Peace Among the Beasts

Colette had written about animals before, in Animal Dialogues and elsewhere, but this book is more considered and, given its moment, more pointed. Published in 1916, it sets out to build a place apart from the war — a refuge of instinct, tenderness, and ordinary creaturely life, held up against the history going on outside it. The gesture is quiet but deliberate, and it is one of the reasons the book matters.

The animals here are not cute proxies for human feeling. Colette is increasingly interested in what she cannot reach in them — the otherness of a mind that is not human, the limits of observation and sympathy. The book moves through domestication, estrangement, watching, and tenderness, and its subject in the end is as much the boundary between species as the affection across it.

Some of the pieces had appeared before, in Prrou, Poucette and a Few Others and The Tendrils of the Vine, gathered here into a fuller book. In English the material has circulated under the title Cats, Dogs, and I and, later, in the anthology Creatures Great and Small.

There is no plot. The book gathers thirty-three short pieces about animals — cats, dogs, and other creatures observed at close range. Published during the First World War, it is organized around a single wish: to make an imagined refuge where the war does not reach, a space of instinct and ordinary creaturely life set against the history outside.

The pieces move through domestication, estrangement, observation, and tenderness, and they are as interested in the limits of human access to an animal's mind as in the bond across it. Some of the material had appeared earlier, in Prrou, Poucette and a Few Others and The Tendrils of the Vine, gathered here into a fuller collection.