Le Toutounier

Where Duo confined itself to a marriage and ended in death, Le Toutounier opens the windows onto the world Alice came from. She returns to her sisters' Paris flat and to the toutounier — an old, sagging, much-loved couch that is the emotional center of the household, the place the sisters have retreated to since childhood. The word is the family's private invention, and it gives the book its untranslated title.

The Eudes sisters are working women who earn their own livings and expect little from men, and the novel's texture is their blunt affection, their routines, and the practical tenderness with which they take Alice back in. Colette is interested here less in romance than in the durable bonds among women who have learned not to depend on it.

It is a modest, humane book, and a deliberate counterweight to its predecessor: after the closed tragedy of a marriage, the reopened life of a family. Le Toutounier is best read after Duo, whose aftermath it completes.

After the death that ends Duo, Alice returns to Paris and to the apartment she grew up in with her sisters, resuming a life she had partly left behind for marriage. At its heart is the toutounier: the battered old divan where the Eudes sisters have always gathered, and which stands for the shelter and continuity the family offers against loss. Around it, the sisters — self-reliant, hard-working, and plain-spoken about men and money — fold Alice back into their routines.

The book has little conventional plot; its subject is survival and solidarity, the way a household of women closes around one of their own in grief and keeps functioning. Colette writes their affection without sentimentality, and lets the shared couch, the shared history, and the sisters' unshowy competence carry the meaning. It is the quiet, resilient answer to the airless tragedy of Duo.