps the pride and manner of the aristocratic family she comes from while her means have all but vanished. Her former husband, Herbert d'Espivant — charming, faithless, and now married to the wealthy Marianne — falls seriously ill and summons Julie back into his life. Beneath the reunion is a plan: he means to use their unfinished bond to help raise a large sum of money.

Julie, still susceptible to Herbert and half-persuaded that something real survives between them, is drawn into the scheme. Slowly she grasps the truth of her position — that she is being used, that Herbert's charm is a tool and his need for her purely practical, and that the wealth and the marriage he has now leave no room for her. Her clarity, when it comes, is the turning point of the novel.